Handwriting: Tag sxsw

Saturation or Sense?

Kristina B — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 10:47:00 -0500

I just read a good summary of the general message at SXSW Interactive (which echoed my own summary):

If there was one overarching message at this year’s conference, I think it was this: Businesses or services have customers, clients and/or users. And those are people. Human beings. The way of speaking to and otherwise communicating with those people is changing. The press release is boring. People would much rather read a blog. Corporate-speak is a thing of the past. There are ways to stay professional and better engage customers. Because no one is passionate or really excited about a company that they don’t relate to. The key is passionate users. With so many options for consuming services, it is key to incite passion in customers, clients and users. They should be proud to “buy your t-shirt”—believe in your culture, message and persona. It is the experience that sells. It is the experience that differentiates.

It’s that last sentence along with a question that we heard during the Fried / Coudal keynote that’s got me thinking.

The question was basically: how many subscription-based web apps will one person sign up to before it’s just too much to think about?

Fried suggested that even if this new movement means a single person is signing up to ten $10/month (highly specific, simple, elegant) services, he himself would pay that $100 a month to get tools that are useful and compelling.

Sure, that might make sense. We consumers pay monthly for services all the time: cell phone, land-line, cable, broadband, magazine and newspaper subscriptions etc.. It does seem that the web is moving that way too – rather than buying a box from a store with bloated software in it and buying the update a year later, the software landscape is turning into a more dynamic, web-based service style business.

This change in focus is valuable for everyone involved, especially consumers. There’s no denying that. However, people only have so much passion to go around. Passion is an extreme emotion, and if people ended up passionate about every product or service that they use they’d get burnt out. Similarly, building community is great, but there are only so many communities that one can be a part of. If you’re an avid Flickr user, and let’s say you’re also on Friendster or MySpace or something like that, plus you keep a blog and read others’ blogs… when does it end?

More likely, people will never reach that saturation point. A few great services and products will rise to the surface, and the rest will die away.

On the other hand, it’s not like one day all the products that to need to exist will exist, and then we can all go home. Although there may be some limit to the number of products or services that a single person will pay for and get excited about, there are almost an infinite number of groups and subgroups of people with different needs and interests. So, we’ll probably see a trend toward highly focused applications that cater to very narrow market segments.

Handwire At The Conference

Kristina B — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:57:00 -0500

We’ve all been going to panels and parties, and though we are very close to achieving “plum tuckered” status, we’re keeping it alive for the rest of Interactive and then (gasp)... music. And when I say “it” I mean “us”. I, for one, both look forward to this time of year and dread it. Being an Austinite takes endurance sometimes.

Anyway, a bit about the panels we’ve seen. The general consensus in the office is that the Creating Passionate Users panel on Saturday was one of the best panels that any of us have seen so far. It scored not only on content but delivery. Kathy Sierra really did a bang-up job at conveying useful, intelligent perspectives in an engaging way.

The panel focused on the psychology of people’s reactions to things, and how that can be used to build community, buzz and loyalty around a product. I’m not a marketing person, and when I just reread that sentence it sounded like some kind of evil form of manipulation. There was a bit about that, I suppose, but it was delivered in such a genuine and realistic way that it didn’t seem either evil or manipulative. The reality is, for example, that people’s brains respond chemically to positive experiences and everything they are experiencing gets roped into that effect. So, for example, if you show someone a picture of an attractive, scantily clad person along with your product they will respond positively even if their logical mind identifies it as a cheap marketing trick. She really drove home the idea that, yes, there are cheap tricks you can use… but using them effectively is an art form.

Cheap tricks aside, the strongest message in this panel was to focus on your customers rather than yourself. Which, of course! Duh! Everyone knows that, right? Still, look around the web and you’ll find tons of marketing web sites that are really all about companies and products rather than their customers. It’s an easy mistake to make. This year really seems focused on creating user-centric products and marketing them in a user-centric way. Which is a good thing all around.

We sat around at lunch today talking about who the users of Bugwire really will be (people like us, no doubt), and what they might care about. There was no shortage of jokes about putting svelte, naked people on the Bugwire home page.

With the wayfinding work we’ve been doing recently, Steph was intrigued by the Online In Offline Spaces panel. The idea of tying web apps in to three dimensional spaces is exciting and Meetup, Dodgeball, and Socialite are brilliant examples of what can be done there. It’ll be interesting to see if this idea can find more traction in applications that go beyond social networks.

More on panels coming soon. If you missed the conference, some of the panels have been recorded as podcasts.

Big News At SXSWi

Kristina B — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 17:08:00 -0500

Handwire will be making an appearance at SXSWi with an exciting announcement. We’re finally going to follow the advice of numerous friends and partners and launch Bugwire as a product.

A while back, Handwire was casting about for bug tracking software that met our needs. We wanted something that didn’t include a thousand other features to crowd the interface and increase the bill. We wanted something simple, low cost and with minimal setup time/effort. We looked and looked and found… nothing quite right.

Around the same time, Rails was gaining momentum and respect in the development community. We were interested, but understandably wary of using a nascent platform on client projects. We decided to apply our curiosity about Rails to the bug tracking problem, and Bugwire was born.

In designing the UI, we treated ourselves the way we would treat a client. It was probably the easiest requirements gathering experience we’ve ever had! Quite simply, our software PMs, testers, tech leads and programmers needed a system to queue up tasks and bugs. It needed to be available to all parties in realtime. We wanted each bug or task to allow file uploads. It needed to be capable of handling a back and forth discussion about each task or bug. Finally, it needed to allow clients to use it without showing them information about all the projects in the system. Visually, we wanted a clear, uncrowded interface.

Within about a month, we had exactly what we needed. Because we’re good like that, and because Rails really is a “rapid development platform”. We’ve been using it, tweaking it and sharing it with our partners and contractors ever since. The response has been resoundingly positive. It’s funny because Bugwire was truly meant to be an internal tool and experiment in Rails, but it’s turned into something so useful for us that we might as well share it and find out if others like it as much as we do.

We still have some work to do to make it available online as a subscription service. Keep an eye on this blog, as we’ll post updates, screenshots and other information here in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can sign up for an invitation to be an early tester at www.bugwire.com. Sign up in the next 2 weeks for a special SXSW gift!