Comments on: Web App Trends: Users as Developers

By: Personas and the Advantage of Designing for Yourself - Bokardo

Personas and the Advantage of Designing for Yourself - Bokardo — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 21:01:38 +0000

[...] year ago November I wrote a piece called Users as Developers. In it I argue that there is another important element at work here: passion. I’ll reiterate [...]

By: Daniel Szuc

Daniel Szuc — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 16:29:37 +0000

Suggest if companies can harness this type of attitude internally - get people excited about innovating and building great products leveraging on existing technologies - magic can happen!

I guess that what Google are doing … imagine … being able to explore a platform like Google, its data, coming up with ideas and testing those ideas quickly with users. Imagine being able to do that without any of the typical corporate constraints. Even better!

By: Travis

Travis — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 23:26:15 +0000

I am glad to see this article — I am a software developer by trade but have also grown up in a entrepreneurial environment. I used the “scratch your own itch” concept to start Team Cowboy (www.teamcowboy.com), a web site for managing sports teams. I am on a recreational soccer team in Seattle, WA and was using another site for this purpose and simply got fed up with it’s lack of functionality, slowness, and the site manager’s inability to respond to my basic emails. Out of frustration I created Team Cowboy and now upwards of 50 sports teams are calling it home — many of which have also switched over from the other Web site I had been using. I see the “scratch your own itch” idea as common sense and something I plan to employ into many other ventures I have planned for the near future… -Travis

By: Joshua

Joshua — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 19:35:47 +0000

Fixed now…thanks…and great add-on, too! Getting those subtle things right is a form of expertise, I think, that maybe isn’t seen as such.

By: Mike McDerment

Mike McDerment — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 19:25:19 +0000

Joshua,

Thanks for the mention and a great post…From my experience it makes all the difference when you are intimate with the problem you are trying to solve. That way you have a much better chance of getting the subtle decisions right as you design your application and the UE…and the right answers to those subtle decisions is where the magic is at in web apps.

BTW - Looks like the link to my post about FreshBooks is broken (it has a link break tag on the end of it).

Cheers,

- Mike