It doesn’t take long to see the difference between where Google is coming from and where we are going with Acrobat.com. This tweet from a few weeks ago is one pithy perspective:
“I must admit Adobe’s Buzzword looks like creamy, fattening butter next to trim, healthy margarine GDocs. But I like butter…” – @mahyuni
I love seeing that sort of emotional response to Buzzword and Acrobat.com. At the risk of dangerously mixing saturated fat and cardiac metaphors, I think the reason people respond so deeply to Acrobat.com, even in its early “unfinished” stage, is that we believe great designs engage both hearts and minds.
To start the discussion, let me brag a little on the early success of our collegial competitor, Google Docs.
Although relatively few people use Google Docs regularly, Google is clearly doing a lot to raise overall awareness of how ‘cool’ and convenient it is to create documents online. I was lucky enough to work with the co-founders of Google Docs (nee Writely), Sam Schillace and Steve Newman, in the early days of Adobe (nee Macromedia) Contribute, and it is exciting to see their success. It is also exciting to be in a market with strong competitors…usually means there is a “there” there.
Good design works, as GDocs shows. It does what you expect. Good design fits the motto of my alma mater – your hands can make it do what your mind thinks it should. And, importantly, good design can be measured, which is a big benefit from an engineering and marketing perspective. Google is famous for design analysis by the numbers, doing things like testing 41 shades of blue. That makes sense, given that Google was founded with a passion for information, for analyzing data. And numbers are everywhere when you are running an online business. For good or bad, I spend a lot more time looking at charts and graphs and data cubes than I do looking at product designs (the rest of the team gets to do that fun stuff).
So to be clear, even great designs must first be good.
But while good design might be good enough for processing information, it is not good enough for collaboration (or perhaps for people-centric innovation in general). If information is about bits of data and the patterns they create, then collaboration is about groups of people and the ideas they create. And we people are a curious lot with some strange ideas; we want things to be better, but we don’t like to change.
That is where great design comes in.
Great design changes people. It makes them not just willing to change, but it gets them excited about it. It is the difference between loving what a product can do (mp3 players) and loving the entire experience of doing it (iPod). Great design can’t be easily measured until after its impact is obvious, but it causes people to write things about Buzzword like this from David Pierce, or the end of this posting by Dustin Wax, or this recent email feedback from a customer:
“Hello, and congratulations on the product. I have found it very pleasant to use and it makes me feel like writing for no reason…” – Tomás Caironi
Why did Tomás write that to us? (And no, he is not a starving poet.)
I can tell you that focus groups did not hold sway over our dark user interface (no need to run the numbers there). Focus groups didn’t get that excited about the beautiful appearance of text on the page, and they mostly yawned at the clever and colorful commenting feature. Some of them were even uncomfortable about the idea of having “little pictures of strangers,” aka avatars, next to people’s names. And our sleeping baby dialog, while cute, is perhaps a bit odd inside a professional software product.
I know what would happen if we ran A/B tests past a few hundred thousand people and looked at the data. After the first 24-hours we’d be off building a product that looks and acts like Google Docs…or perhaps, more to the point, like Microsoft Word. But the data from the following 6-month period would tell a different story.
In that vein, here is a number for you: in an academic study last year, after using various products to collaborate on projects over the course of a semester, 85% of students preferred Buzzword over Google Docs and Word. In other words, 100,000 people a week are signing up for Acrobat.com for good reason.
We are not trying to collect all the world’s information as quickly as possible, and we are not trying to build a new office productivity suite. We are trying to build a better collaboration solution, so people can work together more effectively on their ideas.
So our user interface is dark and simple because we want your ideas, i.e. documents, to take prominence. The text rendering is beautiful because we want the zen of your ideas to radiate from the screen (hey, I can’t help it, I live in Marin County and work in SOMA). We did our clever commenting and let people pick personal avatars because collaboration is about people, generally people with strong opinions who know each other fairly well and have a thing or two to say to each other. And we put the baby up there because people like to have fun, especially when working together on ideas.
We still do focus groups, A/B testing and number crunching, all the stuff you need for good design. But we also have some brilliant designers who, when it matters, set the direction and design some love into our products. Because when it comes to collaboration, we believe good design is not good enough; only great design is going to change the way we all work together.
I’ll end with the rest of the story from Tomás Caironi. He went on to write this:
“…I have been trying to use it whenever possible, but it can’t be my default writing app yet. This is because I’m studying engineering and this means I have to write many formulas into my coursework…However, this is not a common feature in web-writing-apps and this is not the main issue given that there are many LaTeX renderers online from which to extract an image. What makes it especially difficult in Buzzword is the inability to import images from a web URL…[fixing this] would improve immensely the usability of Buzzword for students of exact sciences.”
That’s the other great thing about great design – people care enough to spend time telling you not just what’s wrong, but how to make it better. And we’re listening.
Next time, maybe some thoughts on SharePoint, or perhaps a bit about the people using Acrobat.com…who are all these people, anyway? For future updates you can follow me on Twitter @erikdlarson.
Comments
Okay, I just had to say something here. I find it interesting that this post brings up number crunching as part of the stuff that one needs for good design. Why is this interesting? Well, because acrobat.com currently does not provide for number crunching or other critical functions needed for good design. You see, while I loved acrobat.com initially, the fundamental problem with it is that it did not/does not have all the necessary tools for everyday work. Development has centered on collaboration, but at the expense of substantive enhancements to the existing programs or the addition of new programs. As a result, some vital tools are missing.
