Why do people see some things as complicated even if they aren't? What makes a user think to himself, "Oooo... no idea what that does but it looks too complicated - not worth the effort," about feature A and, "This looks interesting, might as well give it a try, it looks easy enough," about feature B - even if feature B is more complicated that A?

I recently had to ask myself all these questions. Here is what I found.

People judge a book by it's cover - and they judge a service, in this case my start-up, by it's introduction.

I asked one of the beta testers what she thought about the service, the reply took me back a bit. Basically her reply was that it was too complicated and too hard, so she didn't even try it. I didn't understand, how do you know it's too complicated if you havn't even tried it?

Note: our service is such that a Realtor signs up and gets a website to list their properties online. The part that this person got to was seeing their site after registration.

I looked through to try to find why she would think that - then I saw it. After you create your site you are brought to it's homepage with a nice large blob of text for you to read. No bulleted lists, no apparent 1-2-3 easy steps to get up to speed, nothing. Just that big long boring text blob that no one in their right mind would want to take the time to read. And what's worse is I wrote it! Right about then I understood why that one user thought it was too complicated... I would have too if I was in her place.

I speedily got rid of that text and made it so when they log in they go strait to their account page. I then placed a "getting started" section at the top with some short, strait to the point, links for... getting started!

I wish I could tell you that she tried it again and loved it... but she never came back. All well, maybe the next one.