Staying user focused
When you start building something for people to use, you must stay user focused. It isn’t what the entrepreneur wants, nor what they technology can do. Steve Jobs is famous for saying “a lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. However, that does not mean you shouldn’t be user focused in your approach. Key to your success will be to listen to the customer and provide them with what they need, and not necessarily what say or think they want.
Staying user focused
Looking at the world, certain trends start to show up. Continued growth in smartphone usage across the world, but there is a variety of device capabilities in developed versus developing world. Assuming that memory or disk space available to you is unlimited, will end up creating grief or annoying users. So gaining traction globally today requires consideration of the hardware demands you really need.
Data consumption levels are uniquely different as you travel around. Speed and network capacity has grown leaps and bounds in the past two decades. However, data hogs apps will have a tough time in some markets where data usage is tightly managed by users. Alternatively, creation of “lite” versions can be made, but this only creates another product to maintain. When you’ve developed and built applications with a 14.4 kbps modem, you learn that being efficient is important.
And then we have the user experience. The ease of use, managing the content, the logic of how things work are equally crucial in ensuring adoption. Growing up you learn the KISS rule, Keep It Simple Stupid. Successful applications should not require an advanced degree in rocket science to make them work. This doesn’t mean that the product can’t do amazing things or have tremendous intelligence built-in, only that what users experience should be easily understood.
Building simplicity isn’t easy. In fact, it is harder and takes greater thought than building something much more complicated. So how to keep your product stay simple, user focused and make peoples lives better?
We’re on that road now building KnoRe:Me Inc., I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
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