I decided to leave Typepad (which despite my decision has served me very well) because of two things rather dear to me, namely design and free. In addition to being very flexible, WordPress seems to be embodying the two qualities that seems to be all the rage at the moment. Not that Typepad is that different from the design point of view, but in my book it just lost the battle when you add it all up.
In the past when we did not live in such an abundance one could argue, somewhat along the lines of Daniel Pink, that good design* was 90 percent utility and 10 percent significance whereas in today’s world it’s exactly the other way around -10 utility and 90 significance. In this equation utility has not became any less relevant, it’s just that everybody can afford it nowadays. In a word utility is abundant. Thus to fulfill the criteria of a good design, to be an above average product in the eyes of one’s customers in other words, it’s a game of significance. According to research at the London Business School for every percent of sales invested in product design, a company’s sales and profits rise by an average of 3 to 4 percent. Sounds great, but by definition you need to sell something to generate sales. What if it’s all free, just like WordPress? Confused yet?
Should you redesign your product that you brought to market when it became significant because it was just useful? What if you offered it for free and made money on a) support services, b) offering premium services for paying customers, c) on advertising, d) other half of the product experience, e) gave away the product to promote your service, f) partnering with someone else and giving your service free and getting revenue share from your partner’s product g) or something totally different? Perhaps that in itself could make it significant. You wouldn’t need to worry about branding and being significant if you’d give away cars and sell electricity to run them instead, would you. A good design would be build in.
*Good design can be understood to be purely about say product design or rather more generally same as branding of which product design is only a part
The above photo can be found here under Creative Commons Attribution License
