Increasing Importance of Style and Design in Technology Companies

November 5th, 2008 seph250

What drives your company’s product development? That is, in the day-day decisions when you’re considering trade-offs and shifting priorities - what drives your analysis?

In pure technology companies and research, product development should be driven by technology. When I was an engineer developing consumer satellite modems every decision was based on technology. We only considered performance vs. cost.

More and more though, I think companies that focus only on technology are failing. Technology is still important. It doesn’t hurt if your product is faster, lighter or more accurate than your competitors. But more and more technology is not enough. In a lot of areas, technology has progressed to the point that customers receive little marginal benefit to the improved technology.

If you’re a digital camera user and you take pictures to post them on Facebook, you don’t really benefit if the camera goes from 10 mega-pixels to 12 mega-pixels. You’re only going to share your pictures at VGA resolution anyways. You also don’t care if the battery life increases from 24 hours to 28 hours because you only need the camera for a few hours at a time.

It’s when technology reaches these inflection points that companies with technology-driven culture find themselves disrupted by companies that driven by design. Apple’s iPod did not win market share because it plays music better than the competitors. It won because of its emphasis on design.

In general, good design can have the following effects:

Enable a customer to capture the value technology creates.
Makes a product emotionally desirable.
Using the product makes someone feel positive about themselves because they feel connected to something beautiful.
Makes a product easier to use, decreasing the users stress that they are doing something wrong and shortening the learning curve.

So to all the so-called technology companies out there. Think critically about how critical your technology really is. If major technology improvements produce minimal user benefits, your priorities need to shift. Design should not be driven by technology. Design should be driven by people - and people are your customers.

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Super Targeted Advertising: Tailoring Messages to an Audience’s Cognitive Style

July 16th, 2008 seph250

There is some interesting research coming out of MIT (professor Glen Urban) that I think will eventually be relevant to behavioral ad targeting. The research recognizes that different people, in different contexts have different cognitive styles.

Cognitive styles can be measured across several different dimensions. Some examples include: impulsive (makes decisions quickly) vs. deliberative (explores options in depth before making a decision), visual (prefers images) vs. verbal (prefers text and numbers), or analytic (wants all details) vs. holistic (just the bottom line).

As we are better able to determine what sort of customer is viewing an advertisement, we will not only be able to show them an ad of something they may be interested in (geographic, demographic, contextual), but we can present the advertisement in a way they are most receptive to it.

For example, if it is determined that a customer has a verbal cognitive style, they will be more interested in an advertisement listing impressive specifications of a product than they would be to a picture of the product. This will ultimately lead to higher click through rates.

Additionally, we’ll see these ad’s take users to the advertisers website in more intelligent ways. For example, take an impulsive buyer to a purchase page, and a deliberate buyer to a product details page. This will ultimately lead to higher conversion rates.

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584 Pixels

July 10th, 2008 seph250

I’ve been doing a lot of user interface design lately, and Sam Decker pointed me to a great presentation on Web 2.0 Product Management by Dan Olsen. There is a section in the slide show on UI design that is definitely worth taking a look at. One of the points that I found really useful is this:

When most people are casually internet browsing, they don’t scroll down to see what else is on the page, just below their initial field of view.

Thus, if there’s any critical content “below the fold”, it’s likely your users won’t find it. Confusion and frustration will set in, and they’ll end up on your competitors site.

Now, to get technical: according to the presentation, 92% of the population has a screen height of 768 pixels or greater, while only 38% of the population has a screen height of 772 pixels or greater. I’m not sure where the information comes from, and how recent it is, but this does serve as a pretty convincing argument to optimize your site for a 768 pixel screen height (or at least make sure it provides a great experience at this resolution).

In my Firefox 3 browser, with two toolbars shown, and multiple windows open, a 768 pixel screen height leaves about 584 pixels of web page height viewable in the browser without scrolling down. Basically - it’s not much. Fitting all critical content into this 584 pixels puts a lot of pressure on a UI designer to be as efficient as possible, but ultimately shuld pay off with more satisfied users and a higher conversion to sales rate.