Making users happy should be core to any business. Netflix and Zappos rose to incredible success on the strength of giving people more than just features – they gave care. In doing that they crushed other companies who gave the bare minimum. Apple's brand has grown in the same way.
Anywhere you find companies indifferent to the user experience, you'll find a huge pot of opportunity. When you earn love and loyalty through truly virtuous exchanges, people will help you with your cause. It's true with business, it's true with your personal life.
Being good to people, through your features, through your behavior, through your values, has to, has to, has to come first, no matter what you're working on or how big you are.
Making users happy should be core to any business.
Maybe it should be but plenty businesses make plenty of money without doing that. Look at cable companies or large health insurance companies.
Yes, in markets where you have many competitors, making customers happy is important. When you have fewer competitors or when you are selling a commodity, cutting costs and increasing your output is the key. When you have a pure monopoly, continued payments to the senator of your choice are in order.
Yeah, but the cable companies are screwed. At the very moment I can drop cable, I will. As soon as I find decent bandwidth provided by someone who isn't Comcast, they don't get my money anymore and I will piss on their graves. They're the next Blockbuster. I already won't pay for cable television.
I want to give Netflix my money. As much of it as they're willing to trade for great value. I like doing business with them. You can make money by not making people happy, sure. But you can also make dinner without caring how it tastes. It'll satisfy some baseline nutritional needs, but what is the point?
edit: And don't get me started on health insurance companies. They exist in a nauseating little ecological niche carved out through a perversion of the tax code. The moment health insurance stops being equated with compensation, they dry up like weeds, replaced by companies who must be genuinely accountable to the market.
I get what you're saying, but I'd rather rob people at gunpoint than make money like these guys. At least the robber has the courtesy to screw you in person, you know?
Ah, but you can't... Having a monopoly position put these fellows in the position where they make money from customer who leave them for anyone ... if they could. In fact, they make the most money that way ... and the fiduciary duty they have ... to share holders, says they have to do that, doesn't it?
For the moment. But the wheel turns. It always does. And that's the important thing.
For a very long time, media distribution revolved around warehousing cumbersome black boxes of plastic and charging absurd fees for access. The barriers for entry were extraordinary, requiring geographic reach and licensing agreements. Nationwide media rental was a defacto monopoly for Blockbuster.
Then the medium of information shifted. Because Blockbuster didn't care that much about whether or not people were happy with the service they provided, they didn't notice the new opportunities to make their business better.
Someone else did. Someone always will.
Netflix, because they are customer focused, is busy making itself obsolete. They know one day that the wheel will turn. Physical media will disappear entirely.
The same will happen for bandwidth. Disruption is only a matter of time. As always, there are challenges. But the demand is universal. The market is enormous.
But "have a monopoly" isn't a viable business strategy: you can't decide to build a monopoly business, then go out and do it. It's just something companies luck into, like winning the lottery.
Telecom and the health industry are some of the most highly regulated industries in the US. Is it a coincidence that both are replete with customer abuse and horrible customer service?
Some products are about features and some are about experience.
Experience seems like it wins if your audience is a large number of casual users. Having the right Features seem more important if you're after a smaller number of professionals who have specific things that they need to do (why Adobe prevails in certain field despite their horrific UIs).
Adobe managed to get lock-in, nothing more. There's no loyalty there. I loved PS3, I loved PS7. I loathe CS1-5. I'm trapped there, and I know I'm not alone in that sentiment.
As soon as someone comes along able to do most of what I need to to design UI in Photoshop, I'm gone. An app called Opacity is really close – in many ways it's better than Photoshop, chiefly because they care about how I'll use it. Once they iron out some performance issues with vector objects, I'm there.
As soon as someone comes along able to do most of what I need to to design UI in Photoshop, I'm gone.
You mean when someone comes along with an application with the required features, perhaps? (see above)
As a pure amateur, I have found Corel Potopaint and Corel Draw infinitely more pleasant than anything Adobe does. But I also hear that they don't have the really specific features professionals need ("trapping" and other stuff I don't have a clue about).
That's just the thing, Photoshop actually has fewer features that matter to me than my favored image editor, Opacity. Tellingly, though, those features are centered around making the user experience easy and frictionless. (I went on and on about Opacity in another thread, it was quite a love story.)
As soon as Opacity's vector performance is on par with Photoshop, I'm out!
I don't know. I love Photoshop. My personal opinion here, but I think it is an incredibly well designed piece of software. Maybe not the Mac version, but the PC version is just well thought out. I just don't see anything that could possibly make me want to switch.
Workflow: Opacity lets me define factories to quickly generate images as I iterate a design. They're like a combo of slices and save for web in PS. Using factories is infinitely faster than cumbersome layer comps, slice selections and export scripts.
