I am wondering what the HN community thinks of usability as a key differentiator or USP. Are there examples of products that had essentially same or lesser feature but were a lot more usable and therefore successful? I know that 37 signals is a good example of this but I am curious to know if there are other examples.
Also, does this apply to B2B startups as well as it applies to B2C startups?
Thanks!
Also, all businesses are essentially one of two types: 1) do something entirely new, or 2) do something old, but innovate (i.e. do it faster/better/cheaper). Since it is nearly impossible to do anything that is actually truly new, most businesses fall into the second category.
Usability would fall under the category of doing something "better," though well-executed usability should also increase total efficiency, therefore ostensibly also making the product "faster."
Usability is a steadily-improving idea. A new product is invented, a competitor sees a way to make the product better/faster, another competitor then makes it even better/faster, and on and on. It's market-wide iteration. And at some point, hopefully, one of the companies will create a product with recognizably great usability. Usability is not an all-of-a-sudden event; it happens slowly, over time, and is a confluence of factors.
Of course, whoever finally gets to create the product with great usability gets to also take all the credit. C'est la vie.
EDIT: Specifically, this PG quote comes to mind: "In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better." (http://paulgraham.com/start.html)
About a week later the service released their own client. It didn't have as many features or run as fast as ours on a large database - but it was slick, easy to use, and flexible, and about half the price of our software. Everyone loved it, other than my employers. I loved it, and started using it at home with a slightly guilty conscience. Their software was not as good, but it looked like the new hotness, while ours looked like bad shareware.
Our sales halved within a month or six weeks, and never recovered. B2B may be even easier than B2C; if it demos well you just repeat the word productivity at regular intervals and it'll sell itself.
Any Apple product released in the past decade or so, Guitar Hero and Rock Band (versus Bemani), and the Game Boy (versus the Game Gear) come to mind.
1. GH/RB vs Bemani: Guitar Freaks only had 3 buttons versus 5 in Guitar Hero. Also the home versions of BM/GF/DM/DDR were always poor copies of the arcade versions - missing songs, badly-made input devices. And having western music is a big feature.
2. Game Gear: Personally I switched to Game Boy because of by crappy battery life, huge un-carryable size, bad build quality (it broke a couple of times). Wiki mentions lack of UK/US developer engagement meaning not many local games.
3. Apple: Stable, UNIX-based computers, which are also good for graphics and office use? iPad? iPods? Multi-touch, touch-sensitive scroll wheels, playlists, iTunes Store (100% legal, cheap, good selection of music, which feeds straight to the iPod)...
In each case users did lose some features. But they gain some as well - I don't think any are really subsets of the alternatives. I switched to some of these specifically for better features.
Personally I think usability is nice but it's a secondary differentiator after providing the best features for the largest market segment your product can target. There are some really ugly products out there which survive by virtue of just being the most useful.
That said, successful products also tend to usually also be highly usable because the consumer market is the biggest segment (contrast - enterprise software). Or in cases where usability is the feature - accessibility software? GUI?
A usable system is generally a more efficient system. More efficient systems save you money. Cut a couple of seconds of each interaction a telephone operator makes on the support lines of a major international and you've saved them a hundred grand every year.
There are examples out there like IBMs Intranet revamp http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200209/ij_09_25_02a.... or the Australian Defence Organisation e-learning setup http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9030669/Mission_Educa....
You might also find "Cost-justifying usability" http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kDVgsGgkF4cC&dq=roi+u... a interesting read.
(Also - as others have commented fewer features / simplicity and usability are somewhat orthogonal issues. You can have a terrible experience with a small/simple interface. You can have a great experience with a large/complex interface. Depends on the user, the task and the goals.)
A customer will choose the company with the feature set he/she needs/wants over the company without those features but with a better usability. Likewise, a customer will choose a company over another because of better usability and more simplicity provided that the features on both products are equal.
Simplicity and usability is a bonus, not a selling point. Make sure your product is actually better than the rest before trying to sell simple.
PD: If a product is over featured then it's equivalent to a simpler product with less feature and is a loser to a less featured project that has the correct features but better usability (Zendesk is a great example of this characteristic). Ipods needed to first be the best mp3 players in the market(feature wise, and design wise) and only then be the mp3 player with the best usability.
The next time I need to buy a plane ticket, Hipmunk will be the first place I go.
So, yes.