Web Strategy Micksup

Dave Tilefile

Originally uploaded by bigmick

Offering hundreds of options in a web application is easy. Picking the right defaults is tougher.

I went to a corporatey event in the tech space last week when Ernst and Young held their first ‘EAST - EArly Stage Tech’ event. Dave Bollinger from Tilefile and Richard Watson from What’s Next spoke about innovation and how it often springs from nurtured accidents.

I totally see how people and applications evolve in small and big ways through the random things that happen to them. Hire a new person, someone drops by the site, the developer tries a new approach. I find that ebb and flow the easy part of building web applications. It comes more naturally to me in how I think and work.

One way to get lots of creative playing is by offering plenty of options. Let the users decide how they lay out the page, how they sort, how it works. Lots of buttons, drop boxes, navs and clicks.

By far the harder part is picking the defaults. The one single way you are going to present your web application to new users coming in. It’s crucial. They aren’t going to give you the benefit of the doubt and they aren’t going to find all the options and customise it. They are going to try and find something good about you in a few minutes and if they don’t they’re out of here.

Selecting the defaults is a marketing question first and then a usability question second. And it’s a great marketing question because you have to pick one target customer over all others to perfectly cater for. It’s your positioning meted out in the real world, not on some chart or PowerPoint slide.

You can decide just to leave it broad and appeal to everyone, which is in fact what most people do. The end result is a weaker experience for everyone. This is the whole ‘you can’t please all the people all of the time’.

(There is a caveat to this which is that if you are trying only to do a very simple thing (like Google Search, or Twitter) then you can do a broad appeal approach but it generally takes a lot longer to fester into growth.)

Picking one target user to really nail is tough. Do you know the right one? Is there enough of them to build a product around? Do we know them well enough? That’s why people hedge their bets. But startups can’t do this. They have to go through the real research (which I know is tough) to find all these answers.

Here is a my motto;

“If you’re not pissing off a lot of people who could use your product to make the one target group happier, then you’re not focused enough.”

How do you go against that measure?

Yes, you can grow to please other segments after you nail the first one, but you’ve always got to keep in mind that a step to the middle is a step away from your target. It takes double the resources to do a good job at double the target.

How do you pick the right target and create the right defaults for them? Welcome to the job of building great web applications.

:-)

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