I once inherited a software product that had an incredibly complicated data import process that non/semi-technical users were supposed to be able to use. The training for the product spent almost half a day on learning this process (before anything else in the software!) and it was often in the top-3 of user support issues.
I set about analyzing the problem over a period of a week or so and documented my findings with some recommendations. It ultimately boiled down to far too many settings, most of which were footguns, and no sane defaults that served most users most of the time.
In the end, I instructed the development team to make a number of changes which were mostly around picking defaults, or having the import process use some heuristics to make a reasonable guess, but letting users override them if the software did something wrong -- we modeled very heavily off of various MS-Office import processes, particularly MS-Access and MS-Excel. We ended up getting what was something like a 40+ step process down to 3 clicks that more or less eliminated the support tail and turned training into a 3-5 minute show and tell.
One of the problems with lots of software IMHO is the lack of sane defaults, the blizzard of hard to grok options and settings, and the multitude of ways of doing nearly-exactly the same thing.
I set about analyzing the problem over a period of a week or so and documented my findings with some recommendations. It ultimately boiled down to far too many settings, most of which were footguns, and no sane defaults that served most users most of the time.
In the end, I instructed the development team to make a number of changes which were mostly around picking defaults, or having the import process use some heuristics to make a reasonable guess, but letting users override them if the software did something wrong -- we modeled very heavily off of various MS-Office import processes, particularly MS-Access and MS-Excel. We ended up getting what was something like a 40+ step process down to 3 clicks that more or less eliminated the support tail and turned training into a 3-5 minute show and tell.
One of the problems with lots of software IMHO is the lack of sane defaults, the blizzard of hard to grok options and settings, and the multitude of ways of doing nearly-exactly the same thing.