I was just reviewing a user experience  job where part of the description said the role should help to give ordinary people an “easy button” into the complicated world of the company’s domain. And in that context, the reference and idea makes sense, but I started thinking about the eponymous ad campaign.

The general flow of all of the ads in Staples “Easy Button” campaign is this: someone faces a difficult problem (that they recognize is difficult), they are presented the option of pressing an “easy button,” usually with ridicule that they didn’t think of pressing the button themselves and after pressing the button their problem is resolved.

What reading the job description sparked in me now was the idea that we in the User Experience field also think about things this way as well – our users will have a problem and we will create an experience to make it easier for them. Ultimately though, we should be aiming for something more.

Ideally we should create experiences in such a way that when someone uses our products they should never even realize that what they are doing could be hard. They should be able to accomplish their task, whatever it is, so easily that the very idea of needing an easy button would be ridiculous, not that partaking in wonders of the easy button is ridiculous.

Our jobs should be to make the difficult, the painful, the useless, and time-consuming feel fun, useful, and easy. Riding a bike is hard, but once you know how to do it, it is as easy as riding a bike. There is a reason that someone came up with that saying.

How do we make all of our work as easy as riding a bike, without the weeks of training wheels and scrapped knees, and, of course, without an easy button.