Vinny Lingham's Blog

Check out my TechCrunch elevator pitch for SynthaSite – please cast your vote (green up arrow ) – all votes are very much appreciated!

I’ll be speaking on the Omniture sponsored panel today, at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. My focus on the panel will be to discuss Return on Effort. If you’re at SES today, look me up (you can use the contact form to mail me!).

SynthaSite was just featured in a small business article by the Wall Street Journal, entitled How to Create a Successful Web Site
For Nothing (or Almost Nothing)

As any CEO, I’m very proud when we get coverage like this, in a major print publication – so I just had to share it!

Chris Anderson is currently writing his new book, called Free, and in it he describes that in a competitive market, price tends towards marginal cost and therefore the price of most software (I think an exception will definitely be in the enterprise space), will tend towards being free. Basically, Economics 101, with a twist for our industry.

Once of the main reasons to date that free software has not become mainstream amongst average computer users is that the free stuff is generally written by open source techies, and no one really focuses on design and usability. So generally, free = open source = unusable by the common man.

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote a great post today in his blog about free software usability – and this one of the best pieces on the topic that I’ve seen written to date. He describes 15 points as to why free software has poor usability, and how to fix it.

Now that you’ve done that (or not, you don’t have to, but I hope I make sense!), I’d like to briefly speak to the headings of the 15 points he mentioned, and discuss how we (SynthaSite) as a company are trying to push the envelope with high quality free software, and pioneer a new way to build businesses and income around free software with alternative revenue streams, rather than charging the end user. We hope to inspire other software companies to be creative in the way, that they also try to build out their business models.

Certainly the thoughts of Chris Anderson follows what leaders on the web have been doing for many years, but usability is going to take the front seat, if you want to be successful in this space.

I’m going to make some points against each of Matthew’s – probably best read after reading his post. Remember though, SynthaSite, although free, is a commercial piece of software, so we do have a different approach to it than traditional free and open source products. Now, I’m not going to do what most bloggers do, and reiterate his fantastic piece of work by cut and pasting – so I highly advise you to read it first before continuing – it’s the best 5 minutes of your life that you will spend on this topic.

Matt’s problems with developing free software and how SynthaSite deals with it:

Weak incentives for usability – The more usable a product, the quicker it goes viral. In the current paradigm of large user bases, usability is key if you want to keep users coming back and spreading the word about your web application.

Few good designers – So true. Typically, open source & free software doesn’t get much attention on the design side, after all, it’s free – right? Wrong. Interface design is one of the most important areas of the software development phase and if done incorrectly, will certainly bamboozle most users (who probably won’t try your product again)

Design suggestions often aren’t invited or welcomed – Matt’s point says it all.

Usability is hard to measure – Not at all, we utilize a number of methods, including metric which are unique to each business. Figure out what goals you want your users to achieve, and test how changes to your interface affect those outcomes. If you’re trying to encourage users to build a blog, then see what percentage of users do that, before and after you make changes. It’s not rocket science.

Coding before design – Most startups can’t afford a user interface specialist – understandably, and we didn’t have one when started, but since getting funding, changed that quickly by hiring UI people – design first, then code.

Too many cooks – Like anything in life, too many opinions won’t help. Someone needs to take charge. We have a dedicated UX team that deals with usability issues, and within that team, the roles are clearly defined.

Chasing tail-lights – what works for Apple won’t necessarily work for you. Understanding YOUR users, and design accordingly.

Scratching their own itch –

remember this if nothing else

– 9/10 times, you are probably NOT the target customer and your needs are definitely not representative of the masses, especially if you’re an engineer building a consumer app

Leaving little things broken – this is a difficult one that all software companies will face. How do you deal with the small stuff and the big stuff at the same time. We try our best and over time, we get better at it. Things are never going to slow down, deal with the small stuff on an ongoing basis.

Placating people with options – Here is a nugget: “Less is more, if more is hidden”. Hide complex functionality – power users will find it, beginners won’t need to!

Fifteen pixels of fame – This is where good UI people come in. They want what’s best for the user, not the engineer and his or her ego. Incidentally, I think this point is more prominent in open source community projects where people feel the need to stand out in forums of thousands of people, rather than companies I have worked in of less than 20 engineers, so I don’t think I have personally experienced this problem.

Design is high-bandwidth, the Net is low-bandwidth – Some of the most amazing bits of innovation has been in a room with a white board and some markers. As great as the Internet is, it can’t take away that fresh smell of a marker, and the innovation it brings

Release early, release often, get stuck – SynthaSite has put out over a half dozen releases this year already – with more to come. We are an agile organization and our ability to get high quality work out regularly proves that, in my opinion. I seriously recommend that everyone read “Getting Real” and modify as required for your environment. It’s not absolute, but a good guide nevertheless. We work on 3 week iterations, 2 weeks of coding and 1 week of QA & debugging. My CTO, Brent Viljoen, is a whiz at gearing the company into an agile organization and aligning different departments with engineering to deliver the goods as promised. Many CTO’s still live in the past with their long term outlooks and development processes – in the current paradigm, it’s technically retarded. The key really is to incrementally improve your processes – you won’t get it 100% done from day one, but over time, it will definitely become a way of life, and create order from chaos.

Mediocrity through modularity – this point really speaks to building a product from user requirements back into engineering, and not the other way round. We are using GetSatisfaction to constantly get feedback from our users – their wish is our command…

Gated development communities – API’s are changing this field rapidly. Web apps are now integrating 3rd party apps seamless. We recently deployed a Widgetbox integration into SynthaSite, which now gives our users instant access to over 60,000 widgets – from a simple drag and drop interface. The power of API’s and partnerships are only beginning.

If you read this far, thanks – it’s one of my longer posts, and certainly more engineering and usability focused, but highly applicable to any industry that develops any type of product for consumers.