Why Make Things Complicated To Use?

 The tools for online marketers have certainly changed, even in the last handful of years.

Gone are the days of having to learn some HTML and PHP code to design and edit websites and jury rig things together. Now there are wonderful things you can do in a few clicks that would take hours (and possibly outsourcing to a costly developer) back in 2010.

But the real skill in this is not only about the complexity of what a tool or platform can do, but the ease of use for the person trying to make it work.

By and large, most of the best tools have this sorted. The developers envisage what a non-techie person will experience when confronted with the user interface. Good developers offer access to early versions to non-techie users to get feedback.

But some don’t. Perhaps you use Google Analytics, Amazon Web Services and a few more I could name that were built back in the day when webmasters (as they were grandly called) were all tech kiddies themselves and have seen no need to change.

But here is the point…

If you are creating a product – and I don’t care if it is an information product or a software product, you need to make it easy to use.

Most of the folks who you want buying it are not going to be impressed if there are having to put in support requests just to figure out how to access the product or how to use it when they do.

This is especially true for “done for you” products.

I tend to use software to make funnel pages for customers rather than having them download and fiddle about with HTML. It just makes the whole thing easier to use.

Val Wilson launched a product this week that also makes deploying a “done for you” funnel a complete breeze. The whole funnel is in a WordPress plug-in.

It doesn’t get much easier than that. Most online marketers have sites built with WordPress. They understand what a plug-in is. If they don’t, then it is one of the first things they learn about.

So, by making the funnel in a plug-in was a pretty inspired idea. It enables non-techie people to get a listbuilding and affiliate marketing funnel up in minutes

>> You can see my review and bonuses for this here

So, the takeaway is…

Build everything to be easy to use. Keep all the value, all the functions, all the cool stuff and figure out how you can enable people to use it without a big drama!