Skip to main content

How To Demo With Zero Barrier

When one browses to MindMeister and looks at the nicely designed page, the user will notice a nice screenshot of the service. This is not a screenshot, but an anonymous, live embedding of the actual mind mapping service. Right at the first page, you get to start messing around with things. I think all Web 2.0 apps need to provide this kind of immediate use. We can provide such a low barrier to use, with no installation, but we've really lowered the bar, so to speak. The users won't jump very high for us these days. Let them trip and fall right into our arms.

For Web 2.0 This Means...

Web-based applications need to provide an anonymous access to their application on the front page of the website. If you have a to-do application, let the user start interacting before they do anything. Even registration is a barrier to entry. Of course, if you take what they did anonymously and migrate it when they register, you get a gold star. You get two gold stars if you also keep their anonymous data around when they return with a cookie.

For Development Frameworks This Means...

Frameworks need to provide the infrastructure to do this easily. We build things in the context of a user, so sometimes there is a barrier we have to cross ourselves to provide this. Built-in ways to create anonymous uses, promote them with credentials, and expiration anonymous accounts: all will let developers provide this Siren call to users at little cost.

For Users This Means...

More choices, because I can try more things. I don't need to give out my information and remember credentials just to try out yet another twitter clone, to-do app, or mind mapping software.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Software Job Transition Strategies?

I’ve been spending a good deal of the last two days preparing mentally for starting a whole new challenge as a developer. New things aren’t new to me, but this is different and big enough really call for some Deep Thoughts ™. For one thing, I’ve made a big move from the world of Python web development to totally other Python work and while web development has never been the only thing I do, it has been the only work that paid the bills. That transition isn’t one that bothers me or daunts me, though. Instead, I’m thinking about transitioning to the scope of the work I’m getting into. For a long time, I juggled multiple clients and client projects every day, so no single project usually took up most of my time. Every developer juggles time through the day, but exactly how that works in each company and on each project varies a lot. I was looking for a place that I could really focus in a way that I haven’t for a long time. I think I found that, but now I have to deal with the consequen...
Post a Comment
Read more

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

The Snake Pit is About to Burst

The signs are all over the place. I can count at least five implementations of Python today: CPython, CL-Python, Jython, IronPython, and PyPy. The use of the language is sky rocketting and set to grab real mind-share as the hype over Ruby subsides. Things are looking good for a favorite green snake and british comedy troop reference, aren't they? Trouble is on the horizon in the very ingredients that could push us into true success. Our community and our very language is in danger of segregation, unless we all do something about it and learn to get along. One of the most visible dangers (to me) is being ignored for various political, cultural, and non-technical reasons. IronPython's users are increasingly pushing IronPython-only recipes, libraries, and tutorials. No one is talking about the transition of the alternative implemenations to CPython 3.0 compatability. To make matters worse, we still can not define the language without refering to an implementation. This is very un...
11 comments
Read more