Does “rails” contribute to a better customer experience?
Geek Chic: Rails
37signals has built 5 new software products over the last couple of years, and has knocked every single one out of the park, two of their products earned “best of the web 2005″ from business week, not bad for a couple of years. Currently over a quarter of a million people use those products, which means they are no longer the niche player they once were. One mind boggling fact though is that even with quarter of a million users, support requests are so infrequent that they are generally handled by the founder, Jason Fried (a fact I discovered on a duct tape marketing podcast)
Many factors have contributed to 37signals deserved success, not least their heritage as a “usability” company, and their focus on keeping it simple. What I am wondering though, is whether the development platform/web framework they use for all their products, the geek chic “ruby on rails“, has contributed to the simple, consistent, and clearly superior Customer Experience.
Now, i’m not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I have taken a few tutorials, and viewed a few of the video screencasts of “rails” in action, giving me some limited insight. It seems that the “rails” “write once” philosophy forms an incredibly tight relationship between the User Interface and the database. In other words you write one piece of code and it creates all the UI elements and database stuff automatically. The “creating a weblog in 15 minutes” screencast provides a great example where the programmer creates an item in the program called a “post”. A post has a title and a body that contain text, and as the programmer specifies this, a web view of a post is created, with a title and a body. Not only that but the functions for creating, deleting, and viewing lists of posts are all there as well, with the requisite “create”, “edit”, “delete” buttons.
What this illustrates to me is really the “power of patterns” on customer experience, and the value of consistency. I “think” that because all of the 37signals products were built in rails, they have some consistent patterns that help users learn, and adopt their products. This is not taking away any of 37signals design chops, but I think there are so many details that “rails” is helping making more consistent that 37signals can focus on building a great products.
Clearly well designed, usable, easy to learn products are leading to very strong adoption rates, and the dirty little secret of software sales is that “adoption” is what makes a software product successful. The CRM industry has an awesome failure rate, not because the software doesn’t “scale” or whatever other consulting buzzword you want to put in there, they fail because no-one uses them. This is the reason that salesforce.com actually invests a “shit load” of money in usability (I was getting pitched on salesforce.com at one time and the figure they threw out of how much the spend on UX is huge).
Anyway, why would I mention CRM? Because 37signals has a product in the works called sunrise, you’ve been warned.
References:
- the 37signals blog Signal vs. Noise
- Ruby on Rails Site
- A blog for Rails N00BS – wonderfully named Nuby On Rails
Some additional links courtesy of nubyonrails
- http://podcast.rubyonrails.org — Interviews with Rails pros
- http://rubyonrailsworkshops.com — Opportunities to learn Rails
- http://rails.techno-weenie.net — Practical Answers
- http://railshelp.com — Searchable documentation
On the subject of “rails” hosting I’ll take an opportunity to plug my host here, I host half a dozen sites on site5. Apart from the fact they host “rails” apps, they have lots of features for people who host multiple sites and they provide a shit load of storage space, i mean 11 gigs of space, 400 gigs of bandwidth, 5 domains, for about 8 bucks is pretty good.
My only complaint is they don’t have phone support, but their email support has been very responsive and knowledgeable.
