A blog about Telephony and Business Communications | Lypp VoIP API | Lypp.com

Voice is a touchy thing. People expect phone calls to work, and rightly so, but we're still plagued by poor wireless coverage and either beholden to the phone company's idiocy or required to patch together our own alternatives and suffer the associated issues of call quality and reliability. In the midst of a call, it doesn't matter what's under the covers. It's either seamless and clear or choppy and delayed.

Gaboogie is doing well in its early days, but like everyone else who serves up conference calls we're subject to the limitations of the phone line our users connect with (whether we're dialing out to them or they're dialing in). The tough thing is that many of our early users are also early adopters. They're holding out against the phone companies and bottom feeders, and rightly so, in the trenches of VoIP mixed up with the public Internet. Or they're getting on with their day and relying on a wireless carrier to, umm, provide wireless service reliably and consistently. Don't tell me that Vonage is the best that can be done for these hard working folks.

The good news is we have people with high expectations using our service. It's good because they genuinely appreciate the radical notion of delivering conference calling hand in hand with an intuitive user experience. That's our schtick. The bad news is that we have people with high expectations using our service. It's not really bad news; instead it highlights the basic truth that having a crystal clear conversation without paying the phone company is tough. The challenge for the applications that depend on voice, and appeal to those who want smarter voice-based services, is to deliver functionality, features and usability balanced against nothing more complex than enabling a fluid conversation.

The bottom line? If you're connecting to Gaboogie using VoIP then you're one of us, but sadly we can't wave a magic wand and fix your QoS issues.

I've spent about 20 hours over the last two days building wireframes to assist the GUI developers. Let me make something clear: I really don't heart wireframes. But it did make me realize how important it is that everyone in any organization really understand the product from back to front. It also reinforced the extent to which, agile development or not, there's no room for ambiguity or assumptions if you're truly concerned with getting the user experience right. What I mean is it's no use having us marketing types pontificate in purely general terms about how we'd like things to work; if we really want to have any influence we need to get our hands dirty.

Marketers get frustrated with engineers because they often feel as though the engineers are speaking a different language. (More often it's simply that marketers shut down instinctively when they hear words that sound remotely like techspeak.) Engineers get frustrated with marketers because they often feel as though the marketers trivialize what it takes to get the product right. The result is a yawning chasm between expectations on both sides: of what the product is, how it does work and how it should work. It also leads to misguided marketing (because marketers don't understand what they're selling) and misguided product development (because engineering isn't alinged with what's saleable).

This chasm is easier to avoid in a startup than, for example, a large software development firm, but I'm happy to immerse myself in wireframes if it means getting the product right now, not trying to fix it later, hampered by entirely avoidable disconnects and misinterpretations.

I was having a conversation with a research analyst a few days ago and he was a little concerned about our sales model, specifically that we were expecting customers to buy exclusively via e-commerce. Apparently only about five per cent of conference calls are booked online today, and his instinct was that this number was unlikely to change any time soon. Business users are simply too entrenched in their old stick-in-the-mud ways.

I'm not naive enough to claim that Gaboogie's about to engineer a global paradigm shift, but guess which of the following reasons I buy into about why business users aren't booking online:

a) They love carrying around a little wallet card with a dial-in number and PIN.

b) Getting cold calls from Slick Rick trying to sell you a new conference service is awesome! 

c) They feel that they need the personal touch of a conference call "account manager" (aka an outsourced call centre rep.) for a service that should be so simple their grandmothers could use it.

d) It's great when no-one dials in because you forgot to send them an email telling them the time, date, dial-in, PIN, and your life story to boot.

e) None of the above.

I'm biased, naturally, but I'm voting for "e". Gaboogie will be successful if we make the user experience simple and efficient; if we don't it won't. Business users buy things that make their life easier, and I don't think I need an army of sales guys to sell them something that just works.