“What’s your advantage over your competitors?”

“Oh, the other systems are so complex; we’re so much more easy to use!”

Oh really?  You and every other web application out there.  Increo is guilty as charged.

Don’t get me wrong.  Usability is extremely important and very much the backbone of what we do here at Increo.  But it’s easy to get caught up in a single, unified concept of “ease of use”.  As though every human on the planet would find the same things easy or difficult to use.

It’s not a matter of degree.  If you take the “usability” that makes a web application more intuitive to me, the Increo team, and the technically inclined worldwide, and simply turn up the volume, adding more and more “usability”, the system is not going to become much better for my mom.  Similarly, the properties that make an application usable for my mom are likely to make the software feel clunky and heavyweight to me.  The division isn’t just tech-savviness; the concept of what is easy to use varies across cultures, backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking.

Certainly great advances have been made in what makes something more usable to more people more of the time.  We should listen, and design to be as universally usable as possible.

We should not, however, forget that usability is in the eye of the beholder.

Some time ago, I was honored to speak on an SVAMA panel on Entrepreneurial Marketing alongside Donna Wells, CMO of Mint.com and TJ Schimone of Slice by Karim, partybeans.com and what seems like a handful of other ventures.

In addition to the usual advice “Be exceptionally careful who you hire” and “Manage your network effects”:

• None of the panelists had spent any money on advertising in their current role save a couple thousand bucks on a HARO ad here and there.  Takeaway: A great story and some PR investment is exponentially more effective than traditional advertising.
• With today’s network effects in the Business to Consumer world (and increasingly in the Business to Business world) product is king.  A great product does not guarantee success, but it certainly helps.  A poor product is a ticket to the deadpool.
• You will not get network effects without giving something away for free.  This can be your product or your content–preferably both.