Everyone wants software (and things generally) that are “easy to use”. It’s a question we’re often asked at Lamplight – is Lamplight easy to use? Apple have made quite a lot of money on the basis of being easy to use.  

But how do you answer a question like that? No-one offers products that promise to be difficult to use.  “New Amce Can-Opener – opens 60% of tins in under 5 minutes. Read our 160 page guide to optimise your can opening experience”.  

Other questions we’re asked are easier to answer. Q: “Is Lamplight secure?” A: “Yes, our security systems comply with ISO27001 and are audited by BSI”. Q: “Do you have much downtime?” A: “We target 99.5% availability but typically achieve over 99.8%”. But it can be much harder to come to a solid answer to ease of use. Personally, it often comes down to “do I think it looks pretty?” and / or “does it behave like other similar things I know about?”. 

At Lamplight we’ve adopted an approach based on user journeys. So we start by identifying our users carrying out a task in a particular context. These are things like “An outreach worker needs to find the next client address while walking down the street”, or “A manager produces a report on impact, monthly in the office”. We worked with our customers to identify these key ‘typical users’ and ‘most common tasks’, and that’s what we have in mind when we’re making decisions about Lamplight. 

That’s good at a high level, but it’s less helpful when you get into details. For that, we rely on the following questions from our DUAPER approach: is a design element… 

Discoverable: can I find the thing I need when I need it? 

Understandable: do I know what this command will do? Does it make sense to me in my context? 

Affordances: do buttons look like buttons? Are things that are underlined to look like links actually things I can click? 

Predictable: if I click on that link, does it do what I expect? How surprising are the interactions (we don’t like surprises). 

Efficient: how quickly and easily can I carry out the task I need to do? 

Responsive: does it tell me what’s happening when something is happening? 

It’s important to realise that not everything can or should satisfy all of these points. You wouldn’t want an easily discoverable, highly efficient “delete all my data” button. That needs to be intentionally inefficient to avoid accidents. Tasks that one person needs to do once a quarter can be less discoverable than the things that everyone does every day – and that’s where the users and tasks come back in. 

We’ve found this “DUAPER” to be incredibly helpful framework that we’ve used internally and with customers as we’ve worked on the new look Lamplight. The reason? Feedback is actionable. Instead of “saving data in a tab isn’t very user friendly”, design conversations have been more like “in a tab with many fields, it’s inefficient (and not very discoverable) to have to scroll past them all to get to the save button”. We can then adjust the save button so that it floats at the bottom of the screen, so it’s always visible (more discoverable) and easy to click (more efficient).  

The design conversation moves from a complaint to an analysis, which very often points towards the answer. At a process level it’s much more constructive, it’s much more efficient, and it’s nicer for everyone to be involved in.  

We’re sharing this because it’s been so good, and it applies to things way beyond Lamplight. You can fruitfully use this with forms (paper or online), processes, even documents. 

So… is Lamplight easy to use? 

Yes 😉 

If you’re the kind of user, in the kind of context, doing the kinds of tasks we have in mind, we made Lamplight for you. We’ve put a lot of thought into the design of Lamplight to appropriately optimise DUAPER. We’ve had hundreds of charities engage in the redesign process, offering their feedback (analysis) to keep tweaking and improving. And we’ll keep listening and keep tweaking. 

An aside

Incidentally, if you’re a non-profit, this is why we think CRMs designed for charities are better. CRMs designed for general business have a different set of users, context, and tasks in mind. Ultimately, this boils down to charities seek impact and businesses seek profit. They’re not so different that it can’t be made to work, and plenty have, but you’re always having to adapt these assumptions to a slightly different user, context, and task. 

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash