Part Two: The product · Getting good
What is easy to find for a beginner is slow for someone who uses the product all day. Each group resents an interface made for the other.
A support agent answers tickets in the same tool from nine to five. Closing a ticket takes four clicks through menus that were laid out so a newcomer could find them. For a newcomer they are right. For her they are four clicks, a hundred times a day.
The opposite product exists too. It is dense and fast, runs on codes and keys, and is unusable for the first month. The people who have learned it defend it fiercely. Everyone else leaves.
The usual compromise is an "advanced mode" in the settings. That splits the product in two, and the people who need it never find the switch.
The better answer is one interface in which the slow, visible way teaches the fast one. Desktop menus have done this for decades. Beside each command is its keyboard shortcut. You use the menu until one day you notice you no longer need to. Nobody took a course.
The same idea has other forms. A box where a command can be typed by name. Acting on twenty items at once. A saved reply. "Do that again." All of them sit beside the plain way and leave it in place.
Regulars show you which shortcuts to build. Whatever sequence they repeat all day, with a sigh, is the one to shorten.
Speed is only part of being good at something. An experienced agent also sees more: which tickets are the same problem, which customer is about to leave. A product can teach that too. Put the earlier tickets about the same fault beside the one she has open, and she starts to see the pattern for herself. Once she is fast, the next step up is in the work.
Therefore:
Keep the plain, visible way for beginners, and put a faster way beside it that the slow way teaches. Once people are fast, show them the next thing to get good at in the work itself.
In practice. Find the customer who spends the most hours a week in the product and watch for one of them. Write down everything she does over and over.
Goes with. The person this serves has already come PAST THE AWKWARD STAGE (40). On a single screen the same balance is SHOW A LITTLE, OFFER MORE (68). A shortcut to a slow action is wasted, so FAST ENOUGH TO FORGET (46).