Developing, How to - Tuesday, February 19, 2008 9:50 - 1 Comment

The Top 6 MicroISV Design Mistakes

Jakob Nielsen is someone you need to track. Jacob for more years than I can count has been a leading authority on Useability - the arcane but important study of why some apps are easy to use, and some are not.
Today on his blog, Jakob lists his “Top 10 Application Design Mistakes” and if you write code for a living you had better read this post, print it, read it in the bathroom the next two weeks, reprint it and glue it to the wall you look at when your designing because it’s that good.
Now these are really good mistakes to avoid in general, but they’re not the errors that microISVs sometimes make that doom their product. The errors Jakob talks about can be fixed in a few hours or days; the following errors are much, much worse.

Top 6 Fatal Application Design Mistakes MicroISV Make

The Me-Too Product. You decide it’s time to stop slaving for other people and launch your own product. What product will it be? A CMS or online community of course! Why? There’s a lot of them and you might have worked on or with one at your day job. Why not? Because there’s no reason for customers to buy your product versus any other product - no differentiation, no solving a specific market’s problems. Now sometimes you can beat the competition solely on the basis of how well you execute - but that’s the whole of your execution that the customer sees. Marketing, Advertising, PR, Tech Support and product being the smallest part of the whole package.

The Play it Safe Product. A variation of the above. You decide to create a new app, look at the similar apps, and make your app look and feel like those apps, with the same features so you compare well in a “speeds and feeds” comparison chart. Playing it safe isn’t safe for microISVs. Your product needs to be remarkable to generate interest because you can’t afford traditional advertising as a way of bludgeoning your way into people’s heads.
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