Does Your Offering Pass The Douglas Adams Test?

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
How do you recognise something that is still technology?
A good clue is if it comes with a manual.”
Douglas Adams

This mid-90s quote from the peerless humourist and Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy author published posthumously stands tall three decades on.

He wrote it "writing an article on (and about) a palmtop computer in 1996". Correctly foreseeing we would all soon have small computers glued about our person.

I thought of this as the simulation seems intent on serving me up a barrage of bumper ads which theme around the same frustration. Are you tired of being stuck sifting through an impenetrable manual to do something with your new piece of kit?

For Mr Adams only intuitive software would do.

Phone based apps have helped usability in this regard for sure. What with limitations from restricted screen real estate. The desired trend towards truncating input routines. A tendency towards single-issue procedure tasking.

Yet enter the Enterprise space, and complexity can explode.

In my early knowledge management SaaSing, those first Millennial years did on occasion prompt a doubting prospect to wonder if engagement would merely prove just as tricky as their ERP travails. I never got tripped up by such. "Well, if you can look up on Amazon, ..." being but one disarming approach.

The deeper point though is worthy. Many of us sell Tech. How do we get it to, quite simply, 'work'?

Along with proof of what glorious riches follow for our other buyers, we mustn't lose sight of how our freshly minted clients make their first steps along their own path towards such success.