Saturday, June 17, 2006
The Experience Gap, further shocking evidence
In the "Technology" section of this Saturday's NYT, there's an article on the rise of "true" web applications, or perhaps more appropriately, web-active desktop application replacements (wadars?). What's a wadar? It's not a web application like Orbitz or EBay. Plunk someone from 1991 down in front of Orbitz and the response would be "What the fuck is this?" But a wadar... plunk that same chrononaut down in front of Writely and they would say, "This? This is a really nice version of Word." Only after you had explained the networked collaboration, the fact that your files were being stored on some server out there in the white hot data cores of the matrix would an expression of gnostic horror would take control of their face.
Google has had the pieces for a totally networked "Office," for a while - Gmail, Google Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and Writely. Writely hasn't been rolled out yet (the beta site has it rated at "62% beta," for what that's worth), but when it goes live there will be a suite of office software that is operating system independent and totally free - because the operating system is the web and revenue stream comes from context cued search. While this is tectonically, seismically, geologically important, it is not news. This was Larry Ellison of Oracle's pitch way back in the heady 90's. Thin clients. Massive networked data centers. Multiple modes of access and delivery. To which I say, "So what?" This kind of thing has been possible since the days of Nth tiered software architecture. Browser technology has finally caught up with the idea of ubiquitous data through ubiquitous computing. The important thing is that something much more significant has caught up - user expectations of experience.
"Web as Platform" has gone mainstream. When you ask a friend if you can check your email and they hand you their phone, WasP is mainstream. When turning in your essay to your composition professor means uploading it to Writely (apparently a killer app for the service), WasP is mainstream. All of this is significant because it means the needle has moved on user expectation of experience.
If the game experience is now the default frame of reference for an immersive, high-interactivity user experience, then the wadar experience is holding down the other end of the bench. Users are arriving at websites today expecting the sites to do something. Ask them questions to help configure a car. Search for product more powerfully. Aggregate and process content based on their preferences. They are expecting the site to work in certain ways: moving data and input asynchronously. Remembering what users want and do and reacting. Life is an active, metabolic state. Web sites do not "deliver" anything. Websites need to help users work, help them live. It is a concept which goes as far beyond providing static product information as a word processor supersedes a typewriter. Both work in words, but beyond the layout of the keyboard there is simply no comparison.
Sites that simply provide a "virtual brochure" experience are essentially Colonial Willamsburg for the late 1990's. Sites that provide rich media interfaces for galleries of photos and product information are more of the same, circa 2004. The future of user experience online looks like a chimeric hybrid between an Excel spreadsheet loaded with all the data you've ever touched and a robot knife fighting game, all delivered via Firefox... except that Firefox is now your operating system, except it isn't, because you're on your phone. Wait, you're on a Lenovo-clone made in Thailand with a Tupperware exterior, the whole thing ginned-out in a inkjet fabrication plant for $40, running on open source software that you are continually tuning to your personal tastes. It's all just a door to your data.
Where am I going with this? This is the state of the experience gap. Users expect a game with a cinematic-like high definition world, or they expect tools - newly powerful tools that are increasingly replacing the role of desktop applications. Both experiences carry with them an expectation of doing something. In World of Warcraft they are forming social networks and building personalities. They are creating a sense of community and accomplishment that may not exist in their analog lives. On Google Spreadsheets they are conducting business, crunching number in a free groupware environment. They are getting things done. That is their mindset when they open up their computer, users are not "online" so much as just living. They are not creative professionals and developers caught up in technologies and branding. They are doing.
With our brands and our microsites, what are we doing for them?
