'Pataphysical science in the home

The Cool Tool, aka hammerhead

Is it a good strategy to base your web business idea on a cool tool? Well, if you’re the talented Loren Brichter, the answer is probably YEAH. He created and distributed the premier Twitter client for the iPhone, an application that cost me €2.39 on iTunes. His 1-man shop made a good income from sales and then was acquired by Twitter and he was hired on, in a presumably pretty sweet deal.

Yet the percentage of developers who are able to make a living from the sales of client applications is rather small and once a few big applications gain traction, it’s going to be very difficult to compete. And let’s not forget that in most segments there are a plethora of good enough clients being distributed for free.

It makes a lot more sense to think of your cool tool as facilitator, one that does not call attention to itself, but that enables, simplifies or reveals an experience in a way that is better than what currently exists. The business opportunity will be found in the value that you can create in the experience, not necessarily in the tool itself.

As an example, this is what Foursquare, Facebook and the other slew of mobile location-centric applications are all about. The holy grail here is to help connect local businesses with existing customers and for them to be introduced to potential new customers. Putting it together correctly, businesses will be happy to pay for more, and more frequent, customers while users of your cool tool enjoy the benefits of social discovery, special deals and the nearly magical power to know the best nearby places even if you’ve never been there before.

The holy grail of human-computer interface design must be the DWIW function. I communicate with the machine and the machine just Does What I Want.

Do what I want!

I was thinking about this after having played around with Wolfram Alpha. Actually what sparked this post was having seen so many tweets about it mistaking it for a search engine. The tagline of Wolfram Alpha is “computational knowledge engine”, not something like “find what you are looking for” or “let me find that for you?”

But people don’t read taglines very carefully and when they do they don’t think about them too seriously. They use past experience to parse the service and charge ahead accordingly.

In trying to keep it simple, and to develop a more natural language approach to the input field, the designers of the interface present a single text entry field followed by the plus sign [=] to communicate put your input here, click to see what we can compute from that.

The problem is that most people associate a plain input field with a submit button as = Google, not a computational knowledge engine. If you scan complaining tweets you will notice that the authors hit the [=] with a DWIW intention, expecting a search result, not computational knowledge.

We are living in the pre-dawn of a new age of human-computer interaction. Eventually we will get to the point at which a single input field (with textual, audio or even electro-neurological input) will  be semantically, behaviorally and contextually (time, place, device) aware — getting us that much closer to a true DWIW command. This will require a lot of groundwork, but seeing as though folks like Wolfram, Tim Berners-Lee and an army of others are on the case, I expect to see really cool developments becoming more commonplace over the next 5-20 years