A product is not just about features. It's about experience.
sachin.posterous.com
sachin.posterous.com
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.
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.
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 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.
And everyone fucking hates the incumbents.
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).
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.
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.
(For those interested, here's Opacity, too: http://likethought.com/opacity/)
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.
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).
As soon as Opacity's vector performance is on par with Photoshop, I'm out!
An important counterpoint, though, is that feature lists sell: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html
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.
Sachin got nothing to apologize for, Posterous is one of the great product out there. It just works! Go, Posterous!
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.
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.)
It's similar to startups. Ideas are cheap and easy, but executing them well (profitably) is hard.
Perhaps beside the point, but...I can't be the only one who things that Windows 7 is a vastly better experience than OS X.
Someone who hasn't even tried the best has no way to build something 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...
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.
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:
http://sachin.posterous.com/the-problem-with-lexus-is-while-...
And yes, BMW sucks at interface design. Where they excel is in building the ultimate driving machine. I'm all for BMW outsourcing their tech:
http://sachin.posterous.com/stick-to-what-youre-good-at-for-...
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 find it pretty awful myself, but a lot of people prefer it, therefore in a sense it is better.
But another important factor is to follow your heart, have a vision, build what you want to build.
The most successful companies (Apple, Zappos, Amazon, Google) have strong founders/leaders with strong visions for what they want to build.
Those companies could easily pivot and make more money if they wanted to
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.
Audi and VW are essentially the same company. Have you driven an Audi? The polish and finish on that car is incredible.
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.
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.