Making things polished: Opacity lets me easily snap to whole pixels, instead of sub-pixel horseshit that makes everything look blurry. Using the pen tool in Opacity gives me smart, dynamic guides to help me align my anchor points.
"Layer styles:" Instead of confining me to one of every kind of layer style and forcing me into a specific compositing order for each, Opacity lets me do whatever I need to, in whatever order, as often as I want. It's liberating and time saving, especially when you're making UI elements.
The fact that it doesn't take a long time to launch is also nice.
Photoshop is bloaty and cluttered. There's no focus there and I'm pretty sure no one at Adobe is really giving any thought to how I will use their software. They're working up feature lists, and not much more than that.
What, in particular, is well designed about Photoshop? What alternatives have you looked at?
My memory of it is that the features were haphazardly organized, all of operations required messing with horrible little mousy controls and it was obscure how to do anything beside spray paint on the image.
My experience validated Don Norman's. After I read his essay, I removed the carefully crafted sentences on http://ourdoings.com/ describing the experience, and replaced them with ugly sentence fragments cramming as many features as would fit the layout. My KPI for new users spiked. YMMV.
"User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board." - Evan Williams CEO of Twitter
Sachin is right. A product is more than a feature list. He may come across as arrogant for pointing to Apple et al. as example of great product but his point really is about experiencing a great product and to duplicate this feeling/experience to his product. For example, the unwrapping experience of an iPod does not show up on a feature list but damm, it feels good to open that box because Apple took the effort to make it seem like you're open a present. He should've point to Google Search as another example of great experience. I remembered my virgin search with Google. Relative to other search engine at the time, Google was insanely fast and relevant. Do you remember? if not Google, there must be some products that you fell in love with, now ask yourself if it was the feature list or the experience that you love. btw, having the right feature set at the right moment is part of experience.
Sachin got nothing to apologize for, Posterous is one of the great product out there. It just works! Go, Posterous!
Definitely user experience is the new IP. Some startups are getting some advantage over competitors just based on user experience. But do you think user experience is really defensible? How hard it is for competitors to imitate your user experience? (Apple just didn't have user experience. They had multi-touch technology as well, which was defensible.)
I remember reading one post from Union Square Venture blog about defensibility is not about features, or technology layer you use - but now a days its about the network effect (Craigslist, eBay), and accumulation of data asset (Google, Facebook).
So how startups can win over competitors in long run just based on User Experience? Sure, it can give great head start, but I think to sustain that leadership in the long run, you need to also innovate defensible technology or above mentioned network effect or data asset.
Dropbox has many competitors but none seem to be able to or even want to copy the very smooth experience of using Dropbox. I tried many competitors and found none that comes close.
I don’t know why that is but it seems to me that really copying an experience is not at all easy.
(I also think that multi-touch is a neat feature of the iPhone but in no way essential to the experience. Pinching makes for a nice tech demo but on the small screen the ordinary and somewhat clever double-tap works much better. You can theoretically build a great iPhone clone without any multi-touch.)
There's a lot of user experience that takes a lot of coding to get right. Sites, apps and devices with good user experience didn't just get it magically, they worked at it. Copying it would also take work.
It's similar to startups. Ideas are cheap and easy, but executing them well (profitably) is hard.
To put this in more actionable vocabulary: don't count features you've built, count user stories you've satisfied. Frequently the same small subset of your features make up the key steps in almost all your stories, while the rest of your features can't really find a business use-case at all (because the user will be more likely to chain together other, more familiar features, or chain your feature with features from other products, to accomplish the task instead.)
Actually most XP users would still fit this description. Windows 7 is great, but so many people that won't upgrade from XP try to argue that it has the same features, performance, etc., and don't get what makes 7 better.
But you could argue this over many different levels. Hey, some would say that the BMW driver doesn't really know how great it could be until they drive a Rolls Royce or, perhaps, own a private aircraft, etc. Some of it still is perception...
Only problem is, when it comes to blogging, I thought Tumblr was the one focused totally on experience and ease of use. Posterous still feels more like it's trying to give you every feature available and then some...
I love people who believe themselves arbiters of taste. You use Windows, therefore you don't know what style is. You don't drive a BMW, therefore your opinion about software is uninformed.
And German cars suck. What they don't understand, and why Lexus vastly outsells them, is that the car breaking down every 20k miles is a significant blemish on their user experience. The inattention to detail could be overlooked, even the little GPS knob, which is the worst user interface ever designed, if they could just make it onto an IQS list once.
