Convenience is King

First, you gotta understand, I LOVE my vacuum. It is the best present I ever bought myself, hands down. I loved it even more when I got a golden retriever, who sheds like a nudist at the beach. I vacuum every day, sometimes for fun—and I may or may not get a little excited when I see a mess, because then I know it’s VACUUM TIME.

So last year when I got married and moved into my new house, I found a place for my sweet succulent love (haha get it? Suck-you lent? Ok sorry), and it was the PERFECT place. Hidden, but still right in the middle of everything I want to vacuum. But there was no stud to drill into in order to hang it.

Did I let that stop me? Absolutely not. I FOUND A WAY TO PUT IT THERE GOSH DANG IT because this vacuum is something that I will use every day until that vacuum dies, and I don’t want to tramp all the way up and down the stairs  or dig in my personal closet every time I want to clean. Cleaning is bad enough without the extra work of hauling in the vacuum. It is CRITICAL that it be easy to access.

It took me weeks to get it done. I had to order the right support pieces so it wouldn’t rip a hole in the drywall when I hung it. I had to buy a stud finder, and a power drill. THEN I had to hire a man to come install a socket in the closet, where there wasn’t one, so it could charge.

Was it was worth it? Um, yes. Because every day, twice a day, at any moment, I can use my gorgeous cleaning technology with as little effort as possible, and keep a sparkling clean floor like I love.

Now imagine you want to use an app feature— only this time it isn’t just once a day.

If you’re tracking your calories, and you’re like me, you might have to enter your food diary every 10 minutes to write down what yoy ate. (Haha just kidding...maybe).

Imagine how frustrating it would be if it took five taps to get into the diary, in addition to all the taps it took to actually find and enter the food? My attention span is short, and I’m a busy girl. That would get old preeetty fast. 

So the smart thing for the app designers to do then, is put the food diary right on the opening screen of the app. This decreases the users TTV, or time to value. People like me can get in, get their value out of the app, and then get back out STAT. This is what makes a good app experience, at least for this type of often-used feature.

Maybe it would be prettier though, to start with an image of some gorgeous food, or a woman running and magically not sweating?

No. Maybe not in every case, but in this app that I would be using SO often, this kind of extra step would make me wanna claw my eyes out after a few days, at most. Ok, or at least make me sigh, and consider using a different app.

Convenience is King. Over a pretty display, over whatever Information Architecture you think makes better sense. TTV says you put that most-used item right on the front page, and work around it from there.

So in short, may you remember the case of the dyson vacuum, next time you are creating an experience of ANY sort, really. Don’t go for the Queen, DON’t go for the jester, remember, Convenience is King.

*not sponsored by Dyson, believe it or not