The key of a technology is its simplicity

Continuing my previous thoughts about - what makes something valuable, according to my opinion, the number one characteristic that makes a thing go viral is its simplicity (ease of use). It is subjective as always - what is the target user group, who is going to use the product or service, how well are the people prepared? Yes, there are other properties that are no less important like - quality, security, speed, user experience, but I think they are secondary to ease of use.

Why WordPress is one of the most popular and widespread CMSes - Because it can be managed, customized without any programming knowledge. You just need to learn the custom User Interface - the menus, the settings, pick a theme from the store, some specific plugins and after that - you're done.

Apple is a synonym of simplicity. Capturing the moment, when the time is most appropriate, gradually educating the market - this is something that Apple has implemented in the beginning of the century. Yes, in the beginning - the technology was not there yet, but that didn't stop them. They packaged products that are simple and gradually a little bit more complex, with a little bit more hardware and software features and that how they educated the market and prepared the consumers for every new upcoming product - iPod -> iPhone -> iPad.

Bitcoin exploded because of speculation, greed, bots and the top crypto platforms and function as banks, eliminating the decentralization feature of the technology but, nevertheless. It is enormously complex merge of several technologies, especially to the normal, non-technical people. People that live in a relatively stable countries don't feel the inflation too much, compared to some Latin, African and even Eastern Europe countries and don't get the ideas behind the source of money, value and wealth.

Several generations need to pass for anything new - no matter if it is good or bad - to truly form roots in the society. The Technological Shift is no exception to this need of critical mass of people that will adopt the new - types of devices, services, ways of interacting with the technology and with each other.

That is a thing that I'm thinking in my programming skills and products lately - how to make them for normal people - how to design their user interface, how to explain them (story-tell in marketing term), how to reach the people that will use them and will get the maximum from them. My latest few personal projects are a little bit technical and hard to understand, hard to explain to people. Reasons for that are because of several things that are not purely technical where I am not so strong - marketing, storytelling, finding the correct words, videos, pictures and descriptions etc.

I am currently in the process (when I have time for programming sense I've been distracted with offline tasks) of making more features of my latest tool - GeneratorApp - exposed for use with no programming. Time will tell if I will find the right words and pictures. No matter what happens, I'll probably continue this search for transforming, packaging the technical stuff to normal people. In the end the end users that do not understand absolutely anything from programming are the ones that pay the bills.

It may be no coincidence that some famous people said that making something - simple is the most complex thing.