Deliberate Ambiguity

Powerlabs is indeed coming soon

Last week, Powerset made a simple change to its homepage by adding a sign up for Powerlabs.  The world seems to be watching, because there's already a blog post about Powerlabs and we have over a thousand users signed up.  WOW!

In Powerlabs, you'll not only be able to see ideas that Powerset has about next generation search, but you'll be able to join in the discussion and contribute your own ideas.  Though Powerset is still at the early stages of our product development, we want to show the community what we're thinking.  A product that's conceived, created, and refined behind closed doors will never meet the expectations of the market when it comes out. Instead, testing lots of ideas (good and bad) with lots of users and soliciting ideas from the community will yield a mind-blowing user experience.

Sounds interesting?  Leave a comment and/or sign up at Powerset.com!

tags technorati : powerlabs powerset product design user experience

A great phrase

"Strenuous frivolity" is defined as an activity that is mentally complicated but doesn't achieve any useful end.  Chess could be considered strenuous frivolity.  (Thanks to Manny Rainer)

Copyability in making feature decisions

A brief conversation between me and a coworker the other day:

Coworker: "That's something that Company X doesn't do.  We can differentiate with that."
MNJ: "But it's something that they could easily do."
Coworker: "But they don't do it."

When looking at points of differentiation between you and your competitors, there are two important classes of copyability: easy and difficult.  If your underlying structures are the same, it's usually easy for the competition to copy something.  But, if the feature requires either technical or conceptual changes to the product, then it's not nearly as interesting (from a competitive perspective).  For example, I'm not impressed with search companies who simply change the search interface without altering the underlying data.  If an interface happened to take off, it would be simple for Google to copy it.  On the other hand, if a company alters the data within the index, a major search player could take months or even years to replicate the feature.

In the end though, competition is useful when analyzing external reaction to your product, but user needs should drive your features.  The copyability of the feature shouldn't trump what your customers want.