My presentation proposal recently was accepted by the Web 2.0 Expo SF committee. I’ll be speaking about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 applications and what product decisions can greatly improve it. The official title for the session is “Be Innovative, Yet Familiar: How to Create a Comfort App People Will Actually Use.”What we are facing today is that people, who made Facebook and Twitter an integral part of their personal life, are still often reluctant to use Web 2.0 tools at work. My presentation will explain how vendors should approach Web 2.0 solutions, so that business users can quickly adopt them from day one. The point of focus there is recognizing the existing user behaviors and fitting into their current workflows.
There are many examples in the industry where this worked well, and there are also examples where great ideas that didn’t follow this simple rule stumbled along the way. We’ve followed this approach at Wrike, our project management software, and it proved to be very effective, so I wanted to share it with my peers. Wrike is now used by thousands of corporate and SMB teams worldwide. We took on a very complex problem (everyone who tried to implement Microsoft Project Server in their organization knows what I’m talking about) and came up with an elegant solution that people love and instantly adopt. A big part of it was relying on existing behaviors, like sending e-mail, which is the backbone of the majority of online project communications today. So we zealously focused on closing the gap between e-mail and project management. During my presentation, I plan to share how this was done and other examples of making an app that’s comfortable to use, instead of trying to revolutionize people’s working experience in one big leap.
As you probably know, Web 2.0 Expo is the biggest industry event that showcases the latest Web 2.0 business models, development paradigms, products and design strategies for the creators of the next-generation Web. This is where industry leaders share new ideas, experiences, case studies, techniques and tactics to reshape reality by means of technology.
I hope to see you at the conference. Are there any particular questions you think I should cover in my talk? Go ahead and post them in the comments.
