Building Web Apps For Normal People

If your reading this blog, chances are you don’t fall under my classification of normal. You’re an Internet person, a geek, part of the web2.0 crowd; a SMALL group of tech savvy early adopters that act as the guinea pigs for the newest stuff on the Internet.  I am tired of hearing about new things being built by Internet people for Internet people.  Its ultimately necessary, but successfully building something for normal people is infinitely more interesting

Most web apps are built for the tech crowd because it’s easy, relatively speaking.  There is a better chance that they will try it, and if they like it, there is a built in promotional infrastructure as they all rush to tell each other. If you’re part of this crowd, you probably have a sense of what they’ll like, what would be useful, what features the application needs, and how it should look. You have friends in this community so you can figure out how best to harness that social network. Your friends will use your web app and tell everyone else that they should too.

That’s not to say that creating an app for this market is easy, it’s not.  However, if you are going to create a web app, this is the easiest market to create it for.

The hardest market to create something for is normal people. They don’t want it and they won’t try it. They’ll wait for a geekier friend to tell them that it’s absolutely essential, and then they’ll wait some more until everyone they know looks at them with shock when they say they don’t use it.  If it’s not dead simple and immediately apparent why it will be a major benefit to them, they’ll never touch it again. Period.

The normal market is the one that matters.  If your app can’t crossover, it is unlikely that it has the power to scale into a successful business.

So how do we reach normal people? This seems to be the formula:

Take a product that is massively popular with geeks, let it marinate for a year or two, and dumb it down 100%.  Then you might have something that normal people will use.

If its social in nature, you better understand how normal people are social.  If you’re a geek this may be a shortcoming.  Normal people aren’t open, they don’t want everything about them public, and they want exclusivity within their network. Their social dynamic is fundamentally different.

A social app for normal people needs to mirror a real life social network and the interactions need to mirror real life interactions.

Who does it:

AIM is the ultimate app for normal people. The user has friends and they talk to them in real time.  It’s the perfect real-life mirror, which is why it is one of the most popular web apps ever adopted by normal people.

Facebook is the obvious example.  It mirrored the real life social network of colleges, and then slowly grew up with it’s crowd of early adopters. In Facebook you have friends, and friends have access to more information about you, just like in real life. One of the most popular features is the wall, which is analogous to the whiteboards that all college students have on their door.

After Gamil, I quickly run out of other examples because normal people don’t use all of the stuff we have built over the last few years.  Comment if you can think of examples of web applications that normal people use.

Posted on September 17th, 2008 at 23:03 by Jason Schwartz in Normal People

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  • If you want your app to appeal to the normal folks you need to somehow find a way to integrate it with oprah, twilight, snuggies.. etc
  • Wow thanks for the interesting article. I had never thought about "normal" people, not geeks. I am an application developer by myself, but I am not getting so much orders from "normal" people. It is harder to work with them, because the app must be super simple and so on in order to fit their requirements. I would prefer to make those old traditional apps for geeks. However thanks for the great article indeed.
  • nvaleo
    You had tricked me on that title pretty catchy , well as our technology going progressive we must cope up with it, theres nothing wrong in being a techno geek.
  • i'm caught up to that title nice one, very catchy indeed, well many people now a days are becoming online geek and joining the million people in the web 2.0 crowd many of them are getting benefits from it especially online marketers
  • kevinprentiss
    Normal people aren't open or public you say, yet wall posts are the most popular communication form in Facebook. It's not entirely public, but it's still way more popular than either messaging, or IM on FB.

    Maybe normal FB folk like a little public?
  • Kevin,

    I searched around and I cannot find a source that confirms that wall posts are the most popular form of communication in Facebook. Could you reply with a link?

    Wall posts are public, and I do think that normal people like a little of that. However, wall posts also exist in obscurity beneath the social connections of Facebook. Even if you forget about profiles restricted to friends, when I make a post on someones wall, I am not publicly broadcasting to the world. I am talking to a very tiny community of people that have some connection to the persons wall I'm posting on. They have to come to that profile to see my post. It's similar to making a speech at that same persons birthday at a public bar. Sure anyone could potential hear what I have to say, but unless they somehow know the person I'm talking about, they won't.

    At this point most accounts are only viewable by friends. Many probably allow their entire college or small geographic area to see their profile. When someone makes a wall post, there is a reasonable expectation that it won't be
  • kevinprentiss
    Jason - My apologies, I wrote definitively and should have used qualifiers. I should have said: in my experience wall posts are the most popular communication form on FB. The obviousness of this to me might be due to my network.

    I speak at colleges about technology, so much of my FB circle is a smattering of college students from 200 different schools. I polled a few and they too thought wall posts were tops, but I've never seen a study or numbers from FB.

    Now that I think about it, I do think behavior is different with my tech circles and certainly in my age bracket (early 30's). They tend to be the ones sending longer private messages.

    I talk to college students about "public" all the time. I'm very interested in the idea of privacy and whether or not college students see it differently (digital natives and what not). Your birthday party is right, it's just that students are very used to bridging capital in the 500 + range. So they have a much bigger room that still feels cozy to them.

    When given tools to select private over public, most won't bother. (http://tinyurl.com/5cle9o) It's not just because they feel safe in the college network, myspace ran wild when the only privacy setting was pretending you were 14.

    I think this change in perception is simply the marinating process you mention above, but I would argue we are getting more public, even for normal (if young) people.
  • I think you hit it perfect...the other obvious 'app' they use is of course search (mostly google I would think, but there are still lots of normal people that use MSN search and/or Yahoo search too).

    Otherwise, I would say the majority of other things 'normal' people do on the internet right now is just read/research information and news and/or play games (meaning simple games like solitaire, bejeweled, etc.)

    The question I have is, given that they don't want it, probably won't understand it, and most likely won't use it...in addition to not wanting to pay for it regardless....how does anyone get a profitable 'hit' on the internet with regular people?

    My answer - so far, I don't think anyone really has succeeded going straight for the consumer (normal person)...for now, the profit seems to be more in the network effects of 'normal' people (adwords, facebook gifting, etc.) than in the actual normal people apps...who knows how/when that will change.
  • I did forget search as the most used app for normal people. As you pointed out, amassing a large number of normal people onto one service has been the only profitable business strategy so far. Even then, only a few companies have managed to monetize that network effect.
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