Blogging UX Week -Wrap Up
Sorry it took so long to get all the recaps done, but I wrote notes until my hand locked up, so there was a lot of material to cover. Here are my thoughts and observations on the conference:
- Web 2.0 is not just a marketing buzzword. In fact, Web 2.0 is the next step in the de-emphasis of marketing, and the emergence of user experience is a driver of business. Pretty much every service is covered on the web. We all know that, after commoditization of a product or service, comes competition based on differentiation bred by customization, positioning, and, ultimately, quality of service. In the web’s case, quality of service is primarily influenced by customer experience: provide a rich experience, and you’ll gain - and retain - customers. Successful sites have great experiences; great experiences build great communities; great communities will pay just because they like the service. Notice how there’s no marketing involved here: there’s not million dollar media buys, email spam, and text links wherever you can get them. Word-of-mouth is king.
Take Google. I love their services; they provide me with a great customer experience. I would gladly pay $5-10 a month just to keep using things like their search and Gmail. Did I decide to do it because I saw their ad during Lost? Nope: They don’t advertise at all. There’s no need to market a great product or a great service that is built into a great experience. (Or, perhaps, this anti-marketing is the next step in the evolution of marketing?)
- Good design is not often innovative design and a good design for one site may fail miserably on another. There’s no formula for a good design (no, "clean" is not always best; look at Netflix which is very usable but kind of cluttered). In fact, good design is a design that enables the user: it exposes and emphasizes the features and paths that the user needs, provides easy methods to interact with the site and data, and provides visible and immediate feedback on user actions. A good design for a site may not be beautiful, but it succeeds because it is functional. Great designs wrap beautiful presentation around beautiful channels for interaction, around easy-to-use features, and easy-to-find paths. A great design builds that great user experience, which in turn builds a popular site.
- Usability is now totally different. We’re mixing the context of applications with the context of web browsing. How do users see complex web applications? Should they react more like desktop application - with full undo, state saving, etc. - or should they work more like traditional web pages, only with a few souped-up features? It’s too early to give a sound recommendation, because users haven’t formed any distinct mental models around what Web 2.0 apps are supposed to do. After more exposure to advanced web apps, users will slowly begin to decide that "this is what a web app is supposed to do."
- Web 2.0 is about the creating the "duh" service. A site that lets people collaborate on projects? Duh. A site that lets you keep track of people in your network? Duh. A site that lets you meet friends with similar interests? Duh. That’s what Web 2.0 is. Web 1.0 (maybe Web beta?) was about seeing what could be done and living off the "wow, this is cool!" factor that arose because we’d never seen this stuff before. Now, it’s very much "been there, done that" when it comes to the sheer technological wow factor. Now, we actually want to use things that serve some sort of purpose: the "only cool" products burst with the rest of the bubble. Web 2.0 is about finally putting products that serve a need, no matter how small, on the web; it’s mass production to serve mass needs. The "duh" services are driving the new boom: think of Flickr (let’s make photosharing easy, duh!), Basecamp (people need to collaborate on projects, duh! let’s do that), and YouTube (there’s a lot of great videos out there, what if we could collect them all so, duh!, they’re easy to find and search). These are the services that are now spiraling to huge popularity and massive VC funding.
The new generation of web applications are about giving users access to the things they need and the ability to do what they want with their data. More and more, companies are starting to realize that success comes to companies that give users what they want, not to those that try to market things down users’ throats. By creating user-focused web applications with enabling designs, companies can create engrossing experiences, the type of experience that brings users to a site and develops strong communities around those sites. By focusing on engrossing, positive user experiences, Web 2.0 means success for both companies and, ultimately, users.
