When do you leave your user behind?
Every so often, a gamer will say "Hey, my character died. Why should I get a free pass to restart?" In the world of video games, death penalties have lessened as games get longer, more complex, and the systems themselves more capable. Where originally games were simple, could be beaten in one sitting, and the systems couldn't save any data (after all, it worked for arcades), we were then treated to cartridges with battery backups or password-based save systems. These progressed to memory cards you could plug in and swap between systems. Intervals for saving have also grown shorter and shorter – initially, you had to complete a level. Then, it was at 2 or 3 checkpoints in a level. Now, it's whenever you want, plus an autosave system whenever you accomplish something. You don't even NEED lives - you just restart from the last place to run headlong into the alien hordes again.
Then again - a modern game may take a few days of heavy playtime to defeat, or in the case of an MMO like World of Warcraft or Everquest, you NEVER defeat the game, and death always lurks around the corner. Should you looks days, weeks, or YEARS of work because of an unluckly break?
But even for short games, we have our hands held so that we can see everything, do everything, and there's no risk of us not seeing the end, eventually.
There's a similar trend in web design. We build build our sites to be usable by idiots, and to be viewable by your blind grandmother on a 10 year of Packard-Bell, with their hands held the whole way. But where do we draw the line?
I'm not going into accessibility issues. Most are important and require little to no extra effort (alt tags for images, correctly formed HTML, etc), and some (liquid layouts, font scaling in IE, and no use of plugins) are simply best left for standards and accessibility nerds to argue over while the rest of us actually make things.
How much hand holding do we need to provide to our users? Let's use the example of a website for a credit card company. We've all used one, and I have some experience on the creation side. What does a basic user want to get out of their experience? Basic things - paying a bill, checking a balance or applying for a card. What does an advanced user want? They probably want to see all of the options - what rewards programs they can choose, budget calculators, payment calculators, financial tips... and... I'm not sure. I'm actually a basic user, given my minimal credit card usage, so I don't actually care about all that other stuff, so I'm not sure I actually need to see it. Sure, I want it accessible in case I decide to sign up or change rewards programs at some point, but it won't be something I want to sift through.
A basic user in the more traditional sense (unfamiliar with the site, perhaps new to web-based services in general) would simply be confused or overwhelmed by the bevy of options and services, and the descriptions and explanations of them, that you've thrown at them. In the case of my Grandmother, she might decide the internet isn't worth the trouble, unplug the computer, and just mail her check in every month.
How do we keep a basic user's experience simple, while allowing advanced users to get the most out of their time on a site? One solution would be to think about how Google, Yahoo, and other web app/portal sites (or even desktop apps) start with a basic template and allow users to customize it by adding or removing options they don't want to see, or using collapsable palettes. Another option would be to take advantage of the 'fold' - a power user is more likely to be invested in their computer, and probably have a larger monitor at a higher resolution, so moving extraneous content down or to the right will move it out of the field of view of your basic viewers. Last, it's just a design issue. We can't forget that the basic functions that everyone use need to be clearly displayed and easy to use - the advanced functions should not be more prominent.
