As the creator of a new app or website, you are intimately familiar with its purpose and you believe deeply in the value it offers. But unlike you, when a new user arrives at your app or site for the first time, he will be neither familiar with it nor confident of its value and trustworthiness. It's your program's responsibility to make the new user comfortable, knowledgeable, and confident about its purpose in the first few moments they are together.

It's very much like when two strangers meet on the street. Even if both parties have good intentions, it is imperative that these intentions be made abundantly clear and unequivocal before any significant interaction can take place. Eye contact, hand shaking, and smiling are the cues used in real life, and the web designer must provide equivalent cues on the screen.

When someone sees a website for the first time, several important questions come instantly to mind. The first, and most important, question is, "What the hell is this thing?" The program should answer that question using no more than a phrase. Sometimes the product name is sufficient, but typically a subtitle or image does the work, but if your program doesn't make this clear in a glance, you have some significant design work to do. It is surprising to me how many websites fail to answer this most fundamental question.

The next questions that will occur to the user are, "What does it do?" and "Why would I want that?" At this point, some text can be used to provide answers. Lighten up the text with a diagram, drawing, or image. You don't necessarily want to burden repeat visitors with this stuff, but your software can easily tell the difference between a first time user and a veteran.

Once the user knows what the website is, what it does, and why that would be a good thing, he or she can understand the advantage of having such a product. So now she will be more willing to pay closer attention to more granular questions, such as, "Wouldn't it be easier to just use something else I already know?" Here's where the site can offer comparisons to similar products and itemize its qualities. Any potential user will be weighing the benefits of your program against the burden of learning something new. Make your program easier to learn and use, then prove it.

At this point, the new user is likely asking himself, "Is this going to cost me money?" and, "Do I have to give it a credit card?" Be up front about this now. Don't be coy by only telling the user that money is involved after they have pushed the "Yes, I Accept" button. Tell them now and disclose the full amount. Honesty now will result in more trust, which means more click-throughs and more happy users.

Everybody knows that money isn't the only thing a website can cost. Experienced users will ask, "Will it steal my private data?" and "How long is this going to take?" Once again, take the time to honestly and completely answer these questions. Give the user the option to use the program without surrendering their private information. If they like your program and use it regularly, you can ask them for it again in a month and their answer might well be different.

Good user experience design will keep any user's time overhead down to a minimum, so you should be able to give them good news in the beginning. Saying something like, "This takes the average user 43 seconds." Big picture information like this goes a long way towards assuaging the user's worries.

After your website and the new user have performed this little pas-de-deux of introduction, the human at the other end will be far more likely to end up being a satisfied, long-term user of your program.

Image source: Nightdeposits.

Let's presume for the moment that interaction design can be perfected and delivered to your organization in a tidy, shiny bundle of brilliance. Have you now got a magic talisman that will protect you from competition and summon market share? Of course not. Design is just the beginning.

Like any piece of good advice, your organization must be able to hear the design and then act on it for it to do any good. Take a look at this checklist to see if your organization is design ready.

If you want to build great software, you can go it alone. You can design and build your product, make infrastructure decisions, manage releases, get the word out. Yet soon enough, if things are going well, you'll start to get traction, you'll want to scale, and your solo run will be over: You're going to need to work with others. You're going to need to create a team.

You'll find books and blog posts that will tell you how to create and manage a team, and they will include all sorts of helpful generalities. But I'll suggest a simpler framework for keeping the right things in mind: Think about your product team like a baseball team.

Nick Myers (Cooper) and David Bairstow (Thomson Reuters) are moderating a discussion on this subject at South by Southwest! Details here: Building Team Chemistry in Baseball & Technology.

