Are You A Developer, User, or Consumer? Why Aren't You All?

filed under Crossover · 2 comments in the original

I was struck by some observations Dave Winer made yesterday in his Morning Coffee Notes Podcast. His primary topic was the differentiation between Developers and Users (the Ying and Yang of Dave's Tao). Problem is, the worlds way bigger than Developers and Users.

I wear many hats every day. Sometimes I am a Developer writing code, other times I am a User evaluating a design or experience, but most of the time I'm a Marketer trying to understand how to deliver a message to the Consumer. This year, we've seen Blogging rise in the Geek Ranks. We're seeing Podcasting start to grow now as the new Toy De Jour. We've also seen things like Online Dating, Social Networking, and the catch-all Social Media blossom around us. Problem is, we're just not looking far enough up the food chain. Here's why:

If we want our systems to really work, we need to truly account for the world at large, not use Developer and Users. Success, from my market definition, is converting Consumers into Users in large numbers. Right now, we've been successful in proving that we can get Geeks to do Geeky things - but that's about it.

Let's put on our magic glasses and look at Podcasting to see how we're missing the boat still:

Developers - These are the Programmers; the people that are currently developing the applications that power the revolution. We've got people collaborating (like Adam and Dave working on things like BitTorrent and OPML integration) and other people developing their own applications that pick and poke at parts of the required functionality.

So, here we have the first leg of the problem - Developers are too smart for their own good. As Dave notes, they try to push people towards doing things the way they see it being done. This is why we generally find super nerdy features that no on every uses as well as grotesque usability standards. Developers assume they are Users and figure if they can Use it and you can't, well, then your stupid.
Users - These are the Podcasters. Right now, we're still in that super early-adopter stage of things, so we're seeing a lot more geeks than usual.. the Developer-User ratio is fairly skewed. However, that's not to say that we aren't seeing the net widen quite a bit now and we're finding people that may seem "unexpected" by geekdom.

Users are always right. There's something wrong with your app since it's harrassing them - there's NO WAY they could be doing something wrong. Admittedly, aren't Developers writing software for the Users? Users don't understand Software Engineering, Architecture, or anything in between. They're needs and time-driven ("What's taking so long? Just move it over there. I don't understand why you can't just...."). Worst of all, they're the exact same of Developers - the way they want it is the way everyone should want it.
Consumers These are the Podcatchers. For anyone that's not familiar with the term, that's someone that used to be called a Listener, Reader, etc. - but we have to assign all kinds of weird names to everything. Right now, again, this audience's composition is skewed heavily to include the Users - the people listening are mostly the people producing.

Consumers haven't got the foggiest idea what we're all doing. That's not a jab at them, that's a wonderful comfort. There are those crazy consumers that tinker to make their own solutions to problems (we call them inventors and entrepreneurs), but most of them are just waiting to hear about the latest problem they have and the solution we made for it.

So the major issue here is visibility into the needs and desires of the Consumer from the vantage point of the Developer. We need to stop being geeks and start asking ourselves questions about how we can get out Moms involved in this thing. How do we distill not only the process of doing something, but also the spirit of it?

Tipping Points don't happen on their own, they require a rather unique and diverse cast of characters for things to go as planned. We need to involve more and more Connectors and Salesmen to get things to the next level. We need translators for the Geeky things we do so that the masses will not only understand it but also be excited about it.

These are some loose ramblings (started at 3AM) on a rather long and complicated subject. I look forward to any feedback everyone has and plan to revisit this many times in the coming weeks.