Don’t lock-in. Compete with free.
Yesterday, I opened three doors to the same thing — everything is free on the net — usability — you need sudden passers-by to become users –, but were a bit short in time, therefore abridged the issue a bit. Possibly a bit too much. Therefore I want to go more deep into it, now, and explore some details.
My sumption is: There are so many alternatives on the net that people tend to choose to look for alternatives instead of paying anything for any single service, including yours. (Even if there’s not yet any alternative to your service, it’s simple and cheap enough to implement a first alternative, and people indeed do that.) Therefore it might be a challenge for you to get random passers-by to use your service instead the one of any competitor. Even more, poor luck for you, people who already became users might dismiss your service for an alternative, at any point in time. The reason for this light-hearted behaviour, again, is that effectively everything on the net is free, they don’t have to pay for any alternative service they might want to join — and they are aware of that happenstance –, nor do they loose anything by leaving your service.
The alternative for you as a service provider, of course, is to enforce to lock your users in to your service. For example, you could make them invest into your service but don’t let them take away what they invested any later, e.g. their share of the social graph (i.e. their contact list). Well-known Robert Scoble got blocked from Facebook when he tried to export that share of the social graph — half because that was against Facebook’s terms of service, half because he did that by script.
There are other examples in the past that show that user lock-in worked already, for example in software and data entered by that software — which happen to be the user’s investment. It’s some kind of extortion, isn’t it? Note: Experienced users stopped accepting software that locks them in by their data. Nowadays, people simply insist on getting a software that supports data exchange properly. (Of course, inexperienced users might fail in this, but are you after to trick inexperienced users?)
However, lock-in is not the path of choice on the net. There are alternatives to that, for you as a service provider. At the latest of October 2004, the moment when Chris Anderson published his article on The Long Tail on Wired, more and more people begun to realize that there are indeed chances to make a buck from the net, even lots of bucks. The Long Tail focuses on virtually infinite shelf space you can place your goods on and sell them by the web. Amazon and Ebay are well-known examples for this.
People begun to explore the idea. In 2006 Anderson’s The Long Tail book was released, which increased the number of participants exploring the idea. Current crest is Mike Masnick’s finding you indeed can compete with the net, even if everything is free. You can even give away goods for free, if they are non-scarce. Actually, that’s really a suggest — since it helps you to increase your market share. Masnick put it together on his Techdirt post headlined The Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free. — You’ll easily figure out that an increased market share implies more people might be willing to purchase for anything your service offers, completely indepenent of how many are not: You’ll live by those who are.
Therefore, have a look onto your service from the user’s point of view — and by that I mean the individual user’s point of view, not any virtual average user’s point of view. The user is aware of that there are alternatives, and that they are free, probably even better to handle than your service. Assume, the user is web-savvy and knows of examples of high usability. (Even if they are not or do not, be sure they know other users being more web-experienced than themselves, and those will tell them.) Probably they even noticed usability improved over time and is likely to continue to improve. Therefore the moment they encounter an obstacle with your service, those yet experienced alternatives will pop into their mind. Which implicitly and unconsciously gives your service one minus point. To avoid that, put it into a single sentence: respect your visitors. Make your service be the best experience they ever had.
By that we’re finally approaching the subject of usability. Before we go into it, please let me take a little detour on blogging since that’s what I experimented with and what I learned from.