Why baseball? Because both business and baseball are highly competitive, and baseball provides simple, clear object lessons for just about anything that you might confront in assembling a team -- how to spend money, how to evaluate talent, how to measure success. It's filled with vivid illustrations about teams that vastly underperform, teams that outperform, teams with rigid philosophies, teams that are fluid and flexible in their function. Most of all, baseball lays bare the fact that it is damnably difficult to create a highly functioning team. It's really easy to assemble a bunch of individuals who don't give a shit about anything but their own achievements; it's a lot harder to assemble people who are willing to learn, willing to work with others, and willing to do whatever it takes to win. A highly functioning team is not only about talent, not only about payroll, not only about organizational support, not only about leadership ... And yet it includes each of these things.

Find the right players

In baseball and technology, success starts starts with assembling good people. There's no way around this. If you don't have the right people, you're not going to compete. Ask the Kansas City Royals. They haven't had a perennial All-Star player since the 1990s, and they've only had one winning season since the mid-80s. (Disclosure: I am from Kansas City).

The challenge is not only to find great people, but to define who the right players are for your team. As longtime Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver put it, "A manager's job is simple. Just pick the 25 best players for what he wants done" (emphasis mine). For Weaver, finding the right players meant finding players who could play a variety of positions in the field, which allowed him to employ a more situational, opportunistic style of baseball. It's not the only style of baseball, but Weaver worked it on the way to a World Series championship with a decade's worth of very competitive teams.

Fear conventional wisdom

If you're looking for someone to take the lead on a product, it's only natural to see the words "Product Lead, Apple" in a LinkedIn resume and say to yourself, "Let's give this one a call." Baseball executives used to do this kind of stuff all the time. They identified a conventional need -- "we need a big bat" or "we need a left-handed starter" -- and they go after a guy with that particular trait or great numbers.

Today's baseball executives evaluate players and positions with much more sophistication. They look for players who perform well in situations and environments that match their needs. If you're looking for a lead designer who can work across multiple product managers and scrum teams, you're going to need someone who can consult, cajole, and sell as well as they can design. The point is: Don't go after a big bat if what you really need is someone who gets on base. Get real about what's going to be needed to be successful in the role, and beware conventions and role names.

If you saw the movie Moneyball, you saw that the Oakland A's experimented with new methods of evaluating talent and performance. In the film, the team's scouts were portrayed as a group of grumpy old dudes who evaluated prospects with their guts, while the young guys in the corner uses "sabermetrics," baseball-ese for advanced statistics.

If you've ever tried to hire someone, you know how tempting it can be to use your gut: "Hey, she went to Stanford, so that must mean ..." Unfortunately, this method is doomed to failure, no offense to Stanford. Even more unfortunately, there's no sabermetric version of a person's career performance on LinkedIn. But the real lesson here is that the A's took the lingua franca of baseball performance -- player stats -- and applied it in a very different way to cut through the noise. So: What is the lingua franca of your category? What can you do to get beyond the traditional ways of evaluating talent?

Stay in your lane

Ever hired a dev manager who thinks he knows your business better than you do? Or a design director who can't stay out of the details? ... It's easy hire great people who don't know the boundaries of their greatness. Baseball is littered with cautionary tales of high-performing (and expensive) individuals who detract from the team because they're in the wrong lane, playing the wrong role. Conversely, the best baseball teams are characterized by players who know exactly what their role is, and who are employed by their managers in the right way.

Of course, people are often rewarded for ignoring the boundaries of his or her lanes. Steve Jobs never met a boundary he didn't ignore, which was part of what attracted great people to him. But how many Steve Jobses come around in a generation? You want team members with ambition and drive, but if you end up with people who are more driven by individual success or gratification than by the success of the team, you're going to have a harder time succeeding. Seek folks who want to be part of creating the Apple organization of your industry, rather than people who want to be the next Steve Jobs.

Identify your World Series

In baseball, the ultimate goal is clear: Win the World Series. Everyone knows this -- fans, players, coaches -- and it provides a very simple benchmark for evaluating overall performance. Your World Series should be a big goal, not simply increasing revenue 10% or landing a big account. It's a monumental achievement: an IPO; the millionth download of your app; becoming the market leader in your category.

