Biggest Barrier For Startups: User Experience
Mukund Mohan wrote a great little article on the new barriers to adoption for your startup. These barriers have to do with the user experience and what are the minimum standards that the users expect. Of course the user expects the user experience of Google and the like.
The new barriers are:
- Application better work super FAST
- Instant gratification
- Allows users to make mistakes but still works
- Make the first impression seamless
These are difficult to overcome and a lot of startups fail to reach these goals and the users will punish them by never coming back. This doesn’t mean that they should not try, on the contrary. The user experience is what matters in determining the success of startups..
Read the whole article: the new barriers to adoption for your startup.
Smart Aggregation, Not Search or RSS, Is Key In Getting Valuable Traffic
Fred Wilson has shared where the traffic to his blog, A VC, comes from. He made an important notion on how the majority of users have come to his site through search engines, but their dominance has declined in the past year. He notes that an almost good a source has been from sites he calls smart aggregators. By these he means sites that aggregate either algorithmically (Techmeme) or through user behavior (Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon) the most important new articles. The importance of these aggregators will surely continue to grow especially in topics like technology.
As Fred mentions himself, the traffic from RSS-readers has not increased for him, because they just are too hard for the average user to use. I have to admit that I personally fall into the same category. It’s not that I don’t see the value of RSS-readers, it’s just better (easier, faster) for me to get a pre-prioritized list of the most important news and post through Techmeme or even Friendfeed.
For most publishers and bloggers getting traffic from these smart aggregators is more valuable than getting traffic from search engines using some random keywords. Fred Wilson correctly divides search engine results between “search bookmarks”, which should be counted as direct traffic, and real search. The importance of Search Engine Optimization is not diminishing: see my earlier post about the declining importance of URL’s in navigation as opposed to search.
Death Of The Domain Names Is Near
Or more correctly: the slow decline of the importance of domain names has begun. Cabel Sasser wrote an inspiring article about how in Japan they do not use URL’s on billboard ads, but instead they have pictures of search boxes with keywords. This is done beacause all the good domain names are already gone, but more importantly, as Snipperoo pointed out, people do not remember domain-names, instead they input the brand or product name into search boxes i.e. use search for navigation.
How many domain names do you remember?
When thinking about this I realized that domain names are becoming more like phone numbers, you need them to get to the right place, but nobody really remembers them anymore. The most important ones you have written down (bookmarked) and for the others you use the white pages (Google).
[via Techmeme]
[Original image from Cabel.name]
Teen Age Girls Will Take Over The Internet
New York Times has an article on the differences of online behavior between teenage girls and boys. The article is based on an earlier PEW research report Teens and Social Media that found that girls are more creative than boys online. Girls blog more, are more active on social networking sites, post more photos and create more websites of their own. The only area where boys are more creative is shooting and posting videos.
Read more…
6% of Users Are Responsible for 50% of Clicks on Ads
A new study conducted by Starcom, Tacoda and comScore aptly named “Natural Born Clickers” reveals that 6% of online users are responsible for 50% of all clicks on online ads.
Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.
Search Engine Usage Differences Begin to Unfold
In my earlier post I was wondering about the differences of user behavior and efficiency between the biggest search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live Search). I just stumbled upon this earlier piece of from Mashable that tells us that there are clear demographic differences between the sites. Gmail users are younger and make more money than the users of the two other services.
Compete Blog Tells How People Behave Online
The Compete blog is my new favorite blog. I’ve learned quite a lot on user behavior online after I discovered it a few days ago. Which big search engine is most efficient and why people fill in complete URLs into the search boxes instead of the address bar have made me think about the user differences between search engines. (The answers to both questions can be found in the enlightening comments.)
Also worth reading are what were the biggest sites in 2001 and how are they doing now and an anatomy of a web meme.
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