The 1 Tool 1 Task Initiative

When we design a site, one of our main goals is to make things as simple for the user as possible. These enhancements includes streamlining the navigation, generally-standardized positioning of main elements and increasing the "obviousness" of things. While the public side of a site is the most important aspect, something that is often overlooked is the administration area.

All of our dynamic sites come with their own online tool-kit that we call the "admin area" to help maintain your site and keep things fresh. Elements of a site are controlled dynamically from here, which enables you to keep your site up-to-date from anywhere in the world (which, as we all know is the full glory of the online life).

While the admin area never gets displayed to the public, its importance rivals that of the full-package of the public display. Many times this is like building two separate sites as one package, but the end result is well worth it.

Why? A couple of reasons.

First, a lot of clients will look at their admin area just as much (if not more) than the public side of their site. They should visit the admin area regularly to ensure that information is as current and valid as possible. This area should be easy to use, simple to figure out and well organized.

Second, this is what represents us (iMarc) on a regular basis to the client. When they visit their admin area, they should see us and our principals in the work we've done. (After all, if the admin area is amazing, just think of how good the front-end is.)

Third, while this reminds the client of us, it doesn't require the client to have to contact us. Don't get me wrong, we enjoy talking with our clients and don't mind helping them out, but a well-made admin area is easy enough for anyone to figure out. This also comes in handy when whoever is maintaining the Website moves on to other parts of the company and has to train someone else on how to use it.

This brings us to a theory not used enough on the Web these days: Occam's Razor. It is a principle that states "given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler" (Wikipedia: Occam's Razor). This doesn't exactly fit here, but we can go a step further and say if two processes acheive the same goals, the simpler is preferred. (And as argued by Dave, if it's preferred, it must be better.)

In a lot of the things that we do in our day-to-day lives, one tool that can do many things (corporate buzzword "multitask") is better. Why have many remotes for many appliances when you can have one remote to control everything. This converence of technologies was thought to be the wave of the future at one point, and I suppose to a degree still is, but there have been noticable walls where such is not the case; take for example the Motorola ROKR, combining MP3 playing with a phone just never was really that appealing to the mass audience.

But I digress. While convergence may appear to make things simpler, it infact complicates the entire process. Two simple tools combined into one supertool creates the weird gateway between them in which they must interact, convoluting code and logic.

This is also something that must be watched in creating our admin tools. There have been times in the past where we have created one tool that actually manages many different aspects of the site (and sometimes multiple sites) with one form. Combining many ideas into one tool ends up in confusion and explanation.

Which brings me to my main point: the 1 Tool 1 Task initiative. Each tool in an admin area should serve to maintain one and only one aspect of a site. As an example: we may have a section called "News & Events," but I wouldn't expect to see a "News & Events" tool on the backend of a site if they contain different data. I would expect a "News Manager" and an "Event Manager," because although they're being displayed on the same page, most of the time these things feature completely different data. (In the case that these display the exact same data, combining them is possible, but it's still logically simpler to handle two tools.)

For a lot of our tools, there does seem to be a number of tools that have similar schema, but there is not a skeleton key to control them all, nor should there be. That's the reason we offer custom solutions to each of our clients instead of a Web tool to fix the current problems. Furthermore, I'd rather spend the time creating two separate tools instead of having to hack through the thinking to stuff it all into one. It's the better use of everyone's time (or 'money' on the client end of things, since time = money).

This can lead to one site having many tools, and while it sounds like it might be overwhelming it truly isn't. Check out this picture of what the Springfield Museums admin area looks like. Nice icons, simple layout, very easy to use. A lot of these tools look very similar, but we've broken them out into logical tools, and so far we haven't heard any complaints. (Additionally, this site is updated more often than a lot of the sites we've built due to its size. I wonder if these are related.)

As you can see, simple doesn't equal less. Simple means easier to understand, which in some cases (like this) means a little more work. Either way, the end product is worth it.

This may end up being just one of the many battles I'll be fighting alone around the Web, but it's a worthwhile cause.



1 Tool 1 Task
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