Why Good Enough Isn't - Quantifiably.

On Monday night, Ottawa had its first CaseCamp. One of the presenters was Mitch Brisebois of TrueContext (company) and SensoryMetrics (blog).

I've long believed that "Good Enough Isn't". It's just one of those things I've felt in my gut and I've tried to use as a guiding philosophy when building products. Trouble is of course, not everyone shares that belief. In fact, I'd say the minority do. The much more popular stance is, "it's good enough, ship it now", or it's cousin, "is that extra polish REALLY going to make or break the product?" (shudder).

Mitch whipped out a slide that I though was a wonderful illustration of what happens when you adopt a "good enough" philosophy with product development.

It goes something like this: If the user experience with your product is uneventful, they'll think it's "OK", probably won't remember you, and you'll have a deficit in terms of loyalty with that person.

Yet, on any modern software business plan, you'll invariably see themes like "viral adoption" and "word of mouth" dominating the marketing section. Hmmm. But the chart says you need "WOW" to get the "share with many" reaction. Morale: if you're aiming for anything less than WOW, you're aiming too low.