Just last week Rich Wood blogged about recent Forrester Analysis about Yammer and SharePoint. Rich’s short post focused the fact that neither Yammer, nor SharePoint, nor the cloud was going away anytime soon and that Yammer is the enterprise play. I want to focus on two key items in the Forrester report, “Is Yammer + SharePoint Right For You?” It’s a research article so I won’t quote the entire thing. I do want to focus on how disruptive a cloud based play can be. Rob Koplowitz of Forrester states that Yammer is disruptive because:
- It excels at delivering new functionality fast
- It advances the user experience
From day one, Yammer’s monthly subscription business model has placed a premium on user experience. Why? Because if users didn’t like the experience and stopped using the product, they also stopped paying. In order to minimize subscription churn, Yammer had to drive the best user experience possible. Yammer has taken a very consumerlike approach and has leveraged its large freemium user base as an ongoing test lab. Any change to the user experience, including addition and subtraction of functionality, is tested against a large control group. Changes with overall positive responses are kept, others are not (often to the consternation of the engineering team), but users are king in this model.
I agree with both but want to address the second item. I can’t agree enough with Yammer’s approach towards the user experience. At the SharePoint conference back in November 2012, I attended a session where Yammer’s CIO outlined their development process. In that session, he went into more detail on the user testing process. They do use large control groups and they meticulously gather usage and survey data to determine what goes and what stays. I love the objective approach. It’s not some big wig somewhere demanding his or her pet feature. It’s a group of users that determine the end result. That’s what has driven a key set of changes where Yammer not only kept their process but has started to move that attitude back into the larger Microsoft company.
If there’s anything I have learned from our Experience Design (XD) group at Perficient over the years it’s that your overall product quality rises when you listen to your users and when you take the time to construct objective test. Yammer puts new functionality into production and then tests. Our XD people tend to construct simple models and then test but the end result is the same……. you get objective user test results.
That’s a great approach that has already paid major dividends for Yammer.
