Nielsen says, "Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous..."

While researching usability for social networking sites on useit, this Alertbox article from late 2007 caught my eye. Snippet below:

Summary:
AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they're worth. They also divert design resources and prove (once again) that what's hyped is rarely what's most profitable.

... dangerous for your profits, that is. If you focus on over-hyped technology developments, you risk diverting resources from the high-ROI design issues that really matter to your users — and to your profits.

Unlike some older technologies (notably, Flash and PDF), Web 2.0 ideas are not inherently bad for users. They can be highly effective; we sometimes see examples of usability-enhancing Web 2.0 designs in our studies. But it's more common to find Web 2.0 ideas that either hurt users or simply don't matter to users' core needs. While the latter case might seem innocent, irrelevant website "enhancements" diminish profits because they indicate a failure to focus on those simpler design issues that actually increase sales and leads.

Personas = empathic design

The idea of creating a persona to stand-in for the user was the inspiration of Alan Cooper. He calls them "the elastic user" and Tamara Adlin is a proponent of defining a persona to represent the target customer. As she says in an interview in Online Marketing Heroes, "when you're designing a customer experience online, finding out what makes them happy is much more helpful." Both Cooper and Adlin are fans of goal-driven design, a process of designing for "Rachel" and not for "Bob," the less important target customer. Sound complicated? Not really. Christina Small did an effective job of redesigning a poorly blue-printed website (renamed Connect.com) using a handful of well-researched personas.

Cell phones are not just fashion

Cell phones are not (just) fashion by Mark Hurst of goodexperience.com

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From the NYT, how cell phone companies are trying harder to connect with customers:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/business/29cell.html?pagewanted=all

It's good news, and not entirely a surprise. Apple's especially user-friendly iPhone is doing so well that competitors are finally being forced to listen to their customers. Sure, these companies have employed diligent user experience teams for years. But often it takes hard sales numbers to get management to start really listening up.

The story also mentions the Motorola Razr, a phone that sold very well for awhile, then dropped out of favor. It's pretty obvious why:

the Razr was a fashion statement, not a usable device. (Motorola phones have historically had poor interface design.) Fashion is a difficult, volatile business to be in. In contrast, a great user experience is a competitive advantage, and in the tech industry that means creating tools that people can delight in using, not just flashing like a piece of jewelry.

If I was advising Motorola or Nokia, I'd be wary of too much research into the emotional depths of customers - what mood a color puts them in, that sort of thing - and make sure that there's a focus on delivering on customers' unmet needs. Can you make a call?

Can you turn off the ringer easily (without it making noise)? Can you take a picture easily? Pretty obvious stuff, and most cell phones aren't very good at it.

Yes, it's also important to focus on physical design - shape, color, etc. - that's part of the iPhone's appeal, after all. But I wouldn't focus exclusively on this - otherwise you're just in the fashion business.

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