Quote voucher code SAAS-WEB3 if you want an extra 10% of the 31 March early bird deadline price.

Many thanks to AWIA for a great event and inviting me over to speak and attend. My talk was about ecosystems, and if there is one ecosystem you must join if you use technology in your business then it’s AWIA.

Here’s my preso I did at the conference which I have posted on slideshare.NET

Back in 2000 we drew up some plans to make an accounting system a bit like a Monopoly board. The idea being that as your business assets grew you would see an image of you factory grow. Your sales pipeline would expand into a bigger pipe as revenue grew. We wanted to bring some fun to accounting which can otherwise be a tad boring.

Due to the conservative nature of accountants (a good thing, they are just trying to protect their customers in many cases) we decided to hold off on that approach. Another reason was the difficulty in dealing with animation in web interfaces back then while meeting targets on load time for screens. We were also trying to avoid pagination. Pagination is where you show 1-50 of 7,000 transactions as an example and then provide buttons or links to show transactions 51-100 etc. Pagination can be really annoying for customers as we discovered during our user experience surveys.

In 2004 we started using AJAX (it didn’t actually have a name back then) which gave us the speed and flexibility to create a more designed interface and a better perceived speed experience for customers. We still use AJAX extensively in Payroll where editable data sets are smaller but you won’t see it as much in screens that have large editable data sets because it begins to become cost rather than a benefit in load times. The customer experience might be nice but if the screen load is slow the customer will just want to throw the computer out the window.

AJAX still has issues in this area but they are slowly being worked around. New browser like Google Chrome will allow AJAX to be used right across data heavy applications as it is a very efficient in dealing with JavaScript (the J in AJAX).

Being a fan of WordPress for blogging I really like their spam removal experience. When you click delete it turns red (like slaying the spam dragon) and then slides away off the screen. The destroy feeling is quite good. Gamers amongst you would like it. We implemented this idea back in 2005 into our Payroll and Invoicing modules (without the blood effect).

We are started to work on some UI design changes to give customers a bit more fun in the screens but as always the accessibility will be the controlling factor given our mantra of ensuring the keyboarders aren’t compromised in anyway.

If any of you have suggestions or examples of animation for deletion, creation, edit etc. just post a comment as we will be working up our changes to reports and transaction searching/listing over the next few weeks.

Photo credit: Cowbite

If you are in business that uses serious amounts of tech on a day to day basis then Barcamp Sydney is a great way to learn from (and even contribute back into) the IT industry.

Barcamp Sydney is a free event for you thanks to the event sponsors. The idea is that you can present for 15 minutes on a relevant topic and also listen to the dozens of presenters over two days. There are some really interesting topics lined up on social media, social capital, web services, coding, community and entrepreneurship. This is just a sample that will occur across 3 or 4 presentation rooms. Pick and choose your interests. I will be there as a presenter on the topic of Productivity 2.0 in business.

Saasu is also a sponsor of the carbon offsets required to make it a sustainable event.

Date: 5th and 6th April 2008
Time: 9:00 am – 5:30pm
Venue: Roundhouse at UNSW on Anzac Pde, Kensington, Sydney.

About Barcamp | Sign up for Barcamp Sydney 3

I like to think of it as -

• be unique OR
• be integrated OR
• be in another market

To give a simplistic analogy, if your proposition is not truly unique in the world (like iPhone) then get integrated (like say SMS) so the convenience or the network effect makes you the winner.

Google has some unique offerings but their level of uniqueness will be challenged over time so spreading a wider net and ensuring a larger integrated offering is key to retention and growth. More specifically in SaaS finance we think it is inevitable that competition hots up in our space but we know (from experience) like a lot of seemingly straightforward activities, there is more to online accounting and SaaS finance than meets the eye and that just like Facebook vs LinkedIn or Plaxo or the free email wars, there is room for a bunch of different philosophies that service different market segments.

In Small business there are numerous levels already from jurisdiction neutral invoicing to country specific micro business solutions all the way through to super expensive multi-country corporate versions.

We are very much of the view that while people might want to start with just billing, it is not enough to deliver real business benefits and runs the risk of becoming yet another island of information if you are not very careful. Further, you need to differentiate or integrate to deliver real value – either do it uniquely well or link to someone that does. That is why we link with Salesforce.com instantly out of the box with no extra work and we and our partners are building more all the time.

