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What the People of Wal-Mart actually want
- cardamomo 14y agoI feel like paving the cowpaths is all well and good, but there must be some room for innovation as well. Let's take Dropbox, for example. Sure, it stands out as the de facto file synchronization and cloud storage service in use today, but had the founders of Dropbox set out to merely improve on users' habits rather than reinvent them, their service would probably look like a fancy way to juggle the multitude of different versions of documents we used to have sitting around our harddrives and fileservers. At times, usability improvements demand breaking with old paradigms.
- mijustin 14y agoIn many ways, the Dropbox experience matches the user's current habits: it's a folder, on your computer, that you can drag files into. There were other habits that people had as well: they were using external hard drives to schlep files from work to home. They were emailing themselves files. They were sharing large files on CDs. What Dropbox did was take the pain out of all those things. Instead of burning a large file to CD, you just drag it to your "Public" folder. I think the post has two main points: - you can't always trust what customers say, you have to examine what they actually do. - just because something seems "better" doesn't mean it's what the customer wants. Technically, we could say Microsoft's SkyDrive is "better" because it offers more free storage than Dropbox. But there's something about Dropbox that users prefer.