Choosing Smarter

Why what was OK yesterday isn't OK today

Craig Fitzpatrick just put up a great blog post about how our expectations of technology products have evolved over time, following a series of stages that's in many ways similar (or at least analogous) to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Maslow's hierarchy tries to explain the behaviour of individuals when confronted with various degrees of deprivation. For technology products however, Craig's model attempts to explain how our behaviour as a society changes when we're presented with various degrees of abundance (in this context, "abundance" means functionality and/or usability that's better than the previous generation of products).

I would suggest one refinement to this model, which is that society's expectations are reset every time a radically new technology is introduced, then move up the pyramid as that technology matures. I suspect Craig was thinking about Web apps when he developed this model, and was making the point that our collective expectations of Web apps are now significantly higher than they were even a year ago (i.e., we're pretty high in the pyramid now and moving up fast).

This is a really important point, and one that I've been living for the past year or so. As a technology consumer, I finally dumped Yahoo! Calendar because they weren't keeping pace with Google Calendar, and bought an iPhone. When I started using both of these technologies, I could literally feel my expectations jump up significantly. Last week, a friend showed me how wonderful the Web browsing experience was on his Nokia N95, and seeing him using arrow keys to move around a page was enough to make me want to hurl -even though that was just fine to me a month ago. And don't even show me Yahoo calendar now... how did I ever use that thing?

When started developing the first version of ChoiceBot (which can still be seen on www.choicebot.com for the next 2 weeks or so), it was at the second-highest level in Craig's pyramid. By the time we actually released it, it was at the second-lowest level because everything had gone AJAX-y and broadband in the intervening time, and people's expectations had jumped. So, for the last 8 months, we've done nothing but bring up to the second-highes level, and even possibly the highest level of people's current expectations. And wow, it's a lot of work.

The secret's out: We are our own salespeople

A huge study by Universal-McCaan was released about a week ago, but just seems to be hitting the blogosphere now for some reason. In a nutshell, there are bazzillions of us online now, and a significant portion of us are creating (as opposed to just consuming) content. The details are captured in this presentation:

Universal Mccanns When Did We Start Trusting Strangers

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: digital web2.0)

There's been a fair amount of ooing and aaing about the the staggering numbers of content creators (bloggers, photo uploaders, Twitterers, etc.), but to anyone who makes a living on the Interwebs, these numbers really aren't that surprising. I think the Universal-McCaan study is having an impact primarily because it's a credible source delivering the news to those who aren't in the ecosystem yet, and who may still be thinking that it's just for kids, geeks, just a fad, etc.

The net effect ('Net effet?) is that product and service providers of all sizes are slowly losing control over what's being said about their offerings. People are much more interested in what other people have to say about them than what brands have to say about themselves. Like I said, not really news to the "active Internet users" that constituted the 17,000-member study sample, but probably big news to lots of other people.

Some noteworthy items from a ChoiceBot perspective:
-Slide 12: 28% of bloggers write about "Opinions on products and brands", 14% use widgets.
-Slide 17: "Active" Internet users create some kind of product-related message or content 25 to 44 times per month (!!!)
-Slide 38: Product and service providers have to be transparent now. To me, this says that product flaws and weaknesses are harder to gloss over now with big ad spending.