Competing on easy

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3302-competing-on-easy

by relation • 14 years ago

66 25 14 years ago

Does anyone know what it is they're building? I'm struggling to think of a market that is dominated by free that could also be made easier. Email seems like a possible bet as all the other major email providers are free.

true_religion• 14 years ago

They're 37 Signals, creators of Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, and other fine things that may claim to solve a certain task 'easier' than other competitors.

sutterbomb• 14 years ago

I think the question above was referring to the new service they are building, not what they have already done.

connortomas2• 14 years ago

37 Signals generally create web apps for small businesses, so I suspect an email client/service would be a little too general for them. Jason Fried also says, "This new product eliminates the hassle of one thing in particular", which suggests that there's one huge pain point they'd like to solve with their new product. I can't think of what one particular pain point would be with email - a solution to email would probably involve solving a lot of tiny problems.

It's puzzling, because Jason points out that "the other products are totally free". Most web apps marketed to small business users, though, aren't free. Perhaps this product is targeted at a broader demographic.

gregormck• 14 years ago

I reckon it is a timing app

navitronic2• 14 years ago

Not a huge fan of their blog's redesign.

The combination of the serif font, text-indent on paragraphs and lack of separation between them makes reading it a chore. One of the first times I have needed to use Safari's reader mode out of necessity.

nicksergeant• 14 years ago

This does not add anything to the conversation about the article.

dchuk• 14 years ago

The lack of hierarchy in navigation and contrast in their design makes it really hard to navigate the archives of the blog or really establish the differences between content, navigation, and comments.

As the blog post is about building a great product with the core competitive advantage being simplicity, this new blog design is a full 180 from the point of their post.

connortomas2• 14 years ago

Though this doesn't totally solve your issue, the design is responsive, so if you're on your Mac, you could narrow your browser window to make the body text a little easier to scan. I mean, you shouldn't need to do that, but...

ryanwaggoner• 14 years ago

Interesting, totally opposite for me. The text-indent is what demarcates the paragraphs and I found that really readable. Also Safari's reader mode also uses a serif font, for me anyway.

navitronic2• 14 years ago

It's the combination of the three factors causing the issue.

chrismorgan• 14 years ago

I didn't even notice the serif font, because I have overridden the font-family in almost all places to the Ubuntu font-family (hooray for user style sheets!). I tried it as an experiment somewhere around a year ago. I strike the occasional website that doesn't look right and where it looks like the typeface used may have damaged it, but overall, it's marvellous. I noticed very quickly that the whole web was prettier and more readable. I tried going back, just out of curiosity, a month or two later. I went back to overriding the font-family less than a week later.

But as far as their layout is concerned, I do like the large typography, and don't see any problem with the paragraph spacing and layout. Overall, it's a nice, clean layout.

gravitystorm• 14 years ago

I've been doing this for a few years, along with a reasonable minimum font size. I find it really tough to go back to a smorgasbord of fonts and sizes, with some of them often unreadable. Controlling the fonts via Firefox is awesome.

The biggest downside to this is where sites (e.g. github) try using private-range unicode codepoints for graphical icons, not realizing that users often have other fonts set. I really discourage site authors for hacks and stick to using graphics for icons.

dave1619• 14 years ago

This post really made me think. If you're going after easy then I suppose you look for things that are currently difficult and you can make a competing product. This seems to open up a lot of opportunities.

manmal• 14 years ago

Yes, and it's what Apple under Jobs has always done - they made it easy to use (where easy can mean: easy on the eyes, easy to perform tasks with, easy to buy, easy to turn off,...). And yes, it does not mean anti-complex, at least not for the iPhone - take a look into the settings screen, it's become quite huge by now.

willvarfar• 14 years ago

Why do I think they are sliding towards Easy not Simple? Its a very fundamental distinction!

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy <- Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure and Datomic

jwdunne• 14 years ago

I think, as tech-savvy, I overestimate what users can do or feel comfortable doing. This makes making things easier a nice challenge.

For example, a colleague needed to check if a link has rel="nofollow". The first solution is to right click on the link and click Inspect element (he uses Chrome). This wasnt a good solution because he gave up as soon as he saw code, despite it highlighting it for him. I wrote up a quick and dirty bookmarklet as a second solution which either shows a green "dofollow" or a red "nofollow" with a black BG. This was earlier this year and he still uses the same dirty little bookmarklet. It made me realise that there are probably thousands of things I take for granted which would slow down an average user almost to a stop.

To me, it seems to unearth these things, you have to question assumptions. I assumed anyone on this planet will have the capacity to right click a link and inspect the HTML and the contents of the rel attribute. I assumed the 10 mins writing the bookmarklet would be a waste of time. I was very wrong.

netcan• 14 years ago

My first job out of Uni required me to write up little manuals, take them to the customer to show them how to upload products to their e-commerce site, check orders etc.

I'm not a programmer, but I'm fairly technical.

Anyway, actually sitting beside the user as they tried to do things makes you realize how important easy really is. This was using basically off-the-shelf software that I thought was pretty user friendly. But, anything outside of the manual and instruction could not be/was not done.

It isn't really about easy-hard. It's about possible-impossible. There was some Jobs interview somewhere where he described the early (then current) Apple/microcomputer progression in orders of magnitude.

people who could build their own computer from parts >> people who could build it from kits >> people who could write their own software on pre-assembled computers >> people who could use other people's software >> people who could use a GUI-based computer.

You could continue this line to ipad apps. How many people use computers but don't install software (daughters, IT departments, etc do this once per year)? How many use email that someone sets up for them?

RossM• 14 years ago

I've just noticed that Backpack - a sort of personal notes and tasks tool - has vanished from their homepage and I can't find an announcement about it. Does anyone know why this is?

gt5050• 14 years ago

http://37signals.com/backpack-retired

ejpastorino• 14 years ago

It's funny that most of the comments are about the new blog design and how people is not liking it.

fofmock• 14 years ago

I love making things easy, but I think the 37signals group may take things too far. Their book "Rework" feels like an entrepreneur picture book made for kids learning to read. I liked the ideas presented in the book, but I really wish it could have been just a little more detailed.

s_henry_paulson• 14 years ago

I'm not trying to come off as negative, but did you ever stop to wonder if you're making things more complicated than they actually are?

casca• 14 years ago

This is a great summary of "Rework". It felt like eating cotton candy - too quick and short on substance when the sugar high fades.

yesimahuman• 14 years ago

I definitely see that. To be honest, I really enjoyed how tersely presented the ideas are. They make a great jumping off point for your own internal discussion and creative modification.

Competing on easy

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