At AIMS , Jon Lax presented an interesting view of Web 2.0 as standards and modularity. Jon did a great job explaining Web 2.0 to new comers. The presentation was a continuation of the conversation about innovation and design that started with Jess , Gene , Scott and others this weekend at CanUX.
Innovation, User Experience and Web 2.0
Jon Lax, Teehan+Lax
http://www.teehanlax.com/aims/
Podcast now available.
A Quick Story
- Brought in on a series of merger activities
- Digital communications are a great way for companies to communicate with employees, and shareholders
- Rare to get C-level buy in on creative
- The stock price was wrong when it was presented to the CEO, the CEO doesn’t understand the Web, the site isn’t right
- The designer would press refresh, get an up-to-date stock quote, and get it inserted into the presentation for the CEO
- The CEO is thinking about
How do you make this important to CEOs? to the Business?
- The answer traditionally has been ROI
- Businesses make non-ROI decisions everyday.
- ROI doesn’t matter.
- What decisions get made everyday that don’t concern ROI?
- Example, Blackberry, no ROI to the business -> the user experience is the value of the device
Left with problem, What if…
- For a year that a CEO doesn’t use stock price to evaluate their performance
- Would their comments be different?
Why do some companies succeed at delivering great user experience while others struggle?
- Thinking about their users
- Larry Page’s quote about users, not making sense to shareholders
The most demanding customer
- Apple’s persona of their typical customer. The person they need to satisfy is called “Steve”
- When your CEO is the most demanding customer of their own product. It shows!
- Built to Last, Good to Great -> Books (* Check Amazon *)
Christensen -> Innovator’s Dilemma, Innovator’s Solution, Seeing What’s Next
- There is a limitation on how much performance that a customer can absorb
- Example, Word 12 keeps adding features but you can only use so many
- Moving forward, we keep going after higher value customers,
- Selling your product for more $$$ to a better customer
Technology Architectures
- To get the performance that you need companies chose to create massively integrated solutions
- First mover, beating competitors with features and functionality
- Modular architectures evolve over time
- Beat competitors with speed, responsiveness and customization
Examples: Travel Industry
- First Generation companies
- Expedia
- Travelocity
- Orbitz
- Second Generation
- Kayak.com
- PinPoint Travel
- Yahoo! Farechaser
- The way you kept people was through loyalty
- Very little price differentiation
- Services has commoditized very quickly
Kayak.com
- Slick interface, screen scrapers
- Just have to plug the pieces together using industry standards
- AOL has re-skinned the Kayak.com application (PimpMyTravel)
Google Maps
- Google looked at this as a method for modularizing the user experience
- Using AJAX to redefine the experience
- Released an API -> mashed up with Craigslist
Web 2.0
- One developer, 30 hours is about to disrupt MLS
- Google Maps and Yahoo!Traffic
- Chicago Crime maps
Difference Web 1.0 and Web 2.0
- Web 1.0 was primarily a discussion around technology (just getting things working)
- Web 2.0 is about modular systems being put together
- Being fast and responsive IS EVERYTHING
- Flickr built on MySQL and PHP running on MySQL (LAMP platform)
- Able to build smaller teams and faster
- Technology Tax : VCs assumed that a percentage funds raised went to Sun, MS or Oracle
The Trends
- The Web as a platform
- Infrastructure has been set
- Remixable or Recombinant Web
- Power continues to shift from companies to users
- Web as software or service
Project Management and Development Methodologies are Changing
- Releasing early and often
- Advertising has moved away from the massive integrated marketing compaines towards boutiques
- Check with Katerina and Stewart about revenue from Flickr
- eBay buying Skype – bringing buyers and sellers together
- eBay traffic that comes from Andale (Power Seller application)
- Web 2.0 is really about being modular – this includes the User Interface
- AJAX disrupts online advertising – click page, click page, goes away
- GoogleMaps has innovated around how local search
- How can I put myself in that experience? How do I deliver value?
- Does the technology you deliver the user experience matter?
- You probably want to be using technology that is modular or swappable
- Many Pieces Loosely Joined
- Move towards Agile development in larger companies
- How do we run our business in a modular way?
- It’s tough for big companies to do Agile, they want predictive, which Agile is not
- Layer of business people is not a great model for Agile