It is brilliantly simple. It can be difficult for accountants to explain the concept of cloud computing to their clients and conversely for business owners to explain it to their accountant if they aren’t yet cloud savvy. So the video could be used as a good reference video for Accounting Practice websites. Well done Ben.

The analogy is that the Cloud is like a Utility (Side note: the U in Saasu stands for Utility). This is the best simple analogy to make. There are academic nuances around why it’s different but for the purposes of education over semantics we’ll put that aside in this post. Learn about the differences here.

The value proposition is that if it’s easier to capture the time as you work then you can recover billable time that was otherwise lost due to the burden of managing spreadsheets or paper. I concur with this, we see lots of new customers arrive at Saasu who are trades people, bookkeepers, service companies and the like that have been under billing because they don’t track their time.

I first met founder Ian Cummings when he built the successful Travellr.com Q&A website. Ian has built successful consulting and application development businesses in the past and he mentioned to me last year that he always wanted an easy to use software tool that quickly captures time across multiple projects. He said he was going to build one. Well he walks the talk, and here it is…
 

I was chuffed to have the opportunity to connect with Ray on several occasions during his visit in Sydney.  Knowing Ray’s interest and expertise in the area of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing I invited him over to the Saasu office and introduced him to our CEO Marc.

Thanks for visiting us Ray and we look forward to seeing you when you’re next in Sydney.

Here is Ray’s excellent presentation delivered in Sydney for the AMPlify thought leadership festival entitled: “Why Enterprise Software Sucks and How Disruptive Technologies Converge to Change This”

]]> http://www.saasu.com/2011/06/20/disruptive-technologies-expert-r-ray-wang-in-australia/feed/ 0 http://www.saasu.com/2011/05/20/pushstart-for-startups/ http://www.saasu.com/2011/05/20/pushstart-for-startups/#comments Fri, 20 May 2011 02:53:49 +0000 marc http://www.saasu.com/?p=9023 One of the things we are passionate about at Saasu is commercialisation of great ideas. We always talk about the worlds biggest problem which is that there are too many ideas and not enough ways to execute them. So we are talking about execution, walking the talk.

What does this mean? It means we often sponsor events for startups or gift them a Saasu subscription. We also involve ourselves in events for startups and early commercialisation companies, notably ventures like Pushstart. We are a bit picky though, we need to believe in the organisers of these events.

Pushstart is a new set of community-focused, mentor-driven activities to help grow Australian tech (Web and Mobile) startups, and the Australian tech startup community more generally. By combining top Aussie tech startup people, seed funding and community events it gives local tech entrepreneurs help to start, grow & succeed. There’s an accelerator underlying the structure and it’s run by a bunch of people I have a lot of respect for Kim Heras, John Haining and Roger Kermode.

This week I had my first Mentor session and I have to say that the ideas and talent at this event were incredible. We have amazing talent out there. Notably, ideas have often progressed much further than you would expect. The nature of development tools, ease of company setup and the quality of online apps that you just switch on is facilitating this. The start-up business framework is now a quick beast to create. So if you’re thinking about starting a venture, finish the dreaming and start the doing!

Update: 24th May 2011  Noticed this tweet today linking to a video interview with some of the entrepreneurs:

PushStart on Twitter
Founders: PushStart – Kim Heras – John Haining – Roger Kermode.
Saasu Mentors: Marc Lehmann – Tony Hollingsworth – Peter J Cooper

The internet IS NOT simply about convenience through getting your data available online. Web based email, CRMs and accounting web applications are just the first layer. This is the first level of understanding and observation. It’s the outer most layer of the onion. It’s also an easy way for web application companies to sell the benefits of the web to you the customers. You should however look deeper down and expect more from your web application providers.

The internet has the capacity to add to your business system intelligence and process your workflow in an automatic way. You might not have taken advantage of this yet. If you swallow the red pill so to speak it is a wonderland of triggers and events that we are all creating. Let’s use a real life example to explain this. A trigger might be a customer of a business clicking checkout on your shopping cart that then causes a series of designed workflow events actioned by Saasu such as:

• Capturing the customers contact record and storing it.
• Passing credit card details to a payment gateway.
• Listening to the payment gateway for success.
• Emailing the customer an invoice using a specific email and PDF template.
• Emailing a purchase order to a supplier with instructions to deliver the goods to the business customers address (drop shipping).
• Emailing a shipping slip with an embedded Google Map of the customers address to the delivery driver.

Deeper down in Saasu’s inventory system a lot more is happening automatically.