It's okay if your World Series is unattainable today. In baseball and in technology, there are teams with no realistic shot at a World Series this year, or next. The task for teams like this is to establish a path to that ultimate prize. Most teams should be asking themselves: What's the first milestone on our way to the World Series? You need to win your division first.

Get lucky

Let's face it, there's no champion in the history of any sport that hasn't benefited from some moment of luck. The 2010 San Francisco Giants were on the verge of losing a critical game in the playoffs when the opposing second baseman experienced an utter meltdown in the field, making three catastrophic mistakes that allowed the Giants to escape with a win and go on to the World Series. Diehard Giants fans will recall the 2003 playoffs, when a critical error swung momentum toward the Florida Marlins, who ended up winning that game, and then went on to win the World Series.

So you could say that it all works out, but that's probably one of the areas in which technology and baseball are very different. If you're waiting around for your luck to change in product development, you won't be around for long.

The digital age changes our notions of quality, and in particular, our notions of the limits to quality. Generally, there are two limits to quality: The first limit is your imagination. If you are innovative, you can increase quality in many creative ways. The second limit to quality is what the customer will pay for. If your product is priced too high, even if it is of super high quality, you won't be able to sell many.

These two limits to quality have existed since a caveman traded away a stone knife for the first time. The more it costs to make a product, the higher price you must charge for it. Economists call the tension between cost and price, "Elasticity."

The elasticity concept has been around since that caveman, but in the digital age, its power is draining away. That's because the notion that price is dependent on cost is an assumption based on the character of industrial manufacturing.

Actually, there are two distinct components to cost, "Fixed" and "Variable." Variable costs are those tied to each individual product you make. This includes the raw materials, labor, and transportation of each object. Fixed costs are all the other costs that cannot be tied directly to a unique object. Typically, these include design, engineering, marketing, and administrative costs.

In the industrial age, just as in the days of the caveman, the variable costs were a much larger portion of the total cost than were the fixed costs. That's because design and administration is cheap compared to purchasing, transporting, and transforming steel, aluminum, glass, plastic, and energy. A washing machine, for example, might have taken a dozen engineers six months to design, but it took tons of steel, hundreds of people, railroads, mines, and factories to build those washing machines.

For the washing machine company, elasticity was strong because the variable costs were far, far greater than the fixed costs. The clever business person always paid more attention to driving costs down than to raising quality, simply because cost reduction had such powerful, direct downward leverage on price. Certainly higher quality exerted an upward pressure on sales, but it was offset by the need to raise prices to pay for it. Most customers choose a value compromise, where quality is adequate and price is low. This strong elasticity cemented into business thinking the industrial age idea that quality is expensive. But that relationship has now changed, and quality is no longer so expensive.

The digital age has inverted the relationship between fixed and variable costs. Fixed costs are now usually greater than variable costs, and this dramatically changes the role of price elasticity. When a product is made out of bits, there is no cost to purchase, transport, or transform anything! There are little or no variable costs that can be tied to each individual object for sale. Yes, the cost of transforming bits into coherent software is expensive, but it isn't a variable cost. The expense of design and programming is the same regardless of how many copies you sell.

When price elasticity weakens, the upper boundaries to quality relax and take on a different character than in industrial times. When variable costs drop to insignificance compared to fixed costs, it means that price can drop to insignificance, too. This can be seen clearly in today's market where the most successful companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, provide their products for free.

When price doesn't dominate the purchase decision, quality does. When every company's offering is free or nearly so, the customer is free to choose based solely on the quality of his or her experience in using the product.

The two limits to quality are still there, but in the industrial age, cost held your imagination in check. In the digital age, your imagination is free to expand without limit. It really doesn't matter how much time, money, effort, or imagination you invest in your digital product, as long as what you make delights your customers. They will certainly be able to afford it, so you just have to make them want it.

