Anthony Milner

Do you have an idea for an all singing all dancing web 3.0 web app, widget, Facebook gizmo doodad. If you do then the first step is usually to dig around and do a bit of research to determine if it’s already been done. So you do some research and cannot find anything like it. Then you excitedly draw up some wireframes, use cases, maybe a full blown spec and start to build. After a few months of hard work you stumble on a site and to your horror you find that its been done. This was the fate of the tight web crew in the comedy “Knocked Up”. They find that their genius idea for an “informational” site has already been done and dusted. This is not the stuff of movies, it does happen and when it does, do you throw in the towel and go back to the drawing board? Derek Sivers, president and programmer for CD Baby and HostBaby suggests that it’s not about the idea but rather it’s all about execution…

It’s so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas… …ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. Explanation:

Awful idea = -1
Weak idea = 1
So-so idea = 5
Good idea = 10
Great idea = 15
Brilliant idea = 20

No execution = $1
Weak Execution = $1,000
So-so execution = $10,000
Good execution = $100,000
Great execution = $1,000,000
Brilliant execution = $10,000,000

To make a business you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.

So don’t despair if you find your big idea has been done. If the execution is weak or even so-so, there is still plenty of room for good, great and brilliant.

The success of blogging is in large part due to its simplicity. Most blog software requires you to do very little in terms of setup, just add content and your thoughts are elegantly displayed in a consistent and easy to navigate format. 

Another product that has experienced great success as a result of its simplicity is Basecamp, developed by 37 Signals. As the 37 Signals mantra suggests, Basecamp is an, “Elegant, thoughtful [project management] product that just does what you need and nothing you don’t”. At work we use Basecamp to manage multiple projects and I am yet to find a team member that doesn’t use it. I’ve used complex project management software that makes you coffee and takes the dog for a walk but isn’t touched by anyone working on the project except for the Project Manager. Basecamp has distilled the most important components of project management; communication of ideas, tasks, milestones and documents and made it child’s play to use.

MS Office is probably considered one of the biggest culprits in terms of featuretitis but Office 2007 has made a massive leap with the introduction of the “Ribbon”, a dynamic strip which endeavours to present only what you need (and what you didn’t know existed). Additionally Word 2007 has introduced the Blog Post feature which means I can use Word to create, edit and post blog entries without going near the WordPress editor.

This trend can also be seen in the number of companies approaching us to build web based applications. Besides the obvious benefits of “use it anywhere”, the browser environment is understood by the end user and can be easily modified/adapted to meet the needs of respective audiences.

We’ve probably all had enough of the “What is Web 2.0?” debate but elegant and thoughtful design is certainly a part of it.

It’s not until a small team get together to build an online search tool that you get an appreciation of what Google and others have done. We recently embarked on a project to improve the search in our Enterprise Content Management System – Community Manager. Last year we introduced federated search and we wanted to build on that success and improve search relevance.

Our challenge – improve search relevance whilst adhering to access rights, incorporate a thesaurus and taxonomies, cater for best bets, stemming and spell checking without sacrificing performance. In our industry this is sometimes referred to as a “non trivial” task.

The Team – We put the band back together on this one. It consisted of a formidable team of experts in the fields of search, taxonomy, thesaurus, usability, sql and asp.net.

The Build – From start to beta it took us 6 weeks to build and implement albeit there were some lengthy requirements sessions and sleepless nights.

The Result – A dramatic improvement to search relevance. Initially there were performance impacts but with subsequent tuning we’re now seeing a fast and highly effective search.

Search is a simple concept that anyone can grasp but when you scratch the surface there are layers of complexity. I guess this explains why Google have thrown some of the brightest minds and resources at the challenge. The great thing is that we now have our very own search product and it even has a name – Community Search.

