It’s now accepted wisdom that no application is an island, and data just wants to be free. So, an important consideration in creating your product is how your users will use it to share. Being able to easily get information out of your application and shared with other people is an important element in your user’s satisfaction. It’s also critically important to your software business. Why? Because word of mouth will be your most important form of marketing and nothing is a better conversation starter than, “How’d you do that?”.

In the latest instalment of Art of the Product, Sean Johnson argues that platform choice is one of the most important decisions in a product’s design, and if done right, it’s not a technical decision, it’s a market decision.

….When you find one of these tiny innovations, one that you truly appreciate, one that makes you smile against your will, by all means, copy it! If it applies directly to your product, just take it! Use it to make your product better for your users. If it doesn’t apply directly to your product, steal it for 15 minutes instead, and use that much time to think really hard and about what makes that particular innovation work. Maybe it will inspire some lateral thinking and a new idea that does apply to your product….

Sean Johnson asks you to consider what markets you can really compete in as a software vendor.

In this second installment of his “Art of the Product” column, Sean Johnson discusses some of the pros and cons of having design work done on spec