You will never have enough cheese

"The difference between pleasing products and barely tolerable products lies in whether their details are well done ."

In a speech by human factors International, they mentioned a theme called the Colombian barrier device.

Note: Human Factors International is a consulting company composed of business psychologists and management consultants. It provides consulting services for user-centered product design.

Note: Columbia obstruction device is used in an experiment where researchers use this device to determine a subject of study (hunger rats) to get the threshold value of the pain (electric shock) that it wants (cheese) to endure.

As for the scientific experiments they cited at Columbia University, I cannot find practical references to prove them. However, they seem to make sense. There is a natural correspondence between users and availability. Either put the largest cheese (to make your application attractive enough) or minimize the electric shock (to make your application easy to use ):

We may think our applications are attractive, but are they really attractive to users? I am highly skeptical. Unless you provide users with free MP3 music or show them pornographic imagesYou are unlikely to have enough cheese to make people willing to overcome, even the weakest electric shock.. The only variable you can control is the availability of your application. Only by reducing the threshold for entry to the absurd level can people look at your software a little more-not to mention how many people will use it.

Joel Spolsky has mentioned the following:

There is a terrible fact here-at least it will make the user interface professional worried: if an application can do what people really want very well, even if it is not very easy to use, it will still succeed. On the contrary, an application is the easiest to use in the world, but fails if it cannot do anything anyone wants. Because availability is generally considered "optional"-This is terrible, and in many cases it is indeed optional-so, user Interface consultants have to defend themselves, and they have come up with a convincing ROI formula, it is used to accurately calculate how much the customer will return from the $75000 investment in the availability project. In many cases, availability is indeed optional. The CNN Website will not get any gains from the availability consultation.

Note: CNN, short for cablenews network, was founded in June 1980 and headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. It provides around-the-clock news programs to cable TV networks and satellite TV users through satellites, and is currently the world's most advanced news organization. What I want to express here is that availability is optional (not required) in most cases, while websites like CNN provide news content, people pay more attention to the content rather than the availability of the website.

Napster and ICQ are absolutely terrible in terms of user interfaces. However, this is completely irrelevant. What they contributed to the world was so fascinating that there was not enough competition (in that period) that those developers did not pay a heavy price for bad user interfaces.

Note: Napster is an online music service that originated from the file sharing service created by Sean Parker. Napster is the first widely used peer-to-peer (P2P) music sharing service, which greatly affects people (especially college students) using the Internet.

Note: ICQ was once the most popular instant messaging software on the Internet. The name is from "I seek you" (I am looking for you ). It supports Internet chat, message sending, file transmission, and other functions.

Delicious cheese is a rare luxury. Most developers who are devoted to standard commercial applications should not expect it. For example, in a file management system, to what extent do users have to be crazy about it? If you still have a glimmer of hope,Forget the cheese --Make sure that you do not "shock" your users.