I’m reading Dan Saffer’s book “Designing for Interaction – Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices”. In the web space Interaction Design is a relatively new field. It’s a bit of an umbrella term that incorporates information architecture, user experience, graphic design, interface design and usability. In my experience with application development projects, the ones that concentrate on the interaction design on par with functionality are the most successful. It doesn’t matter if we build a kitchen sink or a simple widget that goes “ping”, it’s the interaction design that is often the difference between user take up and user rejection. The unfortunate reality is that application design is all too often driven by business priorities which usually translate to function over form and getting as much as possible done within the allocated timeframe and budget. The emphasis is on “we need it to do xyz” as opposed to “we need it to look good and be easy to use”. As practioners in this space we need to fight the good fight for interaction design because a great outcome for our client is important and its our best opportunity to market our capability and win more work.

A small team at Microsoft’s developer division in Redmond have recently developed a Silverlight app for creating mashups. Its called Popfly and lets us visually build social networked, mashed up websites i.e no programming skills. Its free and comes with 25mb of storage. The Popfly team at Microsoft call this “democratised development” – making development approachable to an entire class of people that want to “create” without necessarily having to write code. At the moment all this coolness is invitation only so stay tuned for a Popfly app.

Footnote: How do we* manage to keep coming up with such cool product names – Silverlight, Popfly, Picasa, Skype? Surely we’re due to run out of all options and permutations quite soon :-)

*as in the human race 

The guys at Creating Passionate Users love to share their concepts with really simple drawings. I’m a big fan of using illustration for effective communication, in fact two people at a whiteboard is considered to be one of the most effective forms of communication. This one made me think about applications that start out small and simple and then grow quickly into overweight monsters laden with feature set and high complexity. At some point they cross a line from being really useful to really useless. Actually useless is a bit harsh but perhaps unuseful is more accurate. Sometimes a fearless person has the courage to say, “Let’s start over, and make it even better,” but this endeavour is often blinded by commercial reality and we’re left with something which can only be improved incrementally until we take the massive leap over the “big friggin wall”.

Source: Creating Passionate Users

I’ve been participating in beta program for a web based product called Coghead. Their mission is ambitious, allow a lay person to build no-code web based business applications that can be accessed from anywhere. It uses the Laszlo framework allowing “power users” to build timesheets, CRM and issue tracking to name just a few. There’s a large application library which can be used or tailored to suit individual needs. The product has a ways to go particularly with the UX and featureset but despite this I have a huge dose of respect for a company taking on this challenge, not only is it a hugely ambitious task but I’m a firm believer that anyone should be able to create or enhance applications using simple visual interfaces with plain English instructions. Of note during this beta was a personal email and follow up phone call from the CEO of Coghead, Paul McNamara, to find out how my experience with the product was going. It’s not every day that the CEO engages with the coal face for some honest feedback. I think that’s the sign of a company with its coghead screwed on right. J

We want to implement a live support chat solution for one of our clients and started evaluating options at about 3pm today. Amazingly by 3:15pm we had evaluated, implemented and trialled an excellent solution called LivePerson. We have not made a decision yet and will have to shop around to make sure we have the right solution but I was really impressed by the fast and efficient response I received from Jenny.

We arrived at the site via Google after typing “Live Chat“. LivePerson were ranked 2^nd on Adwords and 7^th organically – a good mix. Arriving at the site we clicked onto the Chat Now icon and figured if it was actually manned we would get an instant demo and answers to all of our questions. It’s always a great sign when a company “eats its own dogfood”. Jenny responded within seconds, answered our questions without delay and offered us a trial username and password within minutes. After about 10 minutes we had downloaded the client and inserted the tag snippet on our website.

I couldn’t help but wonder if Jenny were a legion of specially designed FAQbots in a big server farm lulling us mere mortals into a world of logic driven AI customer service charm, but when she said she lived in Rannana I knew she was real (who would say that who was not?).

The support client is a desktop app. It has some smart features, for example you can view who is on a particular page and for how long plus all the usual stuff like FAQ loading, concurrent sessions, transcripts (it can also email the end user a transcript)

The big challenge with software like it is actually manning it; we’ve all been to websites that have the “we’re not here right now” message up. I’ll be interested to see how it is managed by the customer and received by its clients. Stay tuned for updates…