How Twitter learned me to love the user

Focus on the User Experience

I have finally scheduled what sessions to attend to on JavaOne, there are a lot of different areas I find interesting. One session I am really looking forward to is the one with Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith from Mozilla (and fellow founders of Ajaxian.com) where they focus on how we can bring better User Experience using existing technologies

Each year developers gain access to ever-more-impressive technologies for rendering advanced user interfaces and generally doing more cool stuff. But what’s the secret to leveraging these technologies to create applications that users truly love? Join noted Ajax and desktop gurus Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer in this session as they discuss how to create fantastic user experiences in software.

This is how it should be, user experience should drive the technology and not the other way around, technology is only a set of tools we use in order to solve the challenges we have in order to bring the user the experience he expects and deserves. In the end, the user experience will pay your bills, as happy users will come back, and popular services earn money enough to pay salaries to people like you and me.

Twitter redifined

How do Twitter fit in all this? Twitter have had (sometimes deserved) a lot of criticism for different things such as:

• Architecture (Fail Whale anyone?)
• Too few features
• Artificial communication (140 characters limit)
• No business model
• Desperately seeking a buyer

Despite these “arguments” Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone says “Twitter is not for sale”. Why are they not selling? Do they want to push the price-tag? I do not think so. I think that Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone love their product and the philosophy they have chosen. They do not want to sell, they want to own their product, which they probably have strong emotional connections to. I think they keeping the product away from big companies such as Google, FaceBook and Microsoft is good news for people like me who have learned to like the service they provide.

After the Oprah Winfrey appearence Twitter have gone from early-adopters via bloggers to mainstream users. Twitter is a threat to Google on real-time search, Twitter is a threat on status updates to closed alternatives such as Facebook, Twitter is a platform for developers to build other services upon, Twitter fills a big need. But Twitter is not for sale. If the people who see only negatives when they watch Twitter stop thinking about who will buy them, they will probably see a product that offers exactly what their users are asking. I would therefore like to redifine Twitter:

• The architecture is good enough
• The number of features are perfect
• The mass communication channel Twitter is offering fills a need
• Twitter will earn a lot of money
• Twitter do not need Google, they will be a giant player on their own

Twitter helps us define Customer Experience

What conclusions could be drawn from Twitter then? First in order to build a good product, focus must be on the offer you have to the customer. The offer must fill some kind of need and have a quality good enough to make the user come back. It seems that owners having strong emotional investments in their product also adds to the customer product experience. In the end a product will need to make enough money in order to stay alive, I may be a bit naive, but I think that when you manage to grow a big number of users to your product, you will be able to monetize it. In the beginning Google thought that their business model was to sell the technology behind their search engine, and now they are one of the worlds largest ad-companies (if not the biggest), and the money they are earning from selling search technology is hardly enough to buy the toys for their dining rooms.

I think that all of us who work with consumer products have a lot to learn from Twitter. So what is actually the purpose of this blog post? Well I think that we need to learn that if we love our product, love our users we will build a good service. If we are lucky enough to fill a big need we may get the chance to earn a lot of money and get the chance to see the product evolve. Invest emotionally in your product and your users and stick to your idea and philosophy. If you do that you can focus on who to buy instead of who are buying you.

If you are interested in User Experience you should follow me on Twiter and make sure that you subscribe to my RSS.

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