Tech Joy

Facelifts, functionality, and SaaS (oh my!)

Socialtext - more than a facelift « Prof Kane on Computers in Management

I was excited to see responses from Claire and Jerry to my recent post on Social Text’s recent facelift and redesigns rollouts in general. Jerry’s response gave me more food for thought on this topic.

Apparently, the ST is undergoing much more than a redesign—they’re backing up the new look with some functionality our prof is pretty excited about. I’m guessing that things might have started to go fuzzy for some folks when Jerry started talking about platform changes. Jerry’s excitement about the new functionality brings up another point about how users react to software changes. More technical users, who may be administrators or power users, often follow what’s going on with the software closely. The software products I market have an avid user base who blog about every aspect of the product, provide support for other users, and generate constant activity on the user groups. While these technical users may be the most vocal supporters and critics of the products, the fact that they follow every feature and release so closely makes them more prepared to adjust to new releases.

The vast majority of their users, however, are silent users who could care less about the technical aspects of the product. (Who reading this got excited when Microsoft changed the file format for its Office 2007 products to an XML-based format?) The trick for software companies is that the silent users may not gripe about the product on blogs or user groups, but they will react with their wallets—or in the case of freeware, they’ll simply switch providers, which ultimately hurts the company’s bottom line, too.

Many software companies really do have to think about two user bases when creating their products, and make sure that there are clear benefits to both. In the case of SaaS, where new releases are pushed out, companies have to be more aware of which user group the new features or functionality are designed to help—the administrator, or the end-user, and plan awareness campaigns specifically aimed at the user group that is most impacted.