Skype 4.0 Gold – Why Pave the Newbie Journey?

Software is always too hard. Skype's advantage five years' ago was it just worked. That's no longer enough. Skype serves pioneers and early adopters just fine, but now Skype is mainstream and needs to be easier, simpler, more streamlined in turning prospects into loyal users.

4's user experience revamp shows much of that thinking.

Skype needs Scale

Skype is actively driving for scale. Despite being the world's largest VoIM network, they feel small. With more people using Skype (new record set yesterday), Skype can earn three benefits.

• Social Graph Lock-In. When everyone you know has a Skype name, you need a good reason to leave the Skype network. When all your contacts are organized nicely and you'd have to recreate those relationships elsewhere, you're going to stay.
• Becoming a default communication channel. Do you reach for your phone when you want to talk to someone? Or do you reach for Skype? Once you have that kind of mind share, the cost of getting and keeping customers goes down and rates of use go up.
• Better people discovery. Think white page and yellow page directories. Less important for close friends and family, more important for finding useful strangers and friends-of-friends. 

Why do you rob banks? Because that's where you keep the money.

Where do hundreds of people talk to each other?

• Online. Voice over Instant Messaging (VoIM providers like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Tencent and many others) and social networks (like facebook).
• Mobile Telcos. Serving billions.
• Landline Telcos. Serving billions. 

While it's great that up to 16 million people are logged in at the same time, thousands of millions of people have mobile or landline dialtone.

So Skype is still small.

And needs to get more customers, keep them, and help them become active.

Skype is bringing in people from many sources. But Skype loses people to just three: death, defection to a competitor, or abandonment of Skype-like activity. What can Skype do about defection and abandonment?

Optimizing User Experience for Heightened Experiences

While Skype doesn't use this language, they've applied industrial engineering ideas like the Theory of Constraints to improving design. The TOC says to look at your factory, discover the biggest throughput bottleneck, unplug it, see how throughput changes, then start over with the new biggest bottleneck.

Skype applied this to the newbie journey, finding points of pain and abandonment (and improving them), and moments of joy and satisfaction (and enhancing them).

For every thousand people who hear of Skype, only a fraction look for it, download it, try it, and have delightful experiences that keep them hooked on Skype.

Skype's improvements should translate into higher download rates, more new account registrations, more contacts per address book, more first voice calls, more first video calls, more IM chats (a surprising number of people don't know Skype has instant messaging features), longer calls, more time logged in (Skype dialtone), and stronger word of mouth.

Next up, the newly paved experience.

Technorati tags: skype, design, strategy, ui, ue, ux, theoryofconstraints, toc