the Center of Digital Services

@ the Center of Digital Services

You certainly can't replicate customers or employees, but digital services, especially Web services, are easier to replicate than the content that powers them.

My new law, Saffer's Law, is this: It's easier to create the form of a digital service than it is to create the content (products) in that service.

Hundreds of news aggregators can grab content from The New York Times, but creating the content of The New York Times is much harder. It probably wouldn't be difficult (at least on the front end) to make a better auction service than eBay; the trick would be to move eBay's millions of users (and products) over to it. eBay itself is now trying to do this with eBay Express (Figure 8.15).

Figure 8.15. eBay Express is an attempt to add a new interface to the eBay auction service.

Certainly, as this chapter has discussed, designing (and constantly maintaining and upgrading) a great service is no easy task. And at the center of most Web services is a kernel of content. This can be user supplied, such as the photos on Flickr, or employee supplied, such as video from CNN. But that content has to be good or the service is junk. You wouldn't trade using an online brokerage firm if the company's stock quotes were bad. You wouldn't go to Google if its search results were terrible. And you wouldn't shop on eBay if there was nothing to buy. (Just ask Amazon Auctions.)

To a lesser extent, too, at the center of most offline services is a product, and if the product is terrible, unless there is no competition or the price extremely low, even the greatest service isn't going to save it for long. If Starbucks' coffee was undrinkable, people wouldn't continue to buy it. If an airline always lost its passengers' luggage, you wouldn't fly that airline.

In their quest to make a great service, designers should take care to ensure that the content or product around which the service is built is worthwhile lest the whole effort be for naught.