If you want to run a marathon (I don’t), you need to cover 26.2 miles. That’s hard work and there’s no way around it. But you can hire a coach, join a running group, hydrate well, feed off the crowd support, etc, to get through it. Putting in the steps to complete the marathon is a necessary task.
But what if the registration site is hard to use? If you keep getting errors setting up your account or making payments? If links to reserve hotel rooms don’t work. If you have to walk 3 miles just to get to the starting line? These are unnecessary tasks.
We all want to help our clients through the necessary obstacles and remove as many unnecessary tasks as possible. But are we sometimes adding unnecessary tasks of our own?
The Curse of Knowledge
As experts, we often take for granted knowledge that others find new, confusing, or even unbelievable. We may have trouble expressing things in a way that our lay audience can understand– not just descriptions of problems, but also methods of solving them. Consider the way a doctor discusses a diagnosis and performs a surgery with other doctors vs describing these things to a patient.
When I use Mimiran, I use so many keyboard shortcuts that I often don’t think about which button to click (or even what keys to press, it’s just muscle memory). Of course it seems easy for me. But that doesn’t mean it’s intuitive for someone logging in for the first time, trying to load some contacts, not even knowing that there are keyboard shortcuts. (I’m always trying to make this easier, and I’m testing an iOS app version of Mimiran that will let you pull in your contacts from your iPhone.)
The more expert you become, the more you subconsciously perform certain tasks and assume that your clients can do the same things, and the harder it gets for you to make it easier for them. (This is why one of the necessary tasks in my tribe is having conversations.)
What unnecessary tasks in your clients’ path can you remove?