2 posts tagged “business”

    There is an age-old saying that everything that can be thought of has already been created in some form or another. The problem that differs from every single scenario is not necessarily the practice that implements the solution but the entire product that shows itself through its main and completed interface. While the importance of lean and efficient code is and always will be there, there is of much greater importance to a product that can market itself. But let's take a step back at what great products entail in their user interfaces.

    There are a load of toolkits available to create graphical user interfaces today for the web, desktop and mobile but what most of these toolkits tend to do is supplement a key component in creating a product - showcasing originality. In fact, the greatest part about creating a new product is that you have full control over how your users are going to interact with it - you can choose to make task completion inherently difficult or inexplicably easy. In all of interaction design this is quite possibly the most important - work hardest on it over any other.

    Google wasn't the first search engine, or the last for that matter, but what made its success what its ability to create relevant searching without disrupting the user's train of thought. The same logic can be applied to just about every industry in existence. Take a look at the number of different learning management systems available - (there are over a dozen different open-source "enterprise systems").

    The only successful product out of that market will be one that can differ itself in great interaction experience. Of course, creating that will not be easy and should not be taken lightly. Efficient code takes much thought into building algorithms that you can depend on. The same goes for interfaces in that successful products take much more thought, time and emotional presence into designing interfaces that you can depend on.

    The web is full of applications that have a way of giving the user the ability to perform tasks according to their needs. But sometimes those needs expand outside the realm of what's available in whatever the tool allows. A common scenario for a user is to simply not get what they want, move to a different tool that does do what the user wants it to do, or provide a feature request to the developers. But let's get to the basics of what applications are initially intended for.

    Applications, which are apart of a business model that envelops the ideologies and processes that make up information technology and the people it involves, are intended to serve. Services are created so that the audiences and primary customers are satisfied with the end-product. The primary objective of the business is to ensure that the customer is happy and is being served the content in a way that is pleasing. This of course is contingent upon the fact that the user never changes his/her mind with the product. So what happens when an audience of the business wants feature X, we'll say they want the ability to share the content with their favorite social networks. So what happens?

   Well, here are your choices for sites in which you can share your content with (among others not listed here). Quite a few sites will have links to share said content to YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Live, Slashdott, StumbleUpon. This list just keeps going. This creates a very typical and dawning problem for application developers. Given that each site will post shared content in different ways, the business chooses which sites to share with, downloads the apis and develops according to said networks.

    Not only does this create a problem for developers, it creates an even larger issue for users. My site isn't listed! Well, once sites ABC are supported the business has successfully gone outside the scope of their core business processes. The important part is the ability to create a service to manipulate, aggregate and navigate content. Networks provide a nice area of sharing content, services provide a great mashup for providing content. When services can be successfully aggregated and served as tools to users - in this example sharing content will be seemless.