Despite being 2009, one of the biggest complaints I hear from people when describing their online activities is how difficult websites are to use. People get amazingly frustrated when they're trying to do something seemingly simple and the website continuously gets in the way. It's almost as though the people designing or commissioning the website haven't used it themselves. For most consumers this idea seems incredible, but sadly it's largely still the case.
Traditional business is simple. You create a product or service you think customers will want, and then spend money to drive people towards that product or service. If you're lucky, some of those people will want to user your product or service and you'll make money. This can be through direct charges or, in the case of content creation, selling this attention on to other companies.
"Silverback":http://silverbackapp.com/ launched just over a month ago and what a roller coaster month that was. We launched towards the end of July and within the first couple of days the app had been downloaded 7,000 times. Thirty days on and well over 20,000 people have grabbed themselves a copy. Crikey! For the first couple of weeks the whole company was hooked on the Twitter feedback. I had a Summize window permanently open and kept refreshing the search every few minutes. Messages were coming thick and fast and I was pretty bowled over by the feedback. The messages were so unbelievably positive I actually started to worry. After all it was just a little usability testing app and wasn't going to cure hunger and bring about world peace. Here is just a small selection of the comments we received...
Since my last post people have been clamouring for more details on "Silverback":http://silverbackapp.com/, so I thought I’d explain where the idea came from, then show you a few screenshots.
My antipodean adventure is coming to a close so I thought i'd reflect on my time away. The trip started with a two day lay-over in Hong Kong to break the journey. I've been to this amazingly vibrant city before and it's one of my favorite places in Asia. It's a bit of a cliche but Hong Kong really is a city where east and west collide. A city where hundred year old temples sit next to trendy bars and street hawkers compete with international food chains. Like many Asian cities, gadgets rule supreme in this town and none more so than the ever ubiquitous mobile phone. The streets are a blur of activity both day and night, and as dusk falls the city is lit by a forest of neon. Like stepping into a scene from Blade Runner, you expect Decker to come round the corner any minute.
A few months ago Clearleft accidentally leaked the fact we were working on our own application, known as Silverback. I say accidentally because we had just bought the domain name silverbackapp.com and thought we’d better post up a holding page. However the combination of a great logo from Jon Hicks and an amazingly inventive parallax technique from Paul meant the page got far more coverage than anticipated. Before the week was out we had over 5,000 people registered for updates and had started to receive comments like “I don’t know what Silverback is, but I know that I want it!? So no pressure there then!