I am an interface and user experience designer.
If you’re looking to start up some kind of product or service and you want to, you know, make money from it, possibly one of the best moves you could make is to reduce friction – make the uptake of your thing really, really easy.
Well, sure. But how? Something I’ve noticed with a certain class of startup or company – the ones that helped to define an emerging market segment or have become the de-facto standard to beat – is that they’ve sliced out the core concept that was, previously, the defining feature of that segment.
Let’s talk turkey:
Posterous: just skipped the entire “sign up for our service” part. Start using the service and you ARE signed up. They took out the idea of jumping through that signup hoop to get to the meat of the service.
Skype: took out the weird VoIP hardware and complicated setup parts of internet telephony and left just the part that people wanted – the ‘talking to other people’ part.
Basecamp: the ‘huge co.’ model of project management – Gantt charts ahoy – got turfed, leaving only the lightweight, fast and usable parts that thousands of small teams actually needed. 37signals was really one of the first companies to reach out to less-than-huge enterprises in this space, and gained traction specifically because people don’t need or want the same tools that a Fortune500 does.
Amazon: removed the entire idea of ‘hardware’ from the hosting/computing market. Big iron became imaginary iron. By removing the need to care about physical assets, Amazon captured a huge market that was obviously ripe for the picking.
Apple: dumped the prevailing ‘smartphone’ features of the time – hardware keyboard, terrible browsers (remember WAP?) and a corporate mindset. They left behind the smart, simple features everybody actually wanted day-to-day.
These are just a handful of samples, but they stand out as opportunities explored: what could have been a me-too idea turned into something more interesting by cutting out the guts and seeing what was left. Rethinking that core concept provided a tangible, bankable benefit.
@Togsy Ha – that’s amazing but clearly not right. I’ll look into it.