It's becoming almost a daily occurrence: Check my Twitter feed or Google News feed or whatever, and it's always there: "Hey, check out this cool new communications app that a co-founder of Skype/Facebook/etc. just launched." Here's the latest, about an app called Wire.
Before I go on: Is that a thing now? Retro names for next-gen communications products? "Wire" for a mobile phone app, "Circuit" for a product that lives in the IP cloud.... If so, I call dibs on Strowger for my app, which I think will use location-based technology to let you find and contact the nearest undertaker and help you arrange a funeral, pick a casket, and custom mix the embalming chemicals you want for your dearly departed--all from your iPhone, iPad, or Android (Windows version coming).
Reading about Wire, this latest communications app, made me think about the importance of the user interface when it comes to enterprise communications--and, for that matter, when it comes to consumer communications, too. The TechCrunch article oohs and aahs over the cool elements of the Wire interface and notes that the interface was designed with millennials/mobile natives in mind, rather than old folks. The implication is that this will make young people prefer it to Skype (or any of the other mobile communications apps out there). But I'd argue that even as we obsess over user interface, it's actually likely to matter less over time.
I don't want to say that building a good user interface is easy--clearly it's not--but I do think that if your differentiator is that your user interface is incrementally better than somebody else's user interface, you're doomed. Public communications clients/apps rise or fall on network effects, and enterprise clients rise or fall--or should rise or fall--on back-end features that consumers don't care about and enterprise end users don't entirely control. It's not that user interface is a commodity exactly, but it's not a differentiator; it resides in the land of VHS/Betamax.
User experience is a slightly different matter. In her recent No Jitter piece on UX, Blair Pleasant, president of COMMfusion and a co-founder of UCStrategies, offers a lot of great insights and differing perspectives on how enterprise vendors will approach the issue of user experience, and how enterprise decision-makers might make their choices. I think this is one area where things may shake out to the enterprise's advantage.
The downside for enterprise vendors is that they're just getting around to building features and functions into their clients that consumer-grade apps have had for some time now and continue to improve on. But the advantage is that each of these consumer-grade apps gets less useful as the next one is released. Can you imagine trying to contact someone and having to figure out if they're on Skype, Wire, WhatsApp, or any of a host of other voice/messaging/video apps? At some point, if you're trying to get work done on your phone, it's going to be easier to just use the app or client that your company has standardized on, because that's where you're going to have the most consistent experience and persistence of connectivity, contacts, and content. And it seems logical that this standardized app would (or at least could) come from your strategic enterprise communications vendor.
It's still not exactly clear to me what the business model is for the enterprise vendors in this area--and judging by Cisco's Project Squared rollout, I'm not sure it's clear to the vendors either. I think it falls somewhere in between surrendering to the over-the-top consumer apps and insisting on total control via a mobile UC client. I think Squared and Circuit are groping toward that middle ground, but I'm not convinced they're there yet.
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