The art of adding features to any product or service is this:
Those who need or want the new features can find them easy.
Meanwhile those who don’t need or want the features don’t even notice them. They are invisible.
Sounds impossible to do, but I think the team at twitter are doing a pretty good job of it. The way I’d try and achieve this would be by making sure the visual structure doesn’t change, and the sequence of events to use it is not interrupted.
shhh – here comes the controversy.
I’ve always been an evangelist for international outsourcing. Especially as it pertains to digital work. I was asked recently if it has added complexity because of time zone differences. I had never consider the issue before, so I stopped to think about it for a while.
And this is my answer:
Having staff work on the other side of the world is usually an advantage. It feels like we have double the amount of business hours in a day. For example, when it is 5pm and something important comes up, I don’t have to wait for the next day for it to get started on. I can brief it out, and have it on my desktop by the next morning. For small startups getting things done quickly is what matters, and this process is a bit like inventing time.
Startup blog says: having a team in different time zones is rad.
I was working on doing some new instructions for rentoid.com – It’s in an area on the website where things a slightly confusing. Then I thought. Why am I doing this? Wouldn’t it be better to re-design the system so it just doesn’t need instructions at all. Like a chair. It doesn’t need instructions. We just know how to sit on it by looking at it. Next time you start investing time in defining how to do something for our audience think about this:
“If we need steps to explain how things work, the system is broken.”
By definition it’s overly complex because it requires instructions. Especially if our business is web based. It’s a more valuable investment in time to fix the system, thing or service, not educate people how to use it.
If you want to know what a true consumer insight looks like. What it is to have the ‘user in mind’, then take a look at this picture below. It’s one of the simplest and best innovations I’ve seen in a while. The key question is this:
‘Why did it take the industry more than 100 years to think of it?’
Startups: What simple user centric innovations are waiting to happen in your industry?
You are in a room full of people.
You are speaking to them on stage and have their full attention.
You tell them to pretend all the people in the world are in this room
You ask the people who believe they have ‘above average intelligence’ to raise their hand.
All the people in the entire room raise their hand.
The fact is, exactly half will be above and half will be below… we all assume we are the smart guys, the good guys, the people make things better…. we all believe we are adding positively to the collective intelligence.
But collective intelligence has a slight nuance. It only works when we let people with specialist knowledge fill in our own knowledge gaps and or take the lead in areas of expertise. If instead, we take the average viewpoint of the collective audience we usually end up with a pile of crap. Collective intelligence can only occur when we segregate and allocate information requirements, not when we aggregate. The latest proof of this is Youtube.com
Once upon a time youtube was a reliable source of cool and important videos. Circa 2005 the most viewed, most discussed for the day, week or month was an intelligent reflection what mattered. Now it’s a mish-mash of over produced pop songs, inane comedians, and soft porn. A sad failure of the digital ‘Wisdom of crowds’. Youtube is still incredibly valuable, it just takes a little more digging these days.
The point for entrepreneurs is this: The crowd is not always right. Taking all advice from the crowd on how to iterate your product, service or website could result in a very average product. Intelligent design is usually the work of intelligent people.
One of my favourite business quotes of all time is from marketing Polymath Al Reis who was co-author of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (A must read for all entrepreneurs) and it is this:
This is really a key for anyone no matter what our life is. Decisions from the desk are rarely as insightful as decisions made from the filed. For all the reasons we are aware of such as message dilution , the grape vine et al.
I have been witnessing this first hand as I have invested the past few weeks out on the road visiting my business customers for www.rentoid.com. Put simply I’ve learnt more in the past few weeks than I have in the past few months. Incredible insights as deep and wide as web usability to asset management.
I’ll I can say to startups is this. Get out there and press the flesh and make sure you are not ‘Office Blind’.
It’s never been cheaper to start a business in the history of man. Especially on line. Startup guru Guy Kawasaki proved it with his $12,000 example for www.trumours.com – But startup blog says you can do it for pretty close to zero. In the spirit of sharing here’s the startup blog list of the 10 things you need to get started, and resources to help perform these necessary tasks.
So there you have it – web start up in 10 easy steps. Feel free to add any other cool tools and ideas in the comments.
What are you waiting for? Get started.
Steve.