Yostivanich

Want to become a suc­cess­ful can­di­date, busi­ness, tool, what­ever — then keep low­er­ing the bar towards peo­ple inter­act­ing with you. Com­pa­nies that raise the bar towards inter­ac­tion with the busi­ness and the peo­ple involved in the busi­ness will even­tu­ally fail. No mat­ter how large you are, the peo­ple want and enjoy easy access. Even if they don’t con­sciously real­ize it they will go for the busi­ness that has a lower bar to buy from.

Apple’s first gen­uine hit was the Mac­in­tosh with a graphic user inter­face that made it easy for every­body to under­stand how to inter­act with a com­puter and see what was going on. What sparked Ebay’s first real suc­cess ease of access, sell­ing was quick and pain­less. If you didn’t sell well who cared it was junk any­ways. YouTube low­ered the bar towards shar­ing videos online, Flickr pho­tos, Google search­ing, Obama to donate and get involved, the list goes on and on. Why is Mas­ter­Card adding the abil­ity to pay with out even pulling out your card, ease of access towards that card. The eas­ier it is to use your Mas­ter­Card the more likely you are to use it.

As a busi­ness you should not cre­ate arti­fi­cial bar­ri­ers towards let­ting your users inter­act with your business/product. This means pro­vide lots of free sam­ples, make it easy to get in touch with you, make your web site easy to nav­i­gate and fun to use.

If you are a soft­ware com­pany make you appli­ca­tions easy for your cus­tomers to get their hands on and use. Inter­faces should be clean and easy to grasp. Limit pref­er­ences, most of the time the defaults are just fine, the more set­tings you have the more chances you have to con­fuse your cus­tomers. If a cus­tomer can’t grasp an inter­face the user doesn’t need to be edu­cated the inter­face needs to change.

I don’t know if the bar can ever be low enough or if it ever is too low, but the lower you make the bar the more likely you are to attract peo­ple to your prod­uct (be it soft­ware, hard­ware, food, infor­ma­tion, skill, or even your­self) means that many more poten­tial customers.

Thanks to Matt Cutts for the inspi­ra­tion of this post based on his review of the Google Voice Search iPhone App. Specif­i­cally “The easier/faster it is to search, the more I searched.”