• Stock volumes are adjusting.
• Serial numbers or other inventory attributes are being allocated against items just sold.
• The value of stock on balance sheet is changing.
• Stock is moving to “Committed” for the Sale and “On Order” for the Purchase.
• Cost of Goods numbers are being updated.

Saasu has a real inventory system, rather than just a price list mechanism that you see many basic web apps now providing. All these events above are occurring in an automated way.

This is one example of workflow automation based on a trigger event. Customers are inventing new models all the time and as we add features the models become more effective and handle more situations.

This doesn’t mean humans aren’t part of the picture. It is a symbiotic relationship now between the controllers (the users) and the the system (triggers, events and data). Most importantly if you have devices or systems not connected to the internet then they can’t contribute effectively without requiring manual work to be done. Manual work and intelligent, automated systems aren’t good friends. Manual work is all about labour gravity which I have covered before. So our responsibility now as business owners and employees is to remove these old technology blocks from our new system. Work on the worst blocks first and things will begin to improve quickly.

Nature is full of examples we can look to for inspiration in our thinking on this topic. Speed and complexity of communication is a major factor in the success of species evolution. Just look at humans, we got wired, our brains and communication capability grew. We used the complexity of language to evolve a highly advanced species. You should help your business do the same. Getting online, getting automation tools and having fewer systems (versus many disparate ones) that talk well together is an analogous situation.

I’ve just mentioned fewer systems. Fewer systems is a strategy nature uses to reduce interdependence or dependence risk. An example of the the later can be found in cockroaches who have evolved a single system mechanism. One reason they are so successful is because they have internal organs that produce seven different vitamins and lots of complex amino acids that they need so that they don’t have to rely on food quality to get them. They reduce their dependence risk on nutritious food sources.

When businesses get connected online they can actually start to self organise and grow at faster rates. Essentially an off-line business simply isn’t a part of this primordial web soup of activity and thus it can’t evolve. Contrary to this an online business can’t help but be prodded, communicated with, added to, seen by others and thus grow and evolve. The potential ceiling for the businesses momentum and growth prospects is lower. Businesses in this new online world can grow in orders of magnitude rather than the typical single or double digit growth rates.

Lessons from nature are worth listening to.

Photo by raneko

Saasu involves itself in quite a few technology events. We love to hear what entrepreneurs with skin in the game think, those people full of passion and inspiration. It’s great to hang around these people and get re-infected with their fever.

SydStart is a nearly free event for Startups, Students and Investors that I’ll be attending on March 31st in Sydney that puts startups in touch with investors and industry. SydStart is organised by Sydney based Angel firm Cooper Sydney and lists an impressive array of speakers including Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian), Ric Richardson (R2 Labs) and Phil Morle (Pollenizer).

I always walk away from these events having enjoyed them immensely because it’s a real discussion amongst business people with skin in the game. Conferences that feature c-level’s from large enterprises and politicians tend to wear me out, and they make you pay for the privilege! However, with events like SydStart it’s a win-win being nearly free and high value content.

Bookings at Autumn 2011 SydStart.

See you there, and bring your passion!

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

Themes are about Saasu’s Community

Saasu has a long history of developing a mix of community ideas into our products. At the same time we like to apply some of our own ideas as an innovator where we see the opportunity. After all, we are a research and development company.

Introducing CrowdTheme™

Soon you will see stage one of Saasu’s CrowdTheme™.

CrowdTheme™ will support themes for your invoices and statements. You simply apply a theme to each template you have in Saasu (or create and submit your own). What’s more exciting is that this allows you to build a raft of workflow documents such as remittances, packing slips, purchase orders and print labels to name a few. Really it’s only limited to your imagination.

CrowdTheme™ will also be used to cover themes for Reports and Customer Self Service screens in a future release.

We will write about CrowdTheme™ in detail at our Product Blog in coming days.

Innovation background

At the moment Saasu crowd sources ideas from our blog, websites and application into our development candidate list. One such popular request was multiple templates for invoices. Many of our customers wanted to send invoices and quotes using more than one brand for their business. Slight changes between invoices and quotes for specific circumstances are another reason.

In essence the request we receive are what our customers want to do rather than how they want to do it. So this is where Saasu comes in with the innovation twist. We work out ways to solve the problem but at the same time create innovative approach that we think will add a whole new layer of benefit. We have to do this as it’s in our company mantra to create extremes in price relative to competitors while also creating extreme benefits.

Not wanting to let an opportunity go we decided it was time to use a themes approach we have wanted to put into Saasu that goes back to when we started blogging in 2003.

