11–20 of 39 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They expect things to work intuitively right out of the box 20% or so of mobile handsets are returned to the shop. Rarely are they defective but just too difficult to use correctly. (The percentage varies by handset, I can't find the article I learnt this from at the moment)
I remember that stat and I can believe it. The interfaces on those cell phones sucks :S
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might just be you. This post seems pretty clearly to be from someone who get Geoffrey A. Moore's thesis in "Crossing the Chasm" - there are a VAST number of consumers out there that are NOT techie/early adopters and don't understand things in the way that we techie/early adopters do. If you don't plan on how to include that segment, then your startup is in trouble.
Flip Video: 13 percent of the camcorder market
http://friendfeed.com/e/41230d54-d425-07c8-38a3-4bada029126b
This was my thinking 2004-2007 and was my biggest mistake. Targeting late adopters has not proven to be a successful strategy. http://friendfeed.com/e/41230d54-d425-07c8-38a3-4bada029126b
This was my thinking 2004-2007 and was my biggest mistake. Targeting late adopters has not proven to be a successful strategy. http://friendfeed.com/e/41230d54-d425-07c8-38a3-4bada029126b
I think the idea is that early adopters can evangelize your product and create its foothold, but it's the late adopters who play mass market kingmakers.
Joe average is going to have a technical person setup his computer- If that technical person, say, makes firefox the default browser, assuming it mostly works, joe average is going to use firefox. This might also be why OSX is doing so much better than previous macOS versions. Whenever a non-technical person asks me for a laptop reccomendation, I tell them to get a mac, in part because I know they might come to me for help (and I'll be damned if I start rooting around in a windows box that isn't properly backed up. Reboot, reboot, then format and reinstall, I say.)
the other side of this is that it needs to work for joe average... this is why Linux on the desktop took so long to take off (it looks like it's getting a toehold in the low-end- by 'just working' for simple tasks) even now, linux on the desktop only 'just works' if you don't need commercial software.
so yeah, you must target the early adoptors, but targeting the early adoptors alone is not enough. You must make it usable for the average person.
(which is funny, because I've put almost zero effort into the usability of my product. I don't have a support budget, so if you don't know UNIX well, eh, for now I'm not the best product for you.)
Don't fear the niche, or the early adopter. Today's weird geek toy might be tomorrow's necessity.
I once tried to imagine what one of those people was thinking and i felt a strong vacuum in the right part of mi brain. I don't know if anyone of you was ever asked himself what makes these people different. Weren't we the different ones? These people are boring, they live in their own worlds. Thats probably exactly what they think of us :D We understand nerds problems because we are nerds and these problems are our…
It's absurd to think that there are no real-world problems which have interesting solutions. To say that you can't understand what more "average" people would find useful is not an assertion of your superior intelligence, just an assertion that you're not particularly perceptive or curious.