Could we here at Saasu.com | the web finance engine be purchased by Google or Microsoft or Amazon or eBay to get into the web finance space in a quick merger/acquisition? Of course, while we are a decent size we are tiny by comparison on the global stage. Would it be good for our clients/partners? Probably very much so because of the integration with other services like mail, chat, analytics, e-commerce and the network effect of their client bases. Would there be some risks? Sure but they are little more than steps to follow and formula mitigation given the amount of resources that come into play in the M&A world.

You might find my comments on the above article of interest too, Marc Lehmann also has some interesting views.

• have to follow more than 3 links to get to a feature (we think 90% of Saasu.com features are one click away)
• can’t find a key feature when they search for the key feature term – the feature is buried in lower search results
• don’t use the feature you have just implemented (say 90% of them)
• customers suggest a feature and you blindly put them into the build process
• think your help system resembles an accounting software manual
• need to pay a someone thousands of dollars to teach them how to use your system
• need more than one disk to install your application (software bloat only, not relevant for SaaS)
• leave you to go to another SaaS application
• call or email the service desk a lot when they first start out (also attributable to lack of ‘getting started’ help).
• reading between the lines in service queries and feedback suggest bloat or feature confusion

Adjust for your target market.

Is Bloat Really Bad?

I remember a customer comment that really stuck with me. He thought our application wasn’t quite as pretty as some (he was referring to some nice drag AJAX in a competitor application) but that ours “did the stuff” he needed doing and it was fast. He didn’t realize that we were actually pioneers in this technology. We have used AJAX in many areas not just ‘nice to have’ features.

One Catch: Function Regularly Beats Form

He is a customer of ours now, not the competition so function beat form in this competition.

Lately we have been putting much more time into user interface (UI) design despite this apparent function over form win suggesting otherwise. Grant Young points out the importance of “lean and fresh” in a comment on my Evolution Doesn’t Do Design post on my personal blog. Lean and fresh is very important. Our UI changes in recent weeks have been all about raising features to the surface, removing menu items and freshening up.

Pete our CEO thinks it is crucial to progressively reveal features, so have the depth and sophistication, just don’t scare people off by showing them all the features on the first sign in. This progressive reveal including considering the likely experience level and seniority of the user as well as their 80% case – what do they really want to do in most cases in this exact situation? Now make it easy as possible. At the same time (and more commercially) he believes there is a need to balance visibility of powerful features so prospects don’t underestimate just how much power your application has.

Killerapp Punch

The killer punch is when you have feature rich, lean and fresh all happening. You get the balance right. Design that raises the needed features to the surface when and if the user needs them (This was Grant’s mantra long before Web2.0 and Ajax existed). In our business we refer to bloat as the symptom of too many features not being easily used or found in our application.

Plenty of the best selling systems globally are very feature rich and suffer bloat. However, the bloat hasn’t stopped them. These systems do what needs doing. They get business done. Buyers put up with the feature barrage to get specific needs met. Microsoft being an X-tra L-arge spreadsheet tool, has massive penetration, despite the massive headache to learn and use. Once you know how to use Excel the pay-off can be large.

Minimalism sucks, if you are kid and like lots of toys

Let’s face it, as a kid minimalism ain’t much fun. As adults it can be just as bad if you are a kid at heart. However, it can also be very calming, make life simpler and give you that clean fresh feeling many of us love. Minimalist houses are a good examples outside of the tech arena. A person will sacrifice a lot of functionality for form in the aim to achieve minimalism. I’ll argue that for my stage in life I’m not a minimalist, I’m not a buyer of minimalism. I prefer a comfy couch with lots of cushions, easy access to magazines for me and my coffee and kids toys to keep the offspring happy. Later in life I’ll be a customer of minimalism, but not yet.

Clean Bloat is Best

We could keep Saasu lean and clean and sacrifice features, that’s simply a market demographic decision we have to make. Clean bloat is what I prefer. How do you pack a lot in and achieve a clean looking app? Campaign Monitor, another Aussie (email engine with analytics) are one of the best at doing this globally. 37 signals are also very good at it. So the market exists for different people at different times. Your business model can choose to sell into it or not, it should never be a design decision. So there is an answer to the bloat question. However the answer is a decision. Which market are you selling into?

Tell us some more? I’d love to build this list up.