digitalknowledgeworker.net

In one of my last posts I have talked about the importance of attracting late adopters to an online service. Late adopters are usually very loyal customers and show a high reluctance of switching to other services once a product allows them to get simple tasks done effectively. In the post, I highlighted how important it is that this audience is presented a clear use case that is ideally related to "real world" routines or activities. The best case thereof is email: Email can be very well related to traditional mail - there are inboxes, outboxes, messages, each message has a recipient and a sender. That's it.

I've just ran by a study by hitwise intelligence, a company that offers web analytics. The post looks at the question whether Yahoo! would be worth more in parts than as a single entity. This is not a new discussion but right now becomes another boost the the Microhoo negotiations. Instead of picking up the same question I'd rather highlight that this chart quite interestingly shows the late adopters service consumption behavior.

Mail is big, as explained a concept that anyone understands. Another concept that anyone understands is that of the start page: What page is loaded once you start your browser. Then there is search: enter a search keyword and receive results - easy to understand. All other properties are not the mass market champions.

What would be even more interesting is to look at which parts of the page are often used and which ones hardly ever.I suspect that most users will not create complicated filters in Yahoo! Mail, they will click on links in the upper left corner on the Yahoo start page, the will search simple queries and probably not use more complicated search operators to refine the search. And even in Google Finance we will probably find that 80% of the users will only look at the overview site - in particular the chart while only a small fraction is interested in detailed ratio analysis or data export options. But that is just a wild guess...