It was also a result of identifying that there is a vast complexity of international reporting and documentation requirements in accounting. We always felt that in the end only crowd sourcing themes and templates solves this issue. New document themes can be quickly added by the whole community and shared in a social service model and then applied to individual Saasu templates. This reduces the development cost and thus the cost of our communities Saasu subscription. More features for less cost = win win for all.

What’s this mean for the future of accounting?

We believe that Web3.0 is now starting to form it’s foundations. Companies like Saasu will increasingly allow users to design web applications by their use or by their own design (or a combination of these approaches). Themes are one mechanism that allow this. They will start to extend beyond Content Management Systems.

We also believe the web is becoming more and more organic as it gets a life of it’s own above it’s many tiny masters, the people who use it and the people who build on it.

I generated the following cloud from Saasu’s About page on our website to see what the content looked like. Visit the full size image on Wordle. Hat tip to the Stubborn Mule where I first read about this bit of fun.

Saasu.com/about Word cloud by Wordle

Saasu use a couple of the tools mentioned in the video (below) which is the third in the series. It was nice to see we think alike. One tool is tech related but the others can be applied to most business models.

Got a video about what technology or services you use in your business? Let us know.

The following presentation on this topic is from my talk at CeBIT Webciety this year. The topic was What web Web3.0 will look like. This is all about the "Data" and the "Data Generation". Concepts such as the Semantic Web, Data-on-Data and more recently the Datarati have evolved in recent years to deal with the concepts.

If you are interested in the data area and how to use your business data to influence your business then Will Scully-Power’s blog is a great read. Previously of MarkSydney (part of the M&C Saatchi Group) he is seeding a new business in the data space.

We generally upload our presentations to Slideshare. See ~ Saasu | Marc Lehmann | Peter Cooper

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’re a business owner I recommend attending conferences. The trick is to pick the eyes out of them. I only go to about three a year as either a speaker or a sponsor. So ruthless choices are required. My picks are Barcamp, Edge of the Web and CeBIT.

Edge of the Web is coming up in November (Perth, Australia), brought to you by the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA). It is designed for business stakeholders trying to create next generation business practices that utilise the web. The people behind Edge of the Web recognise that technology and the web are an integral part of the business model. So often I see business people who think their business is “what” they do rather than “how” they do it.

Nearly all businesses are hybrid technology businesses these days,
they are part technology company and part product or services. The “how” is all about technology.

I’ll be at the conference talking on SaaS (Software as a Service) as an Ecosystem for businesses to operate in. Having your business in the cloud is becoming an integral part of an effective “how” component in your business. Some smart cookies (and coincidently good friends and customers of Saasu) will be there also such as the Madpilot, Myles Eftos and Millstreams, Adrian and Rosemary Lynch. I also hear that Jordan Brock and his 5 Senses Coffee with be there. 5 Senses was at a recent Barcamp, and the coffee experience just made it ultra-pleasant between sessions.

If you are not sure if this applies to you then consider a sole trader services business as an example who has a large portion of what they do dependent on technology. Getting the books done, preparing marketing material, email, franchising, scheduling, managing inventory, procurement, network marketing etc. It’s all about technology.

If you want to get to Perth then Saasu wants to pitch in and help by subsidising the trip a little through a cheaper Saasu subscription. Just use voucher code AWIA-EDGE when you renew or signup to Saasu NetAccounts. We will add 3 months to your business file renewal date once we confirm you have registered for the conference*.

Edge of the Web is on 6th and 7th of November, Perth WA. AWIA members $395, non-members $450.

ASIDE: If you aren’t already an AWIA member then get on board. Saasu did and never looked back. We are now on their committee and can honestly say it has been a great expereience dealing with some amazing web savvy members and receiving so much businesses through our membership.

If you have multiple business files in your subscription it will be pro-rata calculated. Offer ends 6th November 2008. One voucher at a time sorry. This offer can’t be used in conjunction with any other offer.

Sydney finally has her own Apple flagship store. It is enormous. Right on one of the city central intersections it looks like a lighthouse at night. You can’t miss it.

Sydney is the world’s best city by brand (2 years in a row on ABC), lifestyle (8 years out of 10 on CNN) and especially so now for geeks and business owners since it is also home to Saasu HQ.

The lessons here for marketing any business are fascinating. Focus. Quality. Clarity. Consistency.

Only days after 5,200 Apple geeks meet in San Fran for their WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) when Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone 3G (watch video) will be 36% faster than the latest Nokia and half the price of iPhone today ($199 from $399), Jobs also confirmed that 98% of iPhone users use it for the web, as predicted in this blog ages ago the iPhone platform is a major structural change to the world of web access.

In case you didn’t already know Saasu works on the iPhone and the iTouch, it is the full web application, not a cut down one. So you can do everything on the iPhone that you can do on any desktop or laptop.

