Two worlds colliding: Small and nimble versus Big and efficient
- Small companies are nimble and intimate with customers.
- Big companies have cost and expertise advantages through economies of scale.
Today, these worlds are colliding and the boundaries are completely blurred.
A natural change for small companies
Small companies can now leverage shared infrastructure like Amazon Web Services or Google Apps to drive down costs and enjoy economies of scale beyond what even large companies can imagine. Small companies can use services like oDesk or 99designs to access unique talent and expertise on demand and at low cost. Small companies can compete for consumer attention in small doses through Google AdWords and learn rapidly through metrics avoiding huge, high risk media spend.
A powerful ecosystem is working to solve these problems for SME's. That elusive market has offered so much promise yet been difficult to capture and service until today's models of engagement like SAAS emerged. Expect to see rapid innovation and adoption in this space.
Small companies are naturally hungry for savings and simple solutions to non-core activities. Moving to these new solutions won't always be technically easy, but it will be culturally consistent for many organisations.
Cultural shift in big companies
Unfortunately for big companies, the changes are more cultural than technical.
Adopting new infrastructure solutions / meeting external benchmarks threatens existing organisations through giving up control or creating order-of-magnitude improvements to existing services.
Social media provides big companies with a unique opportunity to build customer intimacy beyond call center boundaries, but requires fast response and 1:1 service. Internal processes and standards need to change to perform on par with community expectations. Layered decision making through complex policies will almost always be too slow.
Finally, the agility and pace of change required will be slower than proponents expect and faster than resisters can believe. Agility and embracing change are internal cultural parameters notoriously difficult to alter.
Conclusion
Traditional boundaries and advantages between small and large companies are being eroded. Rather than small companies trying to grow up, large companies will try to reach small company standards for cost and intimacy (also see Small is the new big from Seth Godin).
The winners will be those that can iterate change and learn the fastest.
Meanwhile, consumers get increasingly intimate services at lower cost!
UI Design for Non-Designers - From Models to Hypothesis to Metrics
Agree on a model
User interface design is filled with opinion and belief - something that many IT teams struggle to resolve (but enjoy discussing at length). A/B Testing adds science to the field, but is relatively late in the process of application development.
We need a better place to start when choosing an approach to application design. After all, our initial designs will set the style and standard of our application in users minds.
For our team, these three questions usually put us on the right path:
- What is the end user trying to achieve and what is the simplest possible process to enable that?
- What models or patterns can we copy from respected or inspirational sites to achieve that process / interface?
- How can we make the experience consistent with our existing sites / applications? (If the new idea is better, how do we update them to match? If they are better, why are we doing something different now?)
The design hypothesis
All our applications go through a design review process during the Implementation phase of the Clarify, Simplify, Implement process.
First we discuss, challenge and agree on these UI models to be used. This is only be effective if the application designers have already been through these questions, asking them honestly and challenging their own design. (Don't just look around for post-build justification.)
After agreement on these core principles and appropriate changes, the design review moves into a second phase of optimisation of the current design. This is where each field needs to be defended, pixel alignment becomes important and we do everything we can to reduce complexity and increase the aesthetic appeal of the application.
Optimisation with metrics
Now we have created our hypothesis of the best possible design for our application, we need to validate and improve it through A/B Testing, customer feedback and metrics.
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