Limited choices

I don't like to make choices. For me the best choice in life is - no choice at all. For example: I like to drink coffee. Any kind is fine. Still I get questions: Do I want the coffee with a touch of frost that gives a dreamy feeling on a lazy afternoon thanks to a selected combination of superbly engineered beans made by an ancient line of distinctive coffee entrepreneurs? Or maybe I would just go for the high-quality coffee which maintains endurance in taste while ensuring a fresh, consistent kick every time I hear the sound of a whisper? I don't know... just give me strong coffee without milk or sugar. And why don't you try to make it yesterday?

Hi, my name is Mathijs Brand and I'm a Hippo business consultant / project manager. I've been working with customers and partners on Hippo projects for the last couple of years. I'll use this blog to tell you a bit about my experiences. Also I hope to show you some of the nice solutions we've come up with.

So maybe I was overreacting with the coffee. And I can understand why we're acting the way we are: it's harder for people to reduce options then just handing them out. Reducing options means making a choice yourself. If limiting options is hard for all kinds of features in the real world; it's even harder in the software world where options are virtually endless.

So why don't we give it a little effort? Try and define your audience. Find out what they are allowed to do or what they just don't want to see. Luckily - once you're done with the analysis - it's pretty straightforward to configure these options in Hippo CMS.

An example

Suppose you have a lot of very specific technical documents lying around. A few people are asking for them, but most don't find them very interesting. Just uploading all these documents to your website can easily end up in chaos like the picture below:

hmm... what button should I push?

Less is more

Let's say you want to do it right this time. Your editor wants to type a news item about cats and dogs. She doesn't want to see all these buttons and folders she can't do anything with. So give her a nice and quiet interface to give her more focus on the contents of the message.

In the above picture the editor just has a couple of options. In the news folder she can only add news items.

On the other side of the spectrum is your site administrator. He wants to be able to go through all of the advanced features managing your site. He likes to configure the rss feeds, widgets, overview pages, pdf's, portals and websites. He makes sure the news item automatically ends up in all of these media types. He likes to see how much memory his server has got and which java version is running. So hand him the buttons...

The administrator has lots of options.

The same kind of options can be given to people visiting your website. With metadata you can define which documents are interesting for which audience. You can also guide your audience through some questions and answers to find out their information needs. With a personal login you can achieve even more.

Conclusion

Hippo CMS gives you a lot of flexibility to limit choices. In the end reducing options gives your powerful web application the simplicity it needs. So pretty please with sugar on top - use these options - and let's get back to the real question:

Do you want the coffee with a touch of frost that gives a dreamy feeling on a lazy afternoon thanks to a selected combination of superbly engineered beans made by an ancient line of distinctive coffee engineers?

This was a repost, you can find the original post here: Limited choices, however there's not much sense in doing that, since you just read the same thing ;)