Much has been written about the freemium business model since Fred Wilson wrote about it over a few years ago and Chris Anderson wrote his book about Free!
Free for the bulk of your users is all fine and dandy when advertising is a legitimate business model; What happens when advertising revenue on the web diminishes in importance as it has this year? The business has to essentially rely on revenue from users of premium services only. Yikes.
I’ve often wondered why business models in the mobile application market aren’t more like the shareware client apps that were so common in years previous (and still have a niche following for some mac and windows users).
Especially for something as utility oriented as an iPhone application, a person should be able to download an application, try it out, and *if* it works for them, pay for it. The iTunes app store doesn’t work like that– It just gives you a tiny preview of the functionality of the application with some screenshots.
I’m nearly positive I’d be willing to buy more iPhone applications if I could just interact with them myself.
This spurred me to start thinking of other business models that could run on a “trial” period, when I saw this. What a great idea for both the hotel and Amazon. It would be great if they could combine the trial experience with a quick feedback forum, like FrogMetrics offers.
Trial usage + Noncustomer (or not-yet anyway) feedback. Sounds like an exciting business model awaiting to be hatched for.
Since August, I’ve been working on a project in an office on the 4th floor. I sit in front of a 30″ LCD screen working on wireframes and product roadmaps for the majority of the day. People walk by and comment on the screen “holy @#$%, that’s the biggest screen ever!” — “You are kinda like OZ controlling the world in front of that huge thing”.
Right.
The project I’m working on is the commercial spinoff of the MacArthur funded “Electronic Learning Record,” an extension of the Schools in the Digital Age project started in 2007.
Through lots of research and time poured into thinking about the user experience, design of a brand, and cycling through learning metaphors, we’ve arrived at the design of a consumer internet site called Bettr@, or http://bettr.at (yes, we used the top level domain name hack for Austria like delicious did when they first started).
The site is focused on helping anyone who is motivated to improve themselves get better at the things they are passionate about. This ranged from hobbies that people do in their spare time, to their career, and to classes that people take.
More on the project later (or in the Bettr@ blog, to be launched soon). For now, I want to tell you about a simple technique I’ve been using to help develop the site that may help some of you get Bettr@InternetStartups like it helped me (although I might argue that it works for getting Bettr@DesignPlanning.
When you’re developing a consumer internet site (especially one that you hope will become a destination site), you have to really be thoughtful about every single pixel that you have control over. Originally when we were doing these wireframes, we thought long and hard about all aspects of the experience– from all perspectives. We tried to translate research into criteria and combined with design principles to guide us into what we were building.
Recently, being in implementation mode, I’ve learned that this level of fuzziness isn’t good enough. Our current process in defining a certain wireframe goes something like this:
1- Take two tabloid sheets of paper. At the top of one, put “What does the user want on the _____ page of the site?” At the top of the other, we write “What does Bettr@ (as a commercial entity) want on the _____ page of the site?”
2. We enumerate through a list of criteria that we think matters on each list.
3. Then we start designing the site with these criteria in mind. Each new feature, no matter how small, has to either be something which contributes to either creating user value or helping the business capture value.
The list and the two sheets aren’t earth shattering– but the idea of assigning a designer to be the user advocate and assigning a product manager to be the business advocate is really effective. It formalizes the process of making tradeoffs. I suspect (and hope) that this process makes the site extremely easy and useful for users, while at the same time be able to harvest revenue (in our case from multiple streams).
This idea of role playing has been effective in software development for a long time under the name “Extreme programming.” But why not try out “Extreme designing” when you’re trying to solve a problem for a company that you’re consulting with? It’s easier to role play and stay within the role of user advocate (designer) or business advocate (product manager) than keep switching off as you go along.
Alan Cooper drops some awesome knowledge on us that tells us why we need to have empathy in designing stuff, (like Bettr@)
Most digital products today emerge from the development process like a monster emerging from a bubbling tank.
Developers, instead of planning and executing with their users in mind, end up creating technological solutions over which they ultimately have little control.
Like mad scientists, they fail because they have not imbued their creations with humanity.
What I feel strong about is that we’re going to start hitting the ground soon (literally), doing guerilla observation on prototypes and wireframes. If people get frightened by them now, we change them before they become those monsters emerging from bubbling tanks.
Although I must say this cookie monster doll is kind of adorable.
In creating Bettr@, sometimes I talk to people who aren’t exactly motivated to improve themselves. They just don’t get it. Maybe their kids need to learn new things, but they don’t have the time to with everything else going on in their busy lives.
Here’s the rub. People are living longer than ever, and are recycling careers faster than ever.
‘studies in the United States at the end of the seventies already showed that between 10 and 30 percent of the economically active population had experienced at least one career change in a 5-year period’ (Teixeria & Gomes, 2000, p. 78)
And when you do, let us know *where you go first* to find information about how to get better at that skill, or subject. Extra points for “pain” stories.
Leave a comment or better yet, find me in a hallway at school and let’s chat.
