All actions in your application should require 1 mouse click, AT MOST!

The less mouse clicks the better right? If you're even vaguely aware of usability you are probably aware of this notion, for some it seems to be the holy grail of usability, the be all and end all. You show them a UI change, they're more than happy to help you evaluate it, using their super human knowledge of this single usability metric and excellent counting ability they can give you a quick and useless evaluation of your UI.

The problem with this? Following this rule to it's end, as you apply it to more and more of your UI the mouse clicks required for every action would tend towards one. There's a nice example of an application apparently built with this constraint here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1486420/how-can-i-enhance-the-aesthetics-of-an-ugly-windows-form-packed-with-too-many-ne

In truth, when people bring this metric up they don't really mean they want everything to only be one click away, just whatever it was they were recently doing which now requires one more mouse click than it did before. Inevitably as you evolve a product and add functionality you eventually end up with too much functionality to fit in the space available. At some point you need to simplify your interface, simple to say, hard to do. Sometimes they can be right about the number of clicks, the important thing is to look at the key tasks anyone using your software is trying to achieve. Those key tasks need to be as frictionless as possible, making anything else so simple to do can lead to clutter in your interface. Hide it away and you may well be doing people a favour. As your product evolves possibly somethings which you allowed to be simple early on will need to take a back seat to other functionality.

This slide share presentation is the best example I've seen of someone going beyond a glib 'Keep It Simple Stupid' attitude or unhelpfully telling you that your application should do next to nothing and that any customers who want more can piss off.
http://www.slideshare.net/cxpartners/secrets-of-simplicity

(I'd also say it's also a good example of how to do a really good presentation )


Sometimes you'll need to hide things away from view to keep the core of your application simple to use, sometimes you'll need to add an extra mouse click between a user and some piece of functionality. I'm not going to try and summarise the presentation linked above, I couldn't do it justice and it's actually really really interesting to watch so stop paying attention to me and head over there.