Success for the Company Is ...


With few exceptions, companies don't invest in product development to lose money or to remain anonymous. Two primary ways that companies measure the success of a product is through profit or how well it promotes the company as a whole.

... Profit

Though forgotten for a while in the heat of the dotcom era, the fundamental purpose when creating a product, whether it's a Web site or a fork, is to make money. Maybe it won't make money immediately, or it won't make a lot of money, but few things are designed to lose money. With the exception of the products of nonprofit organizations, making money is the primary reason companies do anything (in the case of nonprofits, it's also a top reason—it's just not intended to be the biggest one).

... Promotion

To some extent, everything is an advertisement for itself, but other than in fashion or in extreme circumstances—I once rented a car that was plastered on all sides with ads for Hertz—corporate self-promotion in a user experience is generally pretty subtle. Except on the Web. On the Web, with its giant, fast, competitive market full of similar products, it's a lot more important that a site actively serve as an advertisement for itself. There are several general things that a site needs to do well to market itself: it needs to be different, recognizable, memorable, and it needs to communicate its function. Designing purely for these things is likely to create a product that seems all surface glitter lacking substance, but ignoring this role in development is equally dangerous.

Without going into an ode to the beauty of being different, individuality is important for products. It's important to differentiate a product from all its competitors. In search engines, for example, there was a time when there were few differences between the largest search services. Infoseek and Excite, for example, had nearly identical interfaces and services, as did Yahoo! and Lycos (Figures 3.3 and 3.4).While doing competitive research for HotBot, we saw that in users' minds these interfaces merged, became identical and interchangeable. As such, none communicated that there was any reason to go to it versus the other or that there was any inherent value over the other. Thus people didn't necessarily care which one they used and never bothered to learn why one was better than the other.

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Figure 3.3: Lycos in May 1999.

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Figure 3.4: Yahoo! in May 1999.

For a product to consciously find something that makes it different from its competitors, it needs to distinguish itself by features, layout, color, editorial tone, or something else important (even usability!). CNET had a broad and general editorial mission that would not allow them to vary their editorial tone or content, so they concentrated on visual design for their identity. They were so successful that they managed to be identified with a certain shade of yellow for a long time. Netscape Netcenter similarly owned teal, while Yahoo! tried to create identity by being "generic gray" and placing round buttons on top. Other sites used different tactics. HotWired had a new animated front door every day. ICQ had more text on their front door than some sites have on their whole site. Amazon could deliver virtually any book overnight. All these things—even when they interfered with functionality—made these sites easy to remember and recognize.

In cognitive psychology and advertising, there exists the concept of recognition, which goes beyond just being memorable. It means being uniquely identifiable, and the faster, the better. And though recognition is largely visual, it also involves the name of the site, the site's URL, its logo, its attitude. It can encompass all the aspects that make a site stand out from its competitors and from all other sites. Erik Adigard, one of the principals of the cuttingedge Web design firm M.A.D. said that an interface should be recognizable if it's the size of a postage stamp and on a page with 100 other interfaces.

Finally, there's tone, the "spirit" of the site. The things that communicate tone differ from application to application and from market to market, but they exist for every product type and for every type of user. The New York Times Web site doesn't look exactly like a newspaper (it's not as big, it doesn't have ink smudges, the headlines are placed differently, there are ads in the corners), but it communicates enough "newspaperness" through its layout and type-face that it's almost instantly recognizable as such (though maybe not to a 13-year-old skateboarder who hasn't spent a lot of time with newspapers—this is why skateboarding news sites look much more like skateboarding magazines than newspapers). Google looks like a search engine (Figure 3.5).Why? Because it has a big type-in box in the middle of the page, and the word search is prominently shown.

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Figure 3.5: Google's interface, circa 2001.

Self-promotion does little to the immediate measurable bottom-line profitability of the product and the company, but it is still a key element in what makes a successful product.




Observing the User Experience. A Practioner's Guide for User Research
Real-World .NET Applications
ISBN: 1558609237
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 144

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