4 ms·

Ask HN: Can great usability be a differentiator/USP for a product?

• thetylerhayes 16y ago
  Absolutely this is a USP. Entrepreneurship professors love to teach the concept of "Faster, Better, and Cheaper. You can have two, but you cannot have all three." Also, all businesses are essentially one of two types: 1) do something entirely new, or 2) do something old, but innovate (i.e. do it faster/better/cheaper). Since it is nearly impossible to do anything that is actually truly new, most businesses fall into the second category. Usability would fall under the category of doing something "better," though well-executed usability should also increase total efficiency, therefore ostensibly also making the product "faster." Usability is a steadily-improving idea. A new product is invented, a competitor sees a way to make the product better/faster, another competitor then makes it even better/faster, and on and on. It's market-wide iteration. And at some point, hopefully, one of the companies will create a product with recognizably great usability. Usability is not an all-of-a-sudden event; it happens slowly, over time, and is a confluence of factors. Of course, whoever finally gets to create the product with great usability gets to also take all the credit. C'est la vie. EDIT: Specifically, this PG quote comes to mind: "In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better." (http://paulgraham.com/start.html http://paulgraham.com/start.html)
• Lewisham 16y ago
  Apple's iPod is probably the textbook example that yes, usability can be a USP. In fact, it can be the USP.
• CrazedGeek 16y ago
  Are there examples of products that had essentially same or lesser feature but were a lot more usable and therefore successful? Any Apple product released in the past decade or so, Guitar Hero and Rock Band (versus Bemani), and the Game Boy (versus the Game Gear) come to mind.
  • dcx 16y ago
    Strangely enough I've used pretty much every single product you mention. I might rebut: 1. GH/RB vs Bemani: Guitar Freaks only had 3 buttons versus 5 in Guitar Hero. Also the home versions of BM/GF/DM/DDR were always poor copies of the arcade versions - missing songs, badly-made input devices. And having western music is a big feature. 2. Game Gear: Personally I switched to Game Boy because of by crappy battery life, huge un-carryable size, bad build quality (it broke a couple of times). Wiki mentions lack of UK/US developer engagement meaning not many local games. 3. Apple: Stable, UNIX-based computers, which are also good for graphics and office use? iPad? iPods? Multi-touch, touch-sensitive scroll wheels, playlists, iTunes Store (100% legal, cheap, good selection of music, which feeds straight to the iPod)... In each case users did lose some features. But they gain some as well - I don't think any are really subsets of the alternatives. I switched to some of these specifically for better features. Personally I think usability is nice but it's a secondary differentiator after providing the best features for the largest market segment your product can target. There are some really ugly products out there which survive by virtue of just being the most useful. That said, successful products also tend to usually also be highly usable because the consumer market is the biggest segment (contrast - enterprise software). Or in cases where usability is the feature - accessibility software? GUI?
• starpilot 16y ago
  tumblr and posterous brought nothing new to blogging content-wise, but tailored the authoring process for minimalist posts. Python wasn't novel for its featureset but for its lack thereof (DRY). Ubuntu Linux included substantially less than other newbie-oriented distros (hello 7-CD Mandrake), but was considerably more integrated and usable than all of them.
• anigbrowl 16y ago
  Absolutely. Years ago I worked at a small software company which made fairly innovative end-user client software for a subscription-based online service. Good organic growth, and it was the unquestioned choice of power users. We were launching a new version and though the functionality and performance were close to target I was worried that almost all the work was under the hood; visually and interactively it was almost the same as the existing version and felt a bit dated. This was around the time Windows 95 replaced Windows 3.1 and Microsoft was pushing a neater, more refined look on Office, which I wanted to emulate. It didn't happen, because look and configurability were always in the bottom half of user wishlists and I think other members thought my UI obsession was a bit superficial. Version 4 (I think) rolled out and was greeted as a solid if unexciting upgrade. About a week later the service released their own client. It didn't have as many features or run as fast as ours on a large database - but it was slick, easy to use, and flexible, and about half the price of our software. Everyone loved it, other than my employers. I loved it, and started using it at home with a slightly guilty conscience. Their software was not as good, but it looked like the new hotness, while ours looked like bad shareware. Our sales halved within a month or six weeks, and never recovered. B2B may be even easier than B2C; if it demos well you just repeat the word productivity at regular intervals and it'll sell itself.
• jarsj 16y ago
  I don't know about differentiator but I am quickly learning that it's a must for any product.
• RealGeek 16y ago
  Zendesk entered a crowded space of help desk software. Their USP is usability. Zendesk dominated the space with in couple years.
• sp4rki 16y ago
  There is a difference between usability and simplicity. While there are generally not mutually exclusive, neither are the mutually inclusive in contrast. You can sell better usability and more simplicity, but you can't sell either by itself. It's more like an addendum than a feature itself. You don't sell simple or usable, you sell features, benefits, and economics, with simplicity and usability as an added bonus. A customer will choose the company with the feature set he/she needs/wants over the company without those features but with a better usability. Likewise, a customer will choose a company over another because of better usability and more simplicity provided that the features on both products are equal. Simplicity and usability is a bonus, not a selling point. Make sure your product is actually better than the rest before trying to sell simple. PD: If a product is over featured then it's equivalent to a simpler product with less feature and is a loser to a less featured project that has the correct features but better usability (Zendesk is a great example of this characteristic). Ipods needed to first be the best mp3 players in the market(feature wise, and design wise) and only then be the mp3 player with the best usability.
• aaronbrethorst 16y ago
  Yesterday, I spent a half hour fighting with Kayak's UI in order to find a one-way flight from DC to Seattle, and never found what I was looking for. I decided to give Hipmunk a try and found exactly what I needed in under a minute. The next time I need to buy a plane ticket, Hipmunk will be the first place I go. So, yes.
• adrianhoward 16y ago
  I'd say yes - with B2B too although the sales pitch is different. You're usually dealing with somebody a couple of levels removed from the person using the product, and the usability benefits need to be emphasised more clearly - since they generally don't encounter the consequences of a bad user experience themselves. A usable system is generally a more efficient system. More efficient systems save you money. Cut a couple of seconds of each interaction a telephone operator makes on the support lines of a major international and you've saved them a hundred grand every year. There are examples out there like IBMs Intranet revamp http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200209/ij_09_25_02a.html http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200209/ij_09_25_02a.... or the Australian Defence Organisation e-learning setup http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9030669/Mission_Education?taxonomyId=18&pageNumber=1 http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9030669/Mission_Educa.... You might also find "Cost-justifying usability" http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kDVgsGgkF4cC&dq=roi+usability+book http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kDVgsGgkF4cC&dq=roi+u... a interesting read. (Also - as others have commented fewer features / simplicity and usability are somewhat orthogonal issues. You can have a terrible experience with a small/simple interface. You can have a great experience with a large/complex interface. Depends on the user, the task and the goals.)
• jjdeleon 16y ago
  If you can present it in a meaningful way like "So easy you'll never need to read a manual", i think is a differentiator