If you are really clever you can produce remarkable technology that is so cool you don’t have to worry about how people will use it.

The iPad, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Linux. I’m not saying the smart people that launched these technologies didn’t consider how people might use the technology. However they didn’t really try to articulate the Monday morning usage for a specific person.

Now the real world consisting of 99.9 % of technology/products that are launched into the business or consumer world, into a low growth economy, cannot afford to ignore usage.

For example SC Johnson’s new “clip on your belt mosquito repellent” advises users to avoid breathing vapor – that would be the vapor poring out of the device on your belt!
Great guys, really thought through the usage idea!

Vamosa

When I asked my smart team at Vamosa to come up with a really useful, practical utlity software tool that real people could use to manage and optimize their company’s web properties,
the first thing we did was to set down success criteria:

1. It had to be usable right out the box
2. It could be changed and fine tuned by the user at the press of a button
3. It had to operate 24/7 because the web never sleeps
4. It needed to be scalable for large corporations, the more complex the better
5. It needed to be fun to use with bold colors and easy navigation
6. It needed to present really key statistics on all key policies including all errors across the whole estate
7. You should be able to go from anywhere on the Dashboard down to an individual web page to see the issue first hand

I hope the new product WebWorxx released last week achieves our goals. It’s already found 11 million errors for 45 early adopters in its first week. Please give it a try, its free for 14 days, WebWorxx.

In the meantime to quote Jason Fried founder of the successful software group, 37 Signals, Ideas are cheap and plentiful the original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it’s almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute. I would add its about the USAGE of the technology not features and benefits.

Good luck with your technology innovations but never forget someone needs to use it.