A Single Article

Get a Trackback link

1. Bob Smiley July 11, 2008

   This is what happens when the product is considered what’s being sold, and not the entire image to the prospective customer. I suspect this is the case with this website.

   The product in this case is a software program (or something… I’m not familiar with enablus, I just checked it out for about 5 seconds to see what you were posting about) and all the focus is on the product. The website is done by marketing. The website is therefore under a totally different set of developers with a different set of criteria, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the guys who developed the website have no idea about the user experience and other usability features of their own product.

   In other words, I suspect it’s a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, when, in actuality, it should all be getting done by the same hand!

   As a software engineer myself, I used to lament the role of marketing, presuming that a good product will sell itself. Not so; a good product needs good marketing. But websites are a function of marketing and, unless the software product is intrinsically web-based, the website is not engineered as much as it is designed.

   Many software companies don’t realize how much their website reflects on their perceived product offering. The assumption is that, since they are a softwaer company, they know how to do good web design. This is sometimes the case, but I’ve found it to be an afterthought in many cases, especially startups. And I’m not sure it’s restricted to software companies, but that’s the domain I’m familiar with.

   Good catch.