The Tech + Photo Blog

Tech companies get way too involved in their own little world. Or, rather, I might say (without ruffling any feathers) engineers at tech companies. I think that a big reason why otherwise awesome technology is not adopted or widely used is because the back end is far too transparent to the end user. Most people have enough complexity in their lives. I personally know some programmers who slaved for the product, ate pizza for two weeks straight and peed in a bottle under their desk. These guys go through a lot, but that doesn’t mean the users should have to suffer the same fate to create a firewall access rule!

For example, Joe Bob User wants to give his employee access to a file on his server while the employee is at home. What Joe Bob should not have to know is that he is adding a new user account with WAN to LAN access through a VPN tunnel with a network address translation of a virtual IP on the same physical subnet as the protected network resource. I probably lost 95% of the general population in that last sentence, hell I even lost myself! Most network security appliances are far more convoluted even that that, and therein lies the problem.

What Joe Bob should have to do is drag a photo/avatar/name of a user over to a group that represents users with unlimited access to a resource (server, IP, file folder) and be done with it. The new user authenticates with user credentials and a VPN tunnel is created for them. All the user has to know is their login credentials (possibly two-factor) and that they are on a secure connection to what they want. All Joe Bob has to know is that the user can connect to the files he needs and other people can’t. Done.

This does not mean that the geeks are left out either. They love to tinker, love to know what is going on behind the scenes. And that can still be done without making things difficult. We can still show these types the logs, the statistics, the rule matrices, the advanced configurations, but do it with graphical interfaces that make sense of this information. I don’t care how geeky a person is, no one likes hunting through a 500 page guide full of error codes and messages to find out what is going on with their network.

Apple, as much as I sometimes loathe the cult-like club of a company, have done well in this regard; hiding all the technical junk from users in an effort to bring a simple, integrated experience. For tech geeks, myself included, that like to know what is going on behind the scene, this can be a turn-off. But for most of the world, simplicity (and by association, ease of use) is a very important element, and one that Apple captures. The end result, is that we should give customers an experience that takes the backend out of the picture, that takes the complexity of how a solution is built and hides it well, behind smoke screens, turning gears and ultimately, that shiny, glossy interface that gives them a sense of control with simplicity.

Simplicity such as this requires engineers… but it also requires direction that thinks outside of engineering conventions.

-PL

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