In the digital age the upper bounds to quality are only the upper bounds of your imagination. If you and your colleagues can think more creatively and innovate more effectively than your competition, you will succeed. The more desirable your product is, the less each day of invention will have cost you. In other words, your costs shrink to insignificance when you drive your desirability way up. Really clever post-industrial managers don't pay much attention to costs. Instead they exhort their people to better and more desirable creativity. That is the path to post-industrial success.

It's easy for business people to forget about the great difference between the inside view and the outside view. That is, the experience customers have with software systems is enormously different from the experience business people have deploying those systems. This means that making an otherwise good business decision about software systems can have terrible, unforeseen consequences.

The Netflix company just learned this lesson the hard way. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the progression from VHS tapes to DVDs to streaming video. Netflix built its business by renting DVDs when the competition was still renting clunky VHS tapes. Just a few months ago, the company decided it was time to get a similar head start on the next new technology, but they failed to look at the outside view when they crafted their solution.

They split off the portion of the company that provides streaming video from the older, DVD-supplying part. From the inside of the company, this looked like a really good idea and, from that perspective, it was. It allowed Netflix to offer their streaming video service to customers unencumbered by the older technology. The problem is that this doesn't reflect the point of view of their customers, the outside view.

My wife and I have been happy Netflix customers since they started. We rent DVDs and also stream video from them. As my wife so succinctly said, "I want to go to Netflix to get movies, not to one company for DVDs and another for streaming video." Her sentiments neatly encapsulate the outside view: subscribers think about Netflix as a provider of motion picture entertainment, not as a provider of some particular media.

Netflix learned a hard lesson in the importance of looking at things from the user's perspective, rather than just from their own internal one. This little hiccup has cost them 810,000 subscribers and their market cap has dropped by over a quarter just in the last three months.

In the old days when the variable costs of manufacturing dominated income statements, what was good for the company was usually good for the customer. Today, when the experience of people is far more important than the cost of raw materials, business managers need to focus on their users, their employees, and their stakeholders, and not on their internal business processes. The way to success is by making customers happy, even if it means more work inside the company's walls. The only way to please people is by carefully studying their outside point of view.

As a business person, you may consider your software to be an operational tool, part of the sales or operations of your organization. But to your customers, it is a pipeline to your corporate soul. The behavior of your software indicates what is really valuable, what is truly important to your company, and there is really no way to hide.

Websites let your customers access your products and services, but as a side effect, they also access your corporate values. If your website is clumsy or slick, easy or confusing, it tells them a story.

Most clients hire Cooper to solve superficial problems. When they first approach us, they ask us to help make their websites “be more friendly” or their software “easier to use.” Sometimes they just want us to “make it pretty.” In every case, we find that hard to use, unfriendly, or even just ugly software is a symptom of deeper problems within the organization.

The old saying, "History repeats itself" seems to be true in the recent history of book selling.

When the big chain stores of Borders and Barnes & Noble moved into town, the local independent bookstores all quaked in fear or squawked in high dudgeon about how the soulless giant franchises were ruining the business.

Borders failed to compete with Amazon and has since filed for bankruptcy

But the chains taught the independents a valuable lesson: that some books were a commodity. The price and availability of New York Times bestsellers was more important than was the sales clerk's expertise.

The weaker independents closed their doors while the big chains grew fat and happy. The surviving independents continued to disparage the big chains, but the chains delivered a better experience. They added cafes, benches where you could read for hours, and offered a much larger selection of books.

Then the World Wide Web came along, and after some initial jockeying for position, Amazon emerged as the Internet bookseller to beat. Now the shoe was on the other foot. The big chains squawked in righteous rectitude about how they couldn't compete with a company that didn't need to invest in bricks and mortar.

But Amazon taught the chains a valuable lesson: That all books were commodities if you already knew what book you wanted, and it was easier to purchase online, and the online vendors could stock far more titles. What's more, the supporting information on the Web was far more valuable than anything a harried, youthful sales clerk could offer.

