Posted by Nick Mehta on Mon, Jul 28, 2008 @ 08:41 PM
Martin Tuip, on his Archiving101 blog, has a great post on the importance of usability in email archiving systems. I agree with him that the word "usability" is thrown around without much precision in the technology industry.
And with all of the immensely-"usable" products in the IT industry, we are stuck editing XML files and configuring registry settings through the dark of night. :)
I've always had a preference for the word "consumability" (yes I know - that's not really a word). We think of consumability as being a measure of the pain (or lack thereof) involved in customers consuming and getting value out of your technology.
Consumability goes beyond user interface and documentation and touches on the entire experience. From the wikipedia article above, this includes:
- Installation
- Configuration
- Maintenance
- Problem determination
- User experience
One of the beautiful and challenging things about software-as-a-service is that you are forced into consumability whether you like it or not.
At LiveOffice, as an example, we are serving 1000s of clients (small and large) and need to be very automated and predictable in the way that we deploy, configure and maintain our technology for our customers. If every customer involved a "man behind the curtain" tweaking config files, we'd be out of business.
Similarly, our users pay per month, so they expect value every month and demand a solution that they can actually use. One of the fundamental differences between an on-premise, licensed product and a software-as-a-service solution is that license vendors get paid for sales, while SaaS vendors get paid for usage.
Shelfware for on-premise vendors, while disappointing, is still money.
Shelfware for SaaS vendors leads to empty bank accounts.