– Anthony Franco, President, EffectiveUI

If you’ve ever heard Anthony Franco speak, you know he is passionate about what he does. You also know that there’s never a dull moment in conversation with him — and that his perspectives leave nothing to the imagination. When it comes to user interfaces and rich Internet applications (RIAs), Franco’s expertise runs deep and his enthusiasm is contagious.

As president of EffectiveUI, Franco often finds himself engaged in conversation with executives about the efficacy of RIAs from a business standpoint. Every day, he enjoys the unique opportunity to work with companies like eBay, Ford, Random House, Viacom, GE, Dow Jones and NBC to help them transform the way they do business through effectively innovating. We asked Franco to share his insights about the return on investment of RIAs, and to talk about where application development is headed long- and short-term.

Q. In the early stages of a customer relationship, how do you determine if an RIA will meet your clients’ expectations and deliver a good return on their investment?

A. We start by talking about the business successes around a project. For some customers, it’s all about conversions — be it a sale, or successfully propelling someone through a process like filling out a loan application, or forwarding information to a friend. Those types of business drivers are actually quite simple to measure. On the other hand, success might be measured by less tangible factors like how viral an application is, or how the application builds brand awareness. This may sound rudimentary, but we often have to coach our clients to ask themselves: Why are we doing this?

It’s hard to quantify results at a granular level with today’s tools. Currently, the tools out there that measure the efficacy of an RIA are pretty arcane, and that’s a problem. WebTrends and Onmiture, while they have some useful aspects, are very weak. They do measure traditional user analytics that are page- and click-based, but they don’t measure user behavior within an Internet application.

Q. How do you create solutions that fit into a customer’s RIA strategy?

A. I really struggle with the phrase RIA strategy. When customers talk about an RIA strategy, what they should really be looking for are ways to listen to their customers and provide them tools that they can actually use. When companies come to us, they shouldn’t be saying, “I want a cool RIA.” Rather, they should be saying “I want to engage my users,” or, “We have a very serious problem we’re trying to mend.” Then, our approach is to ask customers: Where are your pain points, or what are the opportunities that you’re missing? And how can we leverage new technologies to better serve your customers whether internal or external?

Q. What are your views about the advantages of Web 2.0 applications?

A. Chris Bernard, an experience strategist for Microsoft says, “The difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that Web 1.0 is bad Photoshop and Web 2.0 is good Photoshop.” I don’t know if he meant that to be insightful, but, to me, it’s very insightful because what we’re doing with Web 2.0 is that we’re basically putting lipstick on the pig. We’re not always providing incremental utility gains for the end user, and that’s a big mistake.

The two most common descriptors of Web 2.0 applications are utility plus community. What’s missing is a third component called engagement — engaging your users with a process. That’s what Adobe and Microsoft are yelling about now, as is just about every organization that spends a dime on marketing. Web 2.0 RIAs are nothing without engagement.

Q. EffectiveUI is all about innovation and the user interface. How does innovation lead to a great user experience and why should we care?

A. I love that question. Honestly, I don’t like the term experience. People associate experience with pretty or with a good marketing campaign.

There’s a mantra right now about Web 2.0: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.” Honestly, simplicity is overrated and we need a new chant. Not everything can or should be simple online. What happens all too often is that we are faced with sophisticated applications that can’t be simple. They may involve utility and community, but they’re so complicated and so difficult to get through, there’s no emotional investment and users drop off.

Tim Wood, who oversees user experience for EffectiveUI, tells a good story about the Apple iPhone: Everybody says the iPhone is simple, but it’s not. It’s one of the most sophisticated consumer electronic devices ever released; it’s very complex. People confuse the iPhone’s intuitiveness with simplicity. The reason it has such high adoption is because it’s incredibly engaging.

Q. What other qualities should an RIA have to engage users?

A. A sense of trust. When someone looks at an application, they have to feel that they’re about to enter into a trustworthy activity. To appear valid, an application must first meet the brand promise. Does it match the brand visually or is the user uncertain about the look and feel of the presentation?

Secondly, does the tool look like it was built in 1990, or does it look current? To entrust users, an application has to appear contemporary — better yet, forward-thinking — yet still practical.

The third quality of engagement is an element called personal. What that means is that the application has to speak to me and convince me that it can accomplish what I need it to — not blatantly what the business wants. Ideally, those two results should mesh. Ultimately, an application must accomplish a business goal for sure, but if it doesn’t accomplish the user goal first, it’s never going to accomplish the business goal.

Q. You don’t like the word experience, and you haven’t talked about the concept of innovation yet. So why does EffectiveUI have such a strong reputation for innovating?

