The best humor is funny because it’s painfully true. This week, it was Dr. Glaucomflecken with the complete zingers.

He’s making fun of Epic, a software company that has between 42% (acute care) and 60% (health systems) of the American market. Odds are good that when your doctor is tapping away at their computer, taking their mask off to get it to do facial recognition, or cussing under their breath, they’re interacting with Epic.

And he’s right. It’s the least bad software we have for the purpose, and it’s infinitely customizable, and ubiquitous. It is what your doctor uses, the hospital uses, and even you use, if you have MyChart.

Why Is Customization Hard?

On the surface, letting people have all the customizations anyone has ever asked for seems like a great way to get alignment with what they want. They’ll just use the things they need! And maybe they want something they haven’t thought to ask for.

But that’s just the first thought, because the more options a piece of software has, the more work it takes to understand it, and the faster the users need to accept change. The interface gets cluttered. Then it gets horrendous. Then it looks like the administration view of Jira.

The options start… interacting. Maybe your organization has some users with a perfectly good reason for having both English and French interface labels, but how do they make sure the input keyboard is correct, and are those special characters being re-used anywhere, and do they render correctly in any of the 20 or 30 places that data could be accessed? And if you figure all that out, what happens when there’s an upgrade?

Customization is hard because every time you add an option, you have made the software fractally more complex. And for many many options, that’s the price you have to pay. But it’s still a price. It’s a price in testing, it’s a price in deployment, but most of all, it’s a price in usability.

So What Should We Do Instead?

If endless customization isn’t a good answer, what is?

Be opinionated!

I’m writing this in WordPress, and the blocks they think I’m most likely to use are at the top of my menu. Paragraph, image, quote, list, embed. Yes, those are the things I use most often, and should be easiest to find. There are few enough that they don’t need to be alphabetized or grouped. Much much further down are things I’ve never touched, grouped and alphabetized, in case I need them. Have I ever needed a Wolfram Embed? No, but if I did, I could find it.

Even better, as I use blocks, they get put in my “Most Used” menu. That is unique to me, but it’s not a customization, exactly, more like a preference.

Be aware

What do people say they do with your software? What do they actually do? For most users, the Pareto Principal applies. 80% of the users will use, at most, 20% of the product. That’s fine. The other 80% of the product will be useful sometimes, to some users, in some circumstances. You have to be able to track that. If you aren’t collecting metrics about what people actually do with your product, you might be overlooking a small but very popular feature, or you might be working hard to support something that should be retired. Progressive Delivery is as much about gathering information as it is about getting software out.

Be Considerate

No one sits down to work and opens their laptop with a song in their heart because today they get to use an ERP system. They didn’t go to medical school because they have a passionate drive to click software checkboxes. No matter how much we care about our software, it’s a tool for the people who use it, and we need to respect them. We need to respect their time, and their cognitive effort, and their accessibility needs. And one of the ways we can be respectful is to give them exactly what they need and nothing more.

Conclusion

It’s easy to make fun of Epic, or Jira, or IBM Tivoli, because using them feels like trying to play a Wurlitzer instead of a brightly-colored xylophone. The features they have exist for a good business reason. All of them. But no single user needs all of them, and most users benefit from not seeing them.

Be opinionated.

Be aware.

Be considerate.

Bonus Material

I need to show you what some of the offices at the Epic headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin look like. And it’s mostly individual offices.