With more web products in public (and seemingly perpetual) beta, audiences and especially early adopters are being brought into the usability and design-testing process. But are they really the litmus test for what will fly given the often differing demands of the mass market..?

By Michael Nutley of

[Register and post your own comments on this article below...]

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how software companies can educate users of their products about the new functionality of the latest version.

This started when I was at the Microsoft Strategic Account Summit in Redmond last month, watching demonstrations of the company’s latest products. There are great things in there, but it started me wondering how many people would actually discover them.

I raised the question with Microsoft’s newly appointed head of advertising strategy, Yusuf Mehdi. He conceded that it was a significant problem, and said his ideal would be that the software would be designed in such a way that users would find the new functionality in the course of their everyday activities. But he also admitted the industry had a long way to go to live up to that ideal.

Then a couple of weeks ago I was in Bradford for the b.TWEEN conference. One of the keynote speakers was John Sanborn, creative director of eBay, who was talking about setting up a design basis for future brand extensions, and the need to make sure there’s no disconnect between these extensions and the totality of the brand. Talking afterwards, his main point was the way the relationship between eBay and its users has shifted.

Beyond usability focus groups - audience input to design...

He characterises this by saying “people have taken what the company has created and now they own it in a way that we don’t”, and a lot of the work his team does involves thinking about how to get customers more involved in the design process. His view is that you can’t just give people stuff and expect them to work through it.

While in the Web 2.0 world you can push stuff out before it’s finished and see what people make of it, this then puts pressure on your response mechanisms, and on your underlying architecture. His model is one of a simple overarching layer where form follows function, with more complex areas built underneath where social networks, for example, can exist.

Early adopters - usability testers of Web 2.0?

This is very much the Google view, to push a number of things out into a very public beta test, and see what people pick up on. It’s also the approach being adopted, ironically, by Microsoft for its latest releases. The problem is that the people you’re pushing the beta version out to are usually going to be early adopters at best, or existing brand evangelists at worst. In other words, you’re preaching to the converted.

This matters because the audience for Internet-related products and services is changing. Until fairly recently, it was a computer-literate bunch, people who wanted to get under the bonnet to see how things worked, and were prepared to invest a great deal of time and energy making them do so. That’s no longer the case. The new audience is people who want to use the tools provided, and who expect those tools to be as transparent as any other piece of consumer electronics.

Part of the route eBay and sites like Bebo are taking is to identify the early adopters within their user base and work with them to develop the products and services the rest of the users will want some time in the future.

One route to mass-market adoption?

The question is whether products and services associated with early adopters can make that jump, or whether they have to be productised to meet the reliability and usability demands of a mass market.

The flipside, of course, is that sometimes the audience picks up on functionality that no-one previously considered important. SMS is the perfect example of this. But the key criteria here are that SMS is robust and easy to use. If it had been complex or difficult, it would have seen the usage it has. The message is that people will use extra functionality; it just has to be easy to find and to use.

Michael Nutley is the editor of New Media Age.