kip/bot/blog

Yesterday, David Weinberer twittered an increasingly common experience:

He saw something with a variety of features that looked familiar and seemed to string together intriguingly into something resembling value but, in the end, really couldn’t put his finger on it or endorse it.

When this tweet occurred, I was in the middle of trying to figure out what Skitch is, and whether it’s worth checking out.  This is something I seem to be doing more and more of recently.  Explaining the value of interactive experiences has always been a little tricky, even to professionals.  Some experiences involve behaviors which are foreign (sharing photos on the web).   Others hardly seem worth the effort (watching content through slingbox).
Now, there’s the problem of intricacy.  So much interactive design today is focused on one or both of two things:  subtle improvements to the individual steps in an experience; and/or the connective tissue between those steps.
I’m having that cognitive challenge with Skitch right now. Yesterday I witnessed some Twitter traffic in which people whom I respect were using and raving about Skitch. So I check out the site, watch the video, and try to decide if it’s worth trying. Its features look compelling:

1. screen capture
2. rudimentary image editing
3. easy connections to web services like flickr, .mac
4. less easy connections to blogs, and email clients
5. the ability to put your pictures on skitch.com
6. All wrapped in one experience, I think …

Features 1 - 3, I already have in place (and in abundance). Feature 4, the ability to connect to my personal email, blog etc., I have already done some work on getting sorted out (and do it every time I get a new machine). The value of feature 5 is unclear to me: if I can post to flickr, why am I putting it here? That said, a friend of mine, who is an active flickr user, is using skitch in his twitters . . . why is he bothering?

Feature 6 is potentially the one that moves me. A well constructed integration of previously dispersed functions is potentially serious value.

But see how hard it is to tell what we’re even looking at. Here’s how Skitch describes itself:

Skitch.com + Skitch = fast and fun image sharing. Skitch.com is a webservice that works hand in hand with our application Skitch to give you 1-click uploading of images for fast and fun image sharing.

No differentiator from or value-add to flickr or other photo sharing services, no reference to the image editing interface that follows:

Then you have the additional text, which references two products, but still emphasizes sharing.  This time, instead of being fast and fun, it’s fun and useful:

So I tried the video and that left me confused also.  It was a combination demo, screenshot gallery, and user scenario.   Four different moments to get the idea across and I’m still confused.
Some of this isn’t a big deal, of course.  The product is in beta, so it’s messaging is likely to be as well.  They may be looking to simply be acquired, so it’s not clear who they’re really selling to.

That said, it’s interesting to note how intricate interactive experiences are and the new communication challenges they pose.  Flickr and the iPod were two late entrants to their respective fields.  The iPod had fewer features than other MP3 players, but was easier and more pleasurable to use (and had a better catalog).  Those are very difficult things to prove.  Flickr was supposed to be somehow more convenient and had the foreign, counterintuitive benefit, of being in the midst of a vast community.  Their value props were indistinguishable from their predecessors, and their differentiators were very subtle.  Since easy and fun are hard to reveal in text and words, and even screenshots, those stories need to be told in different ways — word of mouth, more complex visuals, motion graphics/videos.

Skitch is in a similar spot, and I’m experiencing it the same way I did the iPod and Flickr:  I’m watching it with the knowledge that I already have what it offers, wondering if it has something special, and waiting for critical mass of people telling me how great it is, or a negative critical mass of frustration with what I already have until I decide to spend time trying it.

We’re all about telling the stories these days, and I’m never quite sure I understand what that means.   For some emerging interactive experiences, however, it seems pretty clear that we have to start getting comfortable with intricate stories that result in fun, easy, and useful.