A. Here I go again, being contentious about industry jargon. I don’t see innovation as always good. Too often, the practical aspect of an application takes a back seat to innovation, sacrificing the essential utility piece of the puzzle for innovation’s sake. The flip side of that coin is that when designer-developer teams are in stride, and when organizations encourage a culture of exploration, and when organizations start hearing (not just listening to) their customers — innovation can happen. But without those elements in place, organizations are wasting time and money.

To me, the word experience has become overused because people use it in a stand-alone sense to describe an event. In fact, if an event isn’t useful, it’s just a commercial — like a banner ad or a skit.

My mother and my wife are perfect examples of people who could be huge online customers, but they’re not. They could both spend a ton of money online (I have four kids), but they don’t because marketers don’t listen to them. My wife does not shop at Target.com because it’s not very navigable and is overwhelming. So she drives to the store. The message here is that marketers are missing tremendous opportunities because they don’t spend enough time with users, or, in the case of the women in my life, non-users.

Q. What’s your advice to teams working toward greater user adoption?

A. To make something useful, design intuition only takes you so far. What catapults you to breakthrough applications is getting prototypes in front of users quickly and investigating how they interact with the application. Today’s technology platforms allow us to do that faster than ever before.

The Darwinian concept of ‘only the strong survive’ really applies to software evolution — only eras become weeks. In today’s world, advanced frameworks enable us to build software more rapidly than ever before. So, the concept of innovation comes into play because we can sit people in front of prototypes faster and iterate the application in shorter time frames.

Q. Without mentioning specific design tools or frameworks, what’s your advice for designers and developers to help them build better RIAs?

A. Designers need to stop obsessing about themselves and start obsessing about users. Developers need to quit thinking they’re the smartest people in the room, drop their application-dependent religions and listen harder to customers. Today’s mantra should be “The right tool for the job,” and egos should be transcended. “Doing it right” does not necessarily mean creating the most elegant code. Designers should get involved early, and they should be listened to. All team players needs to agree that nothing is more important than user input and use that data as a central rallying point.

Q. Do you have words of encouragement for managers and marketers?

A. Product managers: Get over the notion that iterative development is too risky and that your neck is on the line. Development has gone from planning to overplanning. I recommend locking your designers and developers in a room for a week with the business and user requirements.

Marketers: Scream louder! Your customers are counting on you to be their voice and you are letting them down. Be willing to argue with your IT department on behalf of your users.

CIOs and CTOs: I beg you to stop ticking off my wife and mother. It makes no difference what your technology platform is if people can’t use your application. Seek internal or external resources to build and maintain RIAs that work for the organization and for the user.

CFOs: Find the money. Here’s the ROI according to Business 2.0. “One dollar spent on advertising yields less than five dollars incremental value. But one dollar invested in creating a good customer experience can yield more then 60 dollars.” I don’t know how you actually measure such a thing, but that’s what research proves.

CEOs: Watch your back. If you think your goal is to simply keep up with the competition, you will be leapfrogged in no time flat. Your brand is suffering and you are leaving yourself exposed to a competitor that gets it. Please, give your team some latitude. Small failures are part of this generation of product development — as long as you fail forward.

Q. To wrap this up, let’s look to the mobile arena, obviously where application development is going. What kind of devices will we be looking at in the next few years, and what will their value be?

A. Today, the U.S. mobile industry is completely hamstrung by carrier issues and limited bandwidth. But, with the FCC opening up of huge new bands that were formerly allocated to analog television, tomorrow the mobile arena will be broadband.

I think that mobile is trending toward location-based services. I heard the promise five years ago that I’d be able to walk up to a vending machine and purchase a coke with my cell phone and the coke would just pop out of the machine. So we just start with something very simple like that and then begin to imagine the possibilities. Mobile will enable me to access services that are relevant to my physical location — to better understand my local environment as it relates to my daily activities. I think that mobile computing is not going global, it’s going the opposite way. It’s going local. It’s getting more granular, and that’s where the excitement is.

Q. Will EffectiveUI be focusing on developing mobile applications?

A. Most definitely!

About Anthony Franco
As the president of EffectiveUI, Franco listens to how companies like eBay, Ford, Random House, Viacom, GE, Dow Jones and NBC think about the Internet and desktop software, and how innovation can completely change the way they do business. Under Franco’s leadership, EffectiveUI has had the opportunity to deliver groundbreaking applications for Fortune 500 companies. With a focus on elegant interfaces that solve specific business goals and deliver astounding user experiences, Franco is at the forefront of the next generation of applications that engage audiences on the Web, desktop and beyond.