What Makes A Product to Be Excellent

   As we just had a wonderful technology feast in the lecture of this week and meanwhile the Facebook seminar assignment had been released to push us to think critically think about Facebook apps, I would like to share my own opinions about what makes a product to be excellent.

   First few words that come to my mind are: concise, fresh and efficient. Look at the consumer electronic market nowadays. It is always the one with concise and convictive design that achieves the big win. Apple is a typical example to show us that how concise and fresh design can destroy the considerations of customers on requiring the high configuration of hardware and follow their hearts to choose the more beautiful one. In fact, the high working efficiency Macs power the users makes Mac even more excellent. Furthermore, when I saw the demonstration of window Surface during the lecture, I was really attracted by its concise design, as well as the very fresh GUI of window 8. This will lead out my opinion on the properties of good software products, which still are concise, fresh and efficient. As I know, many web apps achieve great success because of their fresh, concise and friendly user interfaces, which emphasize the core points of information and omit several trivial ones. This design increases the efficiency of users to obtain information by the app with a relaxed or enjoyable experience. Nice appearance, user-friendly functions and convenience to getting started, those are all what users expect to most of the apps.

Besides the technical aspect, advertising and business model are others points that need to be stressed on making a good product. Apple is still a good example. Still remember the impressive moments of each product-releasing Conference made by Steve Jobs?  The excellent advertising work done by Apple can be sufficiently presented here. In terms of business model, forgive me to use Apple again as an example :D. Unlike other PC companies, Apple restricts the supply channels of their Macs and focuses on setting up authorized retail stores to improve the consuming experience on the users. This will obviously keep a lot of high-end users who consider more about qualities. That is why Mac is so popular even though it has not owned much market share. So for software, especially web apps, these two points are even more important because the intensive competition among web environment makes it much more important than ever to have a good advertisement as well as efficient and effective business mode.

While now, based on our level, good design strategy is still the most important part. So concise, fresh and efficient design is what I pursue now. Hope you all can reach it in some days or make even more excellent web apps which follow your opinion on what an excellent app should be.J