Consumer Usability
When going to http://podcasts.yahoo.com/ I see something that I’m very familiar with; audio button, listen, subscribe.
These are going to be icons – a meme. This is the beginning of a meme, very exciting! I go there right now. I’m looking at it. There’s a podcast that says ‘Unicef′. I click listen and what happens? There’s a little box that pops up. There’s fast forward, fast rewind, play, speed, and volume. This is brilliant. Why is it brilliant? Usability.
I can do this from anywhere in the world.Consumption usability. We talked about the power of directories. iTunes owns that. Now the power of usability; Yahoo owns it. All I have to do is click the “Listen” button and boom, we′re there.
If I subscribe to it, how easy is that? All of a sudden, I go into Yahoo ID and password and boom, they have me that way. I think Yahoo has a different intention behind what they′re doing here than Apple. It may not be about monetization. It may be about building their Yahoo database, whereas Apple′s intention is appeasing entertainment.
The fact is I don′t think that I’m alone when it comes to understanding new technology. I didn′t realize in the beginning that iTunes was on-line. Well http://Podcast.Yahoo.com is online and it has a subdirectory. Usability.
Paul Colligan recently had his biggest day of podcast downloads ever after sending out an e-mail letting people know they could go to a Web site and click to listen. Is this a coincidence? No, I don′t think so. It all has to do with usability.
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