We've spent a great deal of time and money this year running observation labs to evaluate user cognitive processes, toward the goal of understanding how to make Lyza (www.lyzasoft.com) software that is both powerful and easy to use. While this research has been invaluable, it also contained a trap we did not foresee.
Initially, we thought that Early Majority users would express higher expectations for usability than did Early Adopters. But, they did not. Their expectations for good usability were almost identical.
At first, this puzzled us and made us wonder if we were perhaps ready for the hockey stick of the mass market. (Given the optimistic psyche of entrepreneurs, this trap is particularly dangerous.) Then, we noticed something else -- Early Adopters showed significantly higher tolerance for a gap between their expectations and the product's actual usability. EA's were just better able to get past, work through, or work around perceived deficiencies than were Early Majority users. Fortunately, the labs allowed us to go beyond simply asking about expectations and allowed us to observe the differences in behavior and tolerance.
Many new tech projects see a stabilization of expressed expectations at some point, encouraging them to scale-up marketing of their products in hopes of tapping the exponential growth curve in the first graphic. But, they jump in without the significant additional investments of money and staff required (see second graphic) to improve the product faster than expectation-performance gap tolerance is declining in their target market (see "The Cliff" in the first graphic). I think these conclusions are simply another perspective on the now-classic Crossing The Chasm argument: don't count your money based upon Early Adopter response, because there is a lot of work left and a very tight window within which to do it. As a professor of mine once said ...
Growth consumes large amounts of money and staff. Have stockpiles of both before you start.
The consequence: we need to hustle to grow our Lyza engineering staff ASAP. So, if you're an expert Swing developer, send me your resume.
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