Both Borders and Barnes & Noble took huge body blows as the new business model assaulted them, but the Web delivered a better experience. Barnes & Noble created their own online presence and has managed to stay in the game. Borders, however, not only failed to grasp their role in their brick-and-mortar world, but they foolishly gave their online business to Amazon, and so filed for bankruptcy last month.

What's wrong, you might argue, with keeping costs down? Quite a bit, it turns out. If your objective is to design a product people want to use, or to invent something brand new, you must embark on a journey of creativity and innovation. That might seem like normal, every day business, but don't make the mistake of trying to run your creative organization like a conventional one.

Business sage Peter Drucker asserted creative employees "are not labor, they are capital." This has profound implications on the way you should manage and account for your business. As Drucker also asserted, "What is decisive in the performance of capital is not its costs, but its productivity."

In other words, if there is something you can do to enhance the creative abilities of your people, it doesn’t really matter how much it costs, or how long it takes. If it results in a successful invention, or a compelling design, that’s what really counts.

Business people trained in industrial age thinking cut costs from force of habit. After all, expense reduction was an excellent strategy when manufacturing costs were dominant; they are easy to measure and provide instant benefits. In the post industrial age, manufacturing costs are neither dominant nor elastic, so reducing them reduces your quality without improving your desirability. Today, trying to make your product cheaper just makes it frustrating to use and unlovable without making it any cheaper to buy. It’s no longer a valid competitive strategy.

“The way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas.” That’s one of my favorite axioms and, in my experience, it is universally true. I have many ideas, every day, and some of them are very good. Mostly, though, they are bad.

A small fraction of my good ideas made it to market, but time spent on good ideas is never wasted. There’s always abundant insight to be gleaned from working on a promising thought, and sometimes working on an auspicious idea can lead to other, even better ones.

I’ve wasted plenty of time, though, pursuing my bad ideas. The time and attention I’ve invested in bad ideas in the quixotic hope that they will somehow morph into good ones has been, by far, my biggest waste. Not only did it cost me time and effort, but I could have been working on something much better instead.

Pursuing bad ideas instead of good ideas is a significant and largely hidden problem of innovation. Economists call the waste “opportunity cost.” It's the cost of what you didn’t do while you were busy doing something else. That is, what good idea did you ignore while you were busy working on a bad idea. I would argue that opportunity cost is the most expensive in all of business.

The obvious solution is to only invest time on good ideas, but that isn’t a realistic solution because of the conundrum of innovation:

Bad ideas often look really good in the beginning, and that’s when good ideas almost always look bad.

For example, the people who worked hard on the Microsoft Zune really thought at the time it was the best music player ever, and many observers of Google a decade ago thought it was just another silly Web startup with an equally silly name.

Frankly, it’s really difficult to find good examples of this phenomenon because of some very powerful cognitive illusions. In hindsight, all good ideas look good and all bad ideas look bad, even though this is not at all the case in the heat of the moment.

Ford Motor Company has just convincingly demonstrated that being an excellent industrial manufacturer doesn’t automatically mean that you are an excellent maker of digital technology. Despite Ford’s improvements in manufacturing quality, their overall ratings fell precipitously this year due solely to the poor software interaction on their dashboards. A recent article in the New York Times discusses Ford’s plummeting fall in user rankings this year, focusing the blame on their new touch screen interface.

MyFord Touch on new Ford Edge—heavily criticized in J.D. Power's research and "frustrating" according to Consumer Reports.

According to the article, J.D.Power, the auto industry arbiter, dropped Ford’s ranking from 5th to 23rd, and subsidiary Lincoln’s ranking from 8th to 17th place. J.D.Power acknowledges that both Ford and Lincoln’s fit and finish are excellent. It was the “annoying” behavior of their driver-facing interactive systems that caused their ratings to plummet. Other reviewers concur, as Consumer Reports yanked their “Recommended” rating from Ford’s new 2011 Edge model.