The exact quote was, "Until you use an iPhone, a Mac, drive a BMW or Audi, you don't even realize how great the experience can be"
I never said that you can't use Windows, an Android, or drive another car. But at some point you need to use the top end product to really appreciate what's out there. If you spend your whole life on Windows/BlackBerry/Toyota, you might not understand what a great product is.
Before the iPhone came out, no one knew how great a phone could be. Even I didn't. The iPhone made me understand how you can take an existing feature set, and dramatically change a product through the experience.
You're going with a blanket, "German cars suck"? Really? I'd bet German cars have more fanatics than Japanese cars do. German cars delight people.
Lexus may outsell BMW, but that doesn't make it a better car. To me, a Lexus is just a high end Honda. It gets me from point A to point B, with a bit more luxury. One of Lexus's problems is that they don't have a vision, a passion. They just pump out what people will buy:
You are still subjective. For many people, iPhone/Mac/BMW, Audi are not a top product.
I'm one of many who like Windows 7 and Ubuntu better than OSX (I've spend more than decade as a Mac user); I like Android better than iPhone; also, while BMW is a fun to drive, S-Class Mercedes is also great experience, heck, I quite like VW Passat too and Audi is in "nothing special" category for me.
So, for my taste, you generalize too much, picking your favourite brands as a superior product.
those are examples, not absolutes. You can't spend your whole life using commodity products and then think you can build a better one by adding a feature.
Audi and VW are essentially the same company. Have you driven an Audi? The polish and finish on that car is incredible.
Yup, company issue A4 for a year. Yes, Audi's interior was very polished, but driving BMW was fun (due to it's chassis, engine, etc). Compared to that, Audi was boring.
I've made enough arrogant quotes on blogs in my day to recognize the backpedaling, but fine, I'll play along. You're defining the Mac or BMW as top-end. So I suppose you're the arbiter of what is top-end rather than taste. A Mac is no more top-end than a similarly priced PC, OSX no more than Windows 7, an iPhone no more than an EVO 4G, a BMW no more than a Lexus. Simply asking someone if they don't use a Mac or own an iPhone or drive a BMW doesn't rule out them having taste or, as you'd prefer to say it, having used a "great product."
I've used OSX extensively and believe it or not just like Windows 7 a lot better. I've used iOS extensively on my iPad (we design games for it) and like WebOS much better. I've test driven most luxury car brands and what I haven't driven, I have friends who own, and I like Lexus better.
Also you're wrong about Lexus, it's the sort of thing I suppose you'd have to own to understand. They have a vision: attention to detail. I think you'd especially appreciate it.
Everything about a Lexus is perfect. Every little feature is in just the right place and works just as you'd expect. Their GPS and other related software is best in class.
Where the attention to detail shows through the most is in the dealer experience. It's unrivaled. What Toyota knows that their competitors don't, and that car magazines rarely mention, is that the dealer experience is the most important factor in getting repeat business.
I've test-driven most of the luxury brands. I liked them better than, say, a Honda, and the dealerships were nicer, but it wasn't the same. Lexus outsells the rest not because it's a bit more luxurious, but because it's as near perfection as the automotive industry has come yet.
My dad owns two Lexus's. I've driven them extensively. I agree the attention to detail and quality are high. In my opinion, Lexus does fall into the "great experience" category. I guess your "german cars suck" comment got me riled up.
Windows 7 is modeled after OS X. Android was modeled after the iPhone. If you are designing a new product, you have to go out and see what's out there and learn from it.
Someone who has never used one of these high end products simply doesn't know.
It I started a blogging platform today, and all I had ever used was Xanga, I would probably build something 10% better than Xanga. And it would suck.
Lexus may outsell BMW, but that doesn't make it a better car
While the definition of "better" varies from person to person,
They just pump out what people will buy
the definition of a successful business is rather less subjective. Pumping out what people will buy is pretty much what makes a business successful. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about the success of a product? Isn't a successful product the one with the most users?
> the definition of a successful business is rather less subjective. Pumping out what people will buy is pretty much what makes a business successful. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about the success of a product? Isn't a successful product the one with the most users?
We are talking about better products, not successful businesses. For example, Britney Spears outsells Tchaikovsky, but no one would argue that she makes better music.
I would, because better is an absolute. It's better in some respects, less good in some, and therefore overall it depends on how you weight the attributes.
I find it pretty awful myself, but a lot of people prefer it, therefore in a sense it is better.
Anywhere you find companies indifferent to the user experience, you'll find a huge pot of opportunity. When you earn love and loyalty through truly virtuous exchanges, people will help you with your cause. It's true with business, it's true with your personal life.
Being good to people, through your features, through your behavior, through your values, has to, has to, has to come first, no matter what you're working on or how big you are.