Software May Be Eating the World, But UX Holds the Keys to the Kingdom

David is a director in the infrastructure group with DigitalOcean and has written this piece from the infrastructure UX perspective.

Introduction

In August 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote an essay titled Why Software is Eating the World. It quickly became a classic, quoted everywhere from Silicon Valley to Wall St. boardrooms. Andreessen argues (convincingly) that software is disrupting nearly every major market. What the piece doesn’t touch on is that disruptive ideas are a dime a dozen — what actually makes a company successful is its ability to create an incredible user experience.

This particular topic hits home for me as I’ve made a career in the infrastructure world, most recently at DigitalOcean. Here, the User Experience (UX) resonates throughout the entire product. From my perspective, infrastructure shapes the UX of any online product/service through a number of ways, including speed, ease of use and the two big ones: uptime and availability. Each of these factors require a myriad of behind-the-scenes technical acumen in a range of disciplines — the choice and maintenance of hardware, engineering on the hypervisors, network engineering, security, etc.

So what is the UX? In the software industry, it’s the experience you have interacting with a website or using an app. Your emotions, experiences, frustrations and satisfaction are what makes up your UX for a given product. The overall UX is always coupled together with the User Interface (UI). When you visit a particular website or use an app on your phone, you are interacting with the UI. At its core, UX is how you feel while interacting with and using the UI or other part of the product.

Indeed much of the overall processes to create an exemplary UX are invisible to end users. For instance, the speed with which a product reacts or a website loads are all part of the UX. Specific hardware components also deliver UX through how they feel and in some cases are more important than the software running on them. For example, many people felt the initial iPad announcement from Apple was simply a huge iPod Touch; the software was all but identical. In reality, the form factor (size) of the hardware exploded into a tablet market many companies had previously attempted to crack with little success. That form factor change alone led to a positive UX as a tablet was now available with an operating system that was already beloved by and familiar to millions of users.

Google Vs. Yahoo!

Google is well known throughout Silicon Valley for its attention to UX. You can’t get a more functional homepage than what Google offers — they knew what they wanted to provide for users, and they executed flawlessly. The concept itself wasn’t new — Yahoo! (and others) already offered search engines — but Google was able to fully understand and explore user behavior to the point that it’s extremely rare to have to scroll to the second page of results to find what you’re looking for. Google’s results coupled with a minimalistic home page that requires absolutely no guesswork is a recipe for market-leading UX. Compare this with Yahoo!’s overly complex and ever-changing homepage and it’s fairly easy to see why Google rules the roost.

Facebook Vs. Myspace

On paper, MySpace should have remained the user-favorite social network. In July 2006, MySpace was the #1 visited website in the US and was owned by NewsCorp (so it had plenty of access to advertising capital and media). So what happened? MySpace was overly-focused on user customizability; users could edit their pages to no end with different backgrounds, themes, etc. The result? Terrible UX. Jumping from page to page was like leaping from one poorly designed site to the next.

Facebook, on the other hand, offers a static format. So while users could still customize their information, where that information lives on the page and how it’s displayed is uniform from user to user. Things are where you expect them to be — a better user experience. Again we see a newcomer overtake an established early player by simplifying and offering a better UX.

Bloomberg Vs. Thomson Reuters

When Bloomberg entered into the financial market terminal business in the early 80s, several long-term incumbents largely dominated the financial terminal market, namely Thomson Reuters. Instead of focusing their efforts on IT departments of financial firms who were in charge of purchasing and installing financial terminals for their traders, Bloomberg went straight to the traders themselves. By focusing directly on the user and their needs Bloomberg was able to design a user-friendly terminal requiring little to no retraining for finance professionals. Bypassing the market’s traditional customers and going straight to the user proved to be a wise decision, as today Bloomberg has roughly 1/3rd of the financial terminal market, accounting for over 85% of revenue.

So what did the user want? Before the days when the majority of Western households were blanketed in WiFi and computer literacy was nearly as necessary as literacy itself, the vast majority of finance professionals knew little about the machines they worked on, and had neither the time nor the inclination to learn them. Among other software advancements, the Bloomberg terminal replaced a traditional keyboard with a specialized one loaded with familiar financial terms. The Bloomberg terminal was easily accessible and a timesaver as the financial terms already in a trader’s vocabulary were hot-mapped onto the keyboard. The UX of the Bloomberg terminal is, to this day, the key to its success.

DigitalOcean’s Close Relationship to UX

Leveraging cloud infrastructure’s economies of scale and performance is the best way to scale online operations. The next logical question is which cloud provider to choose. Time and time again developers are choosing DigitalOcean. While other cloud providers may offer more feature sets, DigitalOcean is focused on offering the best possible UX for customers.

To be fair, the major providers need to have complex offerings if their target audience is the enterprise. Many of the current Fortune 500 didn’t start their businesses in the cloud, and there’s a ton that goes into transitioning and maintaining the infrastructure of a business. But if you’re a next generation startup — building the next AirBnB or Uber and starting with a cloud foundation from the beginning — DigitalOcean offers true UX differentiation. We’re betting on UX, not competing with the major providers and trying to go toe-to-toe, feature-for-feature — though many new features are in the works. Instead, we’re looking to disrupt the entire industry by offering the cleanest, most elegant and simplest UX possible.

The software revolution is here and it’s disrupting nearly every industry on the planet. But software is simply the idea, which are commonplace within a given sector. It’s the UX that determines the winners from the losers. My little contribution to this axiom is the infrastructure, the underpinnings of the technical world that allow the Internet and its products to be delivered and consumed seamlessly. It’s the overall experience that the user feels a connection with, and when implemented correctly can vault a company from obscurity into the limelight in the blink of an eye.

— David McKay is the Director of Infrastructure Engineering at DigitalOcean in New York City. A Cambridge University graduate and startup veteran, David was an early employee with both Google and AdMob (acquired by Google). Follow David on Twitter @DavidMcKayV