DISQUS

Hi Vinny,

Once again, right on the mark!

I couldn't agree more (even if I'd like to find something to disagree) with your post. Software should be free (services can be free too) and usability is one of the key thing, if not the key issue for rapid users adaption and growth. A few comments on some points:

Design suggestions, good designers and coding before designing:

True working in a silo with a designer doesn't get you too far but even if you can't afford or can't find a good designer the do it yourself approach can take you far. Putting yourself in users' mindset and focusing on the top 1 or 2 goals a user will do on a specific page or task is central. Start with users' intent and if needed use Paint to cut and paste your page to do some quick mock ups. This will help you visualize what users will see and how they'll be able to interact with your features. This enable something wire framing can't; the big picture. One you have a good idea of what the interface will look like then coding can start.

Usability is hard to measure:

Agree with you. It's not difficult and even quite easy for web apps. This will let us see how user interact with your site/features, where they can't find or complete their tasks, etc. Once you have enough date go back to your UX and improve it. This should be a continuous improvement, and it's even more necessary as the number of features increase.

Leaving little things broken:

You need to focus on the important stuff vs trivial. Leave trivial aside but if you keep doing the same with little (but) important things you end up pretty quickly with some major problems. Fix little but important things along the way, yes, even if it takes a little longer.

Release early, release often, get stuck:

So true. You can't do daily releases or even releases every few couple of days (unless you're a "one person team"). And the more people you have working on the code the more complex it gets. Being agile and fast takes a little planning and (yes) still need release cycles. Being organized is key (even if it's just a little), and if you don't like it ,well, you're probably in the wrong job or business. Agree with you cycles of 2-3 weeks usually work very well.

Best,

Martin

Shhh Vinny! I've been talking in too good terms about Cape Town and your company. Now some of our staff are reading your post with a smile of envy on their face!

An exchange maybe? I'm sure our staff would prefer to spend their winter in the Cap but I don't think we'd have too many of your staff wishing to visit us in the winter. ;-)

Agree these are obvious but they're also the most important. Taking care of these little "details" is what will make you break away from the rest.

Think about these little details like when you compare interest rate vs a compounded interest rate.

Every little 1% extra when compounded will bring an order of magnitude more going foward. This is true for user, revenues and profits.

Build something relevant and engaging.

Don't try re-inventing the wheel (aka don't make yourself a "me too"). You don't need tons of cash to achieve this; you only need some good ideas, launch quick, test and make it a continuous improvement process.

Also don't try to be everything for everyone. In other words, focus. Whether it's for a vertical, a media type, a demographic or something else. If you find a winning combination then build on it (user growth and make it defensible).

Interesting article Andrew. I understand these companies are running traditional advertising.

On our end, we do mostly CPA ads and we didn't notice (yet) a slow down. A slow down for the CPA model may still happen and if it does that will means the economy is in a *really* bad shape and companies don't want clients anymore.

Until then for the intelligent companies and agencies the CPA campaigns are the last ones to see their budgets cut (if any).

That makes sense to (never!) cut CPA campaigns last because you only pay for results.

Hi Viny, interesting post. I'd like to learn more about your experience with EC2.

But as for MSFT and where they believe the application should live, I think they truly understand and believe it'll live in the browser. On a financial point of view they're simply trying to maintain their revenue base from their desktop applications as long as possible.
As soon as they open it to other browsers their revenues will start declining rapidly. So in my point of view they know very well what they do; pushing back as long as they can opening up everything in other browsers.