Jobs also announced that iPhone 3G will be in 22 countries on July 11 and a total of 70 by year end. We wouldn’t be surprised to see the current 6m iPhone users go up to circa 100m+ by end 2009 (another blog on why another time).

If you go to the Apple Sydney store opening it is 5pm tomorrow (less than 36 hours ago the construction boards were up, now there are loads of apple geniuses running around and customers sleeping outside in line so they are first in tomorrow. TV and other media are already circling. The saasu team will be there of course to answer questions and do the odd demo. While I was there recently the kind apple crew gave umbrellas to those waiting in impending rain outside – well done gang.

Saasu.com is the best value accounting SaaS on the Mac in the world, we love the Apple iPhone too.

So we are offering 3 months bonus FREE to anyone signing up to a paid saasu netaccounts subscription for this week only. Just type APPLEROCKSSYDNEY when you sign up.

Note to Apple environmentally aware staff, please lobby your light house marketing guys to use efficient bulbs (if you don’t already) or turn off those lights when you go home pretty please.

Oh, and a bit of gossip to finish, something else is happening at 5pm tomorrow too. BRW the esteemed business review weekly magazine is launching their special Web 100 edition. Saasu might get a mention…

CeBIT is THE International Trade Show for Information Technology, Telecommunications, Software and Services. In other words, if you want to geek-out or get a real competitive advantage for your business you will love it.

Last year was good

Last year Saasu won the one and only highly prized ‘excellence in innovation platinum award’ for our flagship product NetAccounts. We were going to insert lots of other blatant boasting and superlatives here but thought that was probably more than you can take already.

This year will be even better

This year there will be something like 750 exhibitors from 20+ countries.

This year we will be speaking at the conference in the Transaction 2.0 section, chairing a session and of course exhibiting.

Best of all, as part of the Saasu tech community work we do, Saasu will be the sole green sponsor for the event, we are making the venue carbon neutral for the event for EVERY EXHIBITOR just so we can say we did our bit. Gold standard of course.

Special Bonus (or two)

As a special bonus you can register free as a friend of Saasu just quote code SAASUCA08 and you will get in free which is a fairly substantial saving off the normal door price of $40.

If you visit us at the show you will receive an extra month on your subscription for new and current customers! We will be asking all our visitors two questions – what do they like most about Saasu today and what would they like to see in our coming releases?

You will also be able to see our latest release demonstrated and talk to the experts about your needs, wants, desires and passions in the field of financial management success.

Finding Saasu at CeBIT

So do drop by stand S45, on the main aisle right next to our mates from salesforce.com (in case you have been living in a cave and hadn’t already heard, saasu integrates instantly with salesforce).

We are smack bang in the middle of the main business-software/e-finance/CRM section which takes up most of halls 4 and 5.

Want to know more?

We thought you might so here is a taste of what you will see, watch the videos or read some more
from the CeBIT marketers –

CeBIT Australia 2008 is the largest and most important business-to-business technology event in the region. Join 35,000 business professionals at CeBIT Australia this year to understand, analyse, sample and select the right technology solutions for your business’s future success.

Finding the right solutions has never been easier, CeBIT Australia is organised into 30 show floor categories – ranging from CRM, VoIP, e-Marketing & Search Engine Optimisation, Web Applications to Open Source – making it the number one stop for business professionals seeking the competitive advantage.

* 150 FREE show-floor Seminars
* International Keynote Speakers
* Business Networking
* Interactive Panel Sessions
* 6 High-Level Conferences
* 750+ Solution Providers
* 5000+ Technology Experts
* 30 Show Floor Categories

Visiting CeBIT Australia 2008 will teach you how to make your ICT investment work for you

* Get more out of your website
* Unleash the power 2.0
* Retain your top talent
* Discover online trading
* Slash your communications costs
* See next-gen CRM systems
* Learn about Green IT

And much, much more… most importantly you will arm yourself with knowledge that will give you the power to take your business to next level!

See you @ CeBIT Australia,
20 – 22 May 2008
Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre,
Darling Harbour

Another new Software as a Service (SaaS) idea that might work for some of our business customers is Avatars.

Avatars are a digital representation of people. You find them all over the internet these days, in virtual worlds and increasingly in commercial use for customer support.

A more recent innovation however is the use of these Avatars to sell your products. In pre-sales not post-sales, as it is a very different area because people are less tolerant of poor quality voice or images.

We set one up recently to welcome new visitors to saasu. If you have any feedback let us know. It’s easy to get one for your own site.

