Product Design
Lessons from Thomas Vander Wal: Reputation and Social Comfort
Earlier this month, we hosted a workshop here at Viget led by Thomas Vander Wal centered on Social Design in the Enterprise. I think it went great, and thanks to those who attended as well as to Thomas. A few of us went bowling afterward, and for those who didn't: you missed out.
Thomas led us through a series of challenges and practices that try to help the necessary challenge of pushing the needle in an enterprise environment -- while the consumer web may be satisfied with a 1-9-90 model and widespread participation inequality, the enterprise web requires a much higher level of participation. Thomas was a tour de force when it came to knowledge-dropping; I don't think I'm unlike other workshop attendees when I say that I spent the weekend sparking new ideas as some of the concepts Thomas talked about sunk in.
The thing is, while some of these concepts are crucial to enterprise products, most of the concepts are still very relevant to the consumer space as well. I just want to take a second and look at two things that I found interesting during and after the workshop.
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Waxing Speculative about Amazon’s Business Model
From Jeremy Keith's notes on Jared Spool's AEA Boston talk:
You can buy an iPod nano on Apple, Best Buy, etc. for about $149. Amazon sells it for $134. That’s probably cost price. It turns out that Amazon can sell almost everything at cost price and still make a product because of volume. It’s all down to the Negative Operating Cycle. Amazon turns over its inventory every 20 days whereas Best Buy takes 74 days. Standard retail term payments take 45 days. So Best Buy is in debt between day 45 and day 74. Amazon, on the other hand, are sitting on cash between day 20 and day 45. In that time, they can invest that money. That’s where their profit comes from.
Holy smokes. Maybe I'm dense or out of the loop on these things, but while I figured there was a volume advantage to Amazon, I didn't realize that this cycle-based plan was the key to their profits.
Barn and I were talking about this a little over IM today, and this gives a lot of fun fuel with which to speculate about all things Amazon...
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The Shackles of Simplicity
Simplicity has been at the core of the web's philosophy of design for the last five years. Whether it's a major part of the visual approach, with large amounts of negative space, simple color palettes, and a focus on strong typography; the interface approach, with fewer things on a given page; or the product approach, with products that do "one thing well"; nearly everyone has carried the banner of simplicity at one point or another.
But while this approach has indeed helped us make products on the web that can appeal to a mass audience, it is starting to show its limitations. After a few months (weeks?) of using a simplicity-centric product like Basecamp, you start to run up against its limitations: it may facilitate the way that the creators work best, but you're not quite like the creators. Maybe you've outgrown the simple feature set and need more for your modestly-growing needs. Maybe you no longer have a few months' worth of content in the system, but now have years of content, and managing it all has become a bear. Simplicity is beginning to fail.
Part of the problem is that simplicity is the solution to a problem poorly-identified. Life is complex, and tools to conquer life's complexity need to instead embrace it, rather than ignore it.
Sketching in the Kickoff Meeting
I recently had to deal with a frustrating (but relatively common) problem: A client had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted, but that idea wasn’t clearly communicated in the RFP. We went through a few iterations of wireframes, and finally found a design that felt comfortable to everyone. We plan our engagements with just this approach in mind. However, I couldn’t help but wonder if we could have gotten to that point sooner if we’d been able to take the picture the client already had in their head and use it as our starting point.
An Open Letter to Third-Party Twitter App Founders
Dear Aspiring Twitter Speculators,
Congratulations on your new idea. You’ve come up with, and perhaps already built, a product that is genuinely useful to almost every Twitter user, filling one of the many feature canyons left open by the Twitter product team. Perhaps you’ve already gathered a respectable following on the interwebs, with a few thousand people using your service on a regular basis. All that, and it only took you a couple weeks to build on the side.
Now you’re waiting for the big moment to happen: the call from Ev or Biz or whomever. You’re sure they’re going to want to purchase your product for loads more money than it took you to build it. It fills a clear gap, after all, and there are already people using it. They bought Summize, right?
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