Many members of the Shozam Community are power users of the software. They explore all the features, delve into all the program’s capabilities and push against its limits. But many users don’t want all that detail. They just want a software program that does what they need it to do, simply, quickly and reliably.
At the end of the day, for power and casual users alike, no one wants to spend a lot of time working their way up the learning curve. So, the challenge is to design software that is simple enough for everyone and powerful enough for those who want a richer experience. So how are these two seemingly opposing goals brought together in Shozam?
A research paper published in 1956 hypothesized that human working memory can hold up to seven bits of information, plus or minus two, at once. Referred to as “Miller’s Magic 7,” this theory was the basis for the seven-digit phone number, the recommended maximum of menu items on a Web page, among other things (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, anyone?). Even Apple’s iPod has no more than seven user input options.
So what about top Web sites like Amazon and Ebay that have significantly more than seven points of interaction? Most people find these sites very logical and easy to navigate. Why? Categorization – grouping related items. More recent research indicates that people are quite good at filtering out details that are not important to them: the modern mind has become acclimated to information overload.
When designing the Shozam program, we used both Magic 7 and categorization. The Shozam user interface has six “Steps” based on gallery hierarchy, and typically no more than seven decision points per screen. Perhaps even more important for usability is the compartmentalization of related actions. The “Image” tab holds all functions related to a specific image, the “Sell” tab to shopping cart functionality, and so on. It may not seem difficult to create a usability experience with these factors taken into account, but it is.
For Shozam, all this theory boils down to a program that is as simple, or as advanced, as the user needs it to be. A Shozam user can literally create a gallery using just the first tabs of each of the 5 Steps (in Step 6: Upload Gallery, a user needs to venture into the secondary “Presets” tab to enter upload information). Creating a Shozam gallery can be as easy as adding images, choosing a theme and hitting “Generate.” Done. Power users will find enough customization options in the program to create a gallery uniquely their own. And most everyone finds their path through Shozam Web Gallery Generator to be intuitive, logical, easy – and fun!