As developers we fight with the desire to build useful new services and applications which can attract many users while at the same time reducing the friction that makes it difficult for our average user to try and keep using our creations.
I started observing how people usually hate learning and using too many different tools (except possibly for us geeks), this happens because we have limited resources and look for the maximum utility (this happens most at the cross of the business and consumer markets).
Uncertainty also plays a role in forming our decisions as users, where the perceived value of a new application is decreased by the lack of knowledge about how well it can fit the problems that we need to solve.
This has a few consequences: resistance in adopting new tools since it takes a too big effort to learn and preference for generic tools since they are perceived as more flexible and adaptable to our needs.
To overcome this we may reduce the visible part of the application to a level where the user stops noticing while making sure the user can easily reach the value we add. In the end it will all be about finding a way to give increasing returns for the same effort.
One way to follow this path is leveraging the tools that people are already using, integrating into or with them thus giving new ways to use those “old” and generic applications to do new things. Our invisible application will integrate within the flow of information that the user is receiving, it will remove modality from the interactions and augment the context around the documents and data that the users already handle to enrich the interaction with the same old services. Also, an important role will be played by allowing deep adaptation of the interface, whether automatically or via manual customization by the user (for the italian readers, look also at this presentation by Luca Mascaro).