The downside of course is that they appear less ‘real’, you can’t replace people. The upside is substantial in some industries. You can do many things that you can’t do with professional talent. For example support multiple languages and cultures within the same language with one ‘actor’, even try different text to test effectiveness. An area that we are sure will catch on.

The good providers even allow you to use their talent library of people from around the world as well as text to speech or even load your own sound file in WAV format or phone in if you don’t have a microphone use the telephone and pin number to record it.

This will be an interesting area to watch as the ability to tailor appearance such as hair type, eyes, skin tone and clothing merges with other technologies such as the hologram the Prince of Wales used recently to attend an overseas conference and present.

Prince Charles was criticised for his huge air travel carbon footprint recently so he solved it with a video recording that was converted to a hologram. It is only a matter of time before the 3d avatar meets the holgram and allows his to acheive the same result with a simple email. Perhaps with simple markups to recognise emotion.

Y-gen and late X-gen are most likely to be the demographics who will readily accept them. After all they look distictly like the characters you see running around in Second Life and the The Sims.

Saasu client data (and our own) sits inside some pretty cool technology infrastructure in an extremely high grade location with world class qualifications including some from financial institutions and government security organisations.

Just some of our technology infrastructure features -

• Guards on the front door
• Hundreds of cameras
• Concrete all round – including the roof
• Biometric security
• Multiple levels of steel access doors and cages
• Multiple levels of redundant power, telecommunications and air conditioning
• Laser smoke particle detection; not to mention
• 24×7 monitoring plus
• Heavy duty protection from ram raids and even plane crashes

That helps us well sleep at night and we think it helps thousands of our users to sleep well at night too.

We also had yet another client with laptop problems recently. This follows a long line of similar client problems with their equipment being lost or stolen from client offices and cars not to mention dropped or broken laptops. All these events mean their business is impacted negatively because of lost data because many people still use software with local data copies on their PC/Mac.

But not if they use SaaS. In every case the saasu.com clients get up and running in minutes with much relief.

No loss of -

• Data (nor any data disclosure risk) – just find another computer with Internet access
• Time just when you need that time the most
• Revenue
• Client Satisfaction

It is unlikely any laptop with a local copy of your financial records will ever offer the same security and peace of mind as SaaS ‘big iron’ technology infrastructure.

Yet another reason why SaaS (Software as a Service) will prevail over Software for most businesses in the long run and why more and more are realising this benefit every single day.

The thing I love about the net is unfortunately the thing I also dislike about it. You can meet people online from all around the world but at the same time you don’t often get to meet them face to face without great expense. Last week was different when I travelled to Perth, I met some great customers, giving me a chance to put faces to weblogs and avatars.

Number 1 tip – visit customers that you’d be happy to be friends with.

This really makes the whole thing very enjoyable. It drives you to do it again. I met some great people who reminded why Perth is such a great place (I grew up there). Had a dinner catch-up at the Two Fat Indians with the Mad Pilot, aka Myles Eftos and his gorgeous Italian descent girlfriend Giovanna (Myles act fast or someone will steal her from you). Myles has a cool time tracking app called 88miles built with Ruby
Also present from Millstream and equally as beautifully designed people were Rosemary and Adrian Lynch. Millstream has an awesome CMS called Spring which I got a chance to quickly check out. Looks a lot cleaner and far more image management friendly than WordPress, Blogger etc. It has the ability to manage image shadows and fades better than any CMS I have seen. (I’ve tried and used many a CMS).

Between this group of people they are a large part of Port80 and the Australian Web Industry Association. All of whom use Saasu!

More Top Tips To Leverage Your Travel

• Piggy Back – If you have one big reason to travel then use the opportunity to pile on a bunch of other value adds.
• Jam it in – Book up your time but leave some personal time to keep the whole experience enjoyable so you’ll want to do it again.
• Meet customers you like – Time, money and physical effort is being expended. Travel is hard work, see people you like, you’re out laying a lot to do it.
• Watch your travel footprint – I try and catch trams, buses, ferries, whenever I can. You get a better feel for the people and the place than you would from a cab whose driver will just chew your ear off. You can also lower your carbon footprint. The plane trip alone used up all your Carbon budget!
• Learn about your product – Do an in person Q&A of customers you catch up with. Learn what they think of your product, understand their needs and business better and ask them what they would like to see in your product or service offering.
• Break habits – When you go away you break your normal flow. This is actually a very good time to break habits. On my last trip my aim was to stop checking what was on TV that night as the first thing I do when I get home (after saying hello to everyone obviously).
• Follow Up – book all your new prospects into Saasu, thank everyone for their time and progress leads. Most good business trips are killed off by the failure to follow up.

• 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.