From a press release, or actually a study:

The recent publication of a new benchmark report by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company Application Performance Management: The Lifecycle Approach Brings IT and Business Together, further signals the increasing need for real end user experience solutions. Aberdeen’s latest findings show that 50 percent of revenue loss is a result of poor Application Performance. In addition, the enterprises surveyed by Aberdeen clearly ranked the ability to identify end user problems as the top priority for any Application Performance Management initiative.

…

“Best-in-Class organizations are taking an additional critical step and are measuring application performance not only from the perspective of their data center components, but also from the end user perspective. These organizations are ensuring that improvements in application availability, response times and usability translate into improved employee satisfaction and productivity, and ultimately, improved customer satisfaction, mitigation of lost revenue opportunities, and avoid damages to brand image,” said Bojan Simic, research analyst at Aberdeen.

This goes under — duh.

Of course poor user experience can result from a website, web application, or software application that’s slow, has incoherent error messages or just plain breaks. Users don’t know the difference between what’s a bug and what’s not, or why the application is performing slowly.

So, repeat after me:

The first rule of user experience is that the application should actually work.

I wonder how much they are charging for that report. I need to start writing white papers.

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I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve done the “hey, lets do the requirements gathering in a waterfall process,” by the time we get to the bottom of the waterfall, we’re nowhere close to where we started. That’s one of the reasons why I’m a huge fan of agile requirements gathering and software development.

Horse Pig Cow has a great post on the waterfall vs. the washing machine. It’s done in a presentation (I’m going to include it below).

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It’s a great blog community, evoling as blogs have. More importantly, it’s a comfortable community, as in they don’t get all snooty like some bloggers do.

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For the artist in you, you can create your own Stick Figure Family. It’s sort of like of a family tree that you can have. It’s cute, it’s fairly easy to use but I’m going to knock off a point because buttons should be used instead of hyperlinks in some places, but that’s not the only thing going on.

Most importantly, they have figured out like some of the other applications that they should be cross promoting across the multiple social networking sites. There are four other sites like FaceBook they are promoting this application on. The reason it’s called Open Social is that it’s an open platform. Sure, there’s some customization that goes on, but not that much, so we should be seeing more of this.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 2
• Usability: 2
• Fun Factor: 4
• Stability: 5
• Monetization Opportunities: 3

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So I’m going to catch up on a few posts — I’ve been moving — and one of the complaints I had was Southern California Edison. I’m moving in their territory, from Anaheim to Long Beach, and yet I had to create a new user account and re-enter all my information at their moving site.

I not a big fan of the SCE site to begin with, and this obviously boggles the mind. You know who I am, you know where I’m moving from and where I’m moving to — how about making it easy for me?

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Read on, little grasshopper.

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It’s more than SharePoint, but there are some good feeds here. I subscribe to them.

(It would be nice if the links worked in other browsers that Internet Explorer).

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I’ve been playing with the idea — so I can become famous or something. I know I don’t have a shot in hell of making a ton of money on the book, but it’s mostly to increase the bottom line for consulting and speaking engagements.

Good Experience has a great read on writing a book, and all the things no one tells you when you do it. Seth Godin also has some tips.

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Mini Golf is exactly as it sounds — a miniature golf course played through a Adobe Flash application right there on MySpace. It sounds like a nifty idea, but there have been a fare number of Flash applications that have done the same thing, some of them better with a high quality, and this one asks you to buy the gold version the page.

It’s fun, but tough. The one usability issue I have is there is no way to preview the complete hole (move the cursor around) to see where you have to shoot.

The other issue: it’s a social networking site. You would think a ranking system would be in place, versus your friends and everyone on MySpace. But alas, it’s a one player game, essentially.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 2
• Usability: 2
• Fun Factor: 4
• Stability: 5
• Monetization Opportunities: 4

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I’m going to keep this one short — I was moving this weekend — but Smashing Magazine has interesting article about blog layouts and what the big boys are doing. Check it out here.

Note to Smashing Magazine: Blogs are picking fixed layouts because liquid layouts are a pain in the neck.

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