What tools are these? Well, how about a spreadsheet program, a drawing solution, or a presentation program? What about styles in Buzzword (people have been pleading for this for a long time)? Although these tools are part of a “traditional” office suite, they are there for a reason. The features that are missing are the “stuff” needed for ROBUST documents.
Sure, we can all talk about a better collaboration solution until we’re blue in the face, but until a full set of tools are there to create more than just a simple word processing document on which to collaborate, acrobat.com is simply another pretty face without substance. I am all for collaboration, but with acrobat.com I am struggling to find a way to incorporate a spreadsheet into my word processing document, which will eventually become a presentation.
I don’t want to sound so negative. I really, really want acrobat.com to succeed because I recognize its value. The collaboration features ARE terrific and I use them. Document creation itself, however, in all its forms, must be the next order of business for acobat.com’s design team. Otherwise, OpenOffice/MS Office on a laptop and a flash drive are still the order of the day.
Hi Frank, thanks for your comment. I agree with your sentiments completely, as do a lot of other people; a search on http://ideas.acrobat.com for spreadsheet, presentation, or styles shows clearly that you are not alone. And when I said Acrobat.com is still in an early “unfinished” state, those three features are definitely at the top of the list and thus are the next order of business…I will write a “Top 10 Missing Features” blog posting soon to clarify that.
So we hear you, we’re with you, and stay tuned. Great design does sometimes take a little longer in the early stages, especially on the scale of usage we are seeing so far, but I promise this will be a big year for Acrobat.com.
It is also nice to see a shout-out like this from northern Illinois. I grew up on a farm in Plato Center and went to Burlington Central High School just a bit down I-90 from you guys.
Today, I’m unsubscribing from this blog in my RSS reader. I got invited to Buzzword quite a while ago, long before the transition to acrobat.com. I loved it. I loved the style and the feel and the zen of writing. It made me want to write like the other people you mentioned. I tried to write a paper on it (I’m an academic), but abandoned it due to lack of styles and the inability to see where other collaborators had made changes. Then I tried to use it for freewriting, but it was too annoying to not be able to indent outlines from the keyboard, so that was abandoned as well. It couldn’t work offline, and it couldn’t interface with zotero. I told myself, though, “it’s young, it’s beautiful, and it’s going to be awesome soon.” So I subscribed to the RSS feed, and waited.
Last month i tried to make a syllabus in buzzword for a class with four professors. I made the doc and got to work. After all this time, there are no styles. I couldn’t draw a horizontal line. I began poking around and still couldn’t indent lists from the keyboard. In fact, it looked almost exactly like it did when i first used it, which brings us to this post. In March of 2008 the blog had a post on google docs vs. buzzword. “Buzzword is beautiful…it makes you feel like writing…google docs is for simple documents”. This post has nothing more to say a year later. There have been sharing improvements and added language support, but little support for making anything more than “simple documents”. These days, google docs does page layouts and styles (lame as the implementation may be). It works offline and with zotero. It’s hideous to look at, but it’s getting better. I wish I believed the same of buzzword.
We understand your frustration.
Small startups can be fast and nimble. On the other hand, small startups with only one product who try competing with large rich companies like Google and Microsoft tend to go out of business with alarming frequency. For Buzzword’s survival and for its long-term health, we determined that we’d best succeed as part of a large, well-regarded company, and Adobe was and is the best fit.
Rest assured, the Buzzword team has not gone away, nor have we been resting.
Since joining Adobe, we’ve gone from adding over 100,000 new users in the first year to the incredible rate over 100,000 new users per week as part of Acrobat.com. And while managing that explosive growth, we have also shipped 6 new versions of Buzzword and added the following features:
* Jan 2008 – Background color in table cells; text highlight; import/export for .docx (Word 2007), text, HTML; strikethough; checkbox list type, user information on share bar tiles
* June 2008 – PDF export (our most highly requested feature); integration with Adobe ID system and Acrobat.com
* July 2008 – ODT(open office) export, better sharing invitations; foreign language spell-check support (19 new dictionaries); support for IE 8 beta and Flash Player 10 beta
* September 2008 – Internalization (support for country preferences, page settings, etc); translation to French, German, International English
* December 2008 – Open Access documents; ability to copy and paste sharing lists; ODT (open office) import
* March 2009 – Document compare (Diffs); full justification; Epub export (for ebook readers); support for Safari Beta 4
In addition the team has grown and is working long and hard integrate the Buzzword product with Acrobat.com. Unfortunately for our loyal users like you, a lot of our work recently is invisible. Fortunately for us all, the work we’re doing will have big advantages down the road.
So, what’s taking up the bulk of our time and effort? Our largest effort is in completely rewriting our backend – our foundation, if you will. We’re rewriting it both to prepare for continued future growth and to make Buzzword more fully a foundational element of Acrobat.com – a larger suite of applications including ConnectNow, Share, CreatePDF online and some new things we’ve yet to announce. Further, we need to do this work to accommodate the offline case for Buzzword.
So what’s all this mean for our customers?
It means that we’ll make a number of announcements and ship a lot of new stuff in 2009. We’re making Buzzword part of a larger whole. One we’re confident will offer a rich, collaborative, online suite of products that will make a difference in people’s lives.
We’re also paying a lot of attention to user feedback. We get it from blog postings like yours, from our forums, from email sent to our feedback address, and from our new Ideas! page (http://ideas.acrobat.com) where the number one request is for a better file organizer.
And for what it’s worth, it’s killing me that we don’t have Styles.