The easier the tools is the more usable it will be. Consequently, the activity where you will use the tool will be the most sustainable. Many giants of todays tech world used this approach; They created easy UI and made profound success stories. Think about Chrome browser. It is a fairly blank page with the search bar in the heart and very few recommendations from your search history. You can never miss up what you are going to search for or get distracted.
Being simple and easy is the most attractive
There are tons of work underneath a simple and easy to use interface. However, for the common users who don’t look behind the user interface; It looks simple and easy. Few decades ago, Microsoft used this approach to spread its operating system over devices that used command line operating systems. Both Google and Microsoft do not sell their browsers and operating system as part of their hardware package like Apple. So, their is no forcing to take them as part of any package. That’s why they need to be the product of choice. Then later on, they will promote their paid services to you.
To reach this at those old days, Microsoft offered hardware devices like scanners, printers and even mouse devices at inexpensive prices. And as free of charge the GUI -graphical user interface- for device setup comes with them. Now the user who used to set up his device using instructions at black and green command line screen would make a few clicks on a colorful window. Then after the users enjoyed this easiness; they were offered a parallel operating system called windows. It would run as a second operating system beside their legacy operating system. Then, new computers are now available with only windows as their operating system. Generally, users do not realize the coding effort behind making a simple efficient user interface.
Google pretty much do the same. Some easy free user interfaces help users do a lot of great stuff. You reach the need for paid services when you need to use their cloud services at big volume, as a commercial product you sell or, when you need the professional services intended for business support. However, if your scale of business is small or if you are just starting and exploring you will be more than satisfied with their free tiers. Originally before selling cloud computing, Google was depending on selling ads displayed on their free services.
Using easy digital online tools
If you are just starting to use any digital tool, you feel stumbled in the beginning. A lot of jargon and icons and functions to stumble between them. Any digital tool whether it is a software tool or a digital device include some software program. You can return to our definition of the digital devices for maintenance in this article: Digital Skills for Maintenance – Part1: dbase. Usually, this software program receives a set of inputs not a single one and yields an output to the user. This is not different from playing a game for the first time. The game is a software program that receives some inputs from the user and returns an output refreshed look of the game based on the player inputs.
Some of the online tools as Google Workspace include the free document suite which has a lot of gems. For the z-generation the cloud services tend to be a better choice than the legendary office applications. One of its pretty feature that it is free and needs no subscription. You can simply run it from your Chrome browser.
However, most of the games tend to take you through steps. It starts from a very easy simple level of just moving one piece to the side and hence you win the first level of the game. Then you proceed smoothly to sophisticated levels were you need to monitor a dozen of things, apply some strategies with each move and operate at the speed of light. Unfortunately, digital tools and technical application programs tend to shoulder you all the information together in the documentation and expects that you would do the slicing and splicing and create your own easy path from novice to hero.
Chose the path to build your digital skills toolbox
We grow up used to have some sort of software office tools like packages at workplace for digital document editing. Some years before that we were manually writing our work documents on papers and filing them in drawers. Searching through papers searching for a certain information can be a nightmare if the document indexing is overlooked. This can be the case till now if you don’t have a criteria for storing your digital documents. However with time the search tools grow to save us some time. Anyhow, We were all using Microsoft office at some point in time and we were sharing the files via emails. So anyone can open his version of the file on his PC. While the professional users were able to create macros to automate tasks using visual basic and the professional accountants were easily making pivot tables.
Nowadays, we need to collaborate using and editing the same document at the same time without moving from our chairs. That’s what was offered by cloud computing. I am not speaking about creating virtual machines on the cloud but at least editing some Google Sheet online where all collaborators can see the result instantaneously. Or, following up the results logged from an online form immediately. Or, even, the automated task on Apps Script and Google Sheets can take an action immediately based on the form logged result and send a task or a purchase request. All this can be done from the free Google Document suite or Workspace.
But, how do you chose to learn and apply those skills that can boost your work performance? You can learn bit by bit as along as you have available time. Or, you can join an intensive training course. As an advice, avoid those training courses that load you with tons of information and make you feel dizzy and you lose you focus. Try a training that takes you in a step by step manner through a project to jump-start your digital skills. Without robust foundations your skills will remain shaky. Let’s continue in another chat.
In Conclusion,
Digital online tools are stepping to dominate our life and work. We need to start building our digital skills toolbox at the earliest. But, the golden rule is to look for an easy application or an easy way to learn how to use the application. Those tech giants who used the easy UI interface approach dominated the market.
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