vs. HipChat
Slack
Ease of use + integrations
- What it did
- Onboarding polished through a 2013 preview with friendly teams
- HipChat
- Launched in 2010 before the feature set was complete
Ease of Use
What is Ease of Use?
A company makes a product simpler to understand and more accessible to the people who need it. Better design lets customers do useful work with less learning, technical expertise or confusion. The strategy is to make that difference a reason customers choose and continue using the product.
How Ease of Use works
Clear workflows, useful defaults and understandable controls can let more people complete work that previously required specialists or extensive training. Customers can retain the capabilities they need while the product handles complexity in ways they can understand.
How companies won with Ease of Use
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. InVision
Figma
Browser editor: the file lives at a URL
- What it did
- Custom browser rendering engine built 2012-15
- InVision
- A review layer on files made in Sketch and Photoshop
vs. BigCommerce
Shopify
Easy hosted store
- What it did
- Shopify runs the software (2006); safe template language
- BigCommerce
- Hosted only from 2009; plans tiered by yearly sales, Standard under $50,000, Plus to $150,000, fees reset on trailing GMV (2020)
vs. Linode
DigitalOcean
Simple developer cloud from hosting veterans
- What it did
- Founders ran dedicated hosting (ServerStack) before a 2012 beta built for individual developers
- Linode
- Launched 2003 for Linux administrators; richer control panel in 2013, but root administration assumed
Also tagged: Buildium · HubSpot · Instructure · MongoDB · Navan · Nubank · Robinhood · Samsara · Snowflake · Tableau · Xero · Zendesk
The question to ask of a company
For which customers did simpler, more accessible design make the product easier to learn and use, compared with what alternative, and what evidence connects that difference to adoption or preference?
Who names it
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Kim & Mauborgne + | Simplicity and convenience in the buyer utility map |
| Christensen | Simpler, more accessible offerings within disruptive innovation |
| Don Norman + | Design that makes complexity understandable and usable |
| Karri Saarinen + | Craft; opinionated software |
| Tony Fadell + | Product craft and the quality bar |
Note. Ease of Use is the editorial label; practitioners also call it craft. The judgment is about the product as a whole, compared with a named rival or prior alternative. A comparison with a category (for example "financial apps") counts when an independent reviewer, analyst or award jury made it, the category is the one customers left or chose against, and it is dated within the competition period. Company self-description never counts. Removing one specialist skill is Democratize the Expert Task; faster core work is Speed. In the competitor-pair research, better craft lost to a faster or cheaper product four times (Rdio, RethinkDB, Linode, Jobber).