VentureBlog: Brand Follows User Experience
What year is this again?
We've stayed away (well, mostly) from rants on VentureBlog. But after having a very similar (bad) experience with two web services, I just can't help myself.
I've been looking to sync Outlook with public services of various types... we live in a time of web services, right? It felt like time to have my address book sync with my cell phone. I wanted to be able to look at my Microsoft Exchange calendar via a public web calendar service, similar to how most webmail services these days allow me to log into my private POP/IMAP mailbox. I want to be as effective outside the office and protected LAN as I am in.
But after installing various bits of software, creating user accounts, setting and unsetting numerous options and syncing for hours, all I've managed to do is erase important parts of my address book and calendar. And while I wasn't a CS major, I'm probably what you would consider a sophisticated user (and yes, I did have backups).
It's 2004 and time for the lessons of the last 10 years to be part of a required licensing exam for website producers: it's all about the user experience. And a negative user experience can often be much worse than no user experience at all. Much like voice recognition software, which is useless until it's practically perfect, there are some technologies that just need to stay in the labs until they're bulletproof. And I'd like to nominate technologies that have the potential to erase large parts of my most important data for that category.
The first wave of the web -- starting with sites like my own HotWired, O'Reilly's GNN and Infoseek -- was a short period of exploring the new medium of web publishing and giving the tool builders like
Netscape something to point at. The second wave was the Cambrian explosion with everything from Amazon to Yahoo springing to life. And of course, also everything from Boo.com to Webvan. No market was too small for someone to try to bring online.
The third wave was (is) about the heartiest companies which survived and built scalable businesses out of the wreckage of the bubble. And if there is one unique theme about almost every one of them, it's that they figured out the user experience thing. I'm talking about Yahoo, which first defined page serving time as an important metric; Amazon, which relentlessly sought out the mass market and brought trust and reliability to e-commerce; and of course, Google which refined search to its purest form at a time when website design had become a game of squeeze the most ads on the page as possible.
Hardware and software have become commodities, thanks to Moore's law and the prevalence of programmers around the world. A positive user experience is the only method of differentiation these days. In the early days of the web, I mistakenly believed that brand drove user experience which, in hindsight, was an old media way of thinking. These days, brand (and everything else) follows user experience.
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