Charles-Axel Dein

Stephen Anderson advocates for going straight to high-fidelity prototypes, rather than spending times on wireframes.

In the waterfall model, wireframes indeed make a lot of sense insofar as they make the user experience tangible and can be handed to developers. They also considerably reduce ambiguity.

Yet wireframes makes less and less sense in the current context. First, executives have become more and more used to gorgeous user interfaces, and no one would argue that wireframes are meant to be awe-inspiring. While wireframes are indeed better than text-only functional specifications, the user experience they procure is definitely worse than a fully functional prototype. As Stephen puts it, "how can we possibly expect to get good feedback on such an incomplete experience?"

It is pretty clear also that the waterfall model does not keep up with an ever-changing world. This model makes sense in a highly-deterministic world, where nobody changes his mind and everybody is able to make decision quickly. In reality, we've all experienced clients changing their mind in the last iteration. There are many reason why this happens but according to Stephen the main one is indeed that "human beings don't think about content separate from presentation separate from structure separate from [fill in the blank]…":

Asking someone to comment just on the interaction or just on the structure--independent of the other pieces -- is a bit like asking someone to judge a chocolate chip cookie based on only a handful of ingredients. "Here, these are the wet ingredients (eggs, sugars, vanilla)--what do you think of this cookie?"

I think that prototyping will replace the waterfall model. It provides numerous advantages:

• Instead of focusing on a single aspect of the UX, the approach is holistic.
• It is easy to forget some interactions in wireframes, which requires numerous useless iterations.
• Thanks to libraries like Bootstrap and tools like Handcraft, it has never been so easy to create high-fidelity prototypes. With services like Stripe and Parse, we can even build working prototypes.
• Prototypes are perfectly in line with the lean startup philosophy. They embody the MVP concept quite perfectly, promoting an iterative process rather than the highly inefficient waterfall model.
• Prototypes increases communication between developers, graphic designers, UX designers and business people. It even makes it mandatory, right from the beginning of the project, while in most case the discussion does not begin before the party is involved.
• As prototypes are nearer the end result, their perceived value is higher.
• Prototypes can be experimented with real end-users.
• Prototyping is less risky than the waterfall model, since clients gets a far better sense of the end result far quicker.
• Prototypes are fun! They are fun to create, fun to try, and fun to deliver!

Check out also this great presentation by the Handcraft folks: Focus on the details rather than skipping over them.

That Amazon.com is more and more becoming a platform goes unchallenged. Yet this strategy remains largely emerging and quite difficult to measure given the few metrics the company disclose. A very convincing analysis of its 2011 Q4 results by ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo makes some very good points and clearly demonstrates the depth of this transition.

Even though Amazon.com's results missed analysts' revenues expectation by $1 bn, it beat their profit estimates by $100 m. Scot Wingo argues that sales from third party sellers cannibalized Amazon.com's own sales, but contributed to the increase in profit because costs are far lower on those sales. To sum up, the company is moving away from a retailer model (where its revenues are equals to the transaction values) to a marketplace model (where its revenues are commission on transaction values).

• The company also disclosed it had two million such sellers, representing 36% of units sold (an increase of 65%). This shows the level of momentum Amazon.com is able to sustain.
• Services like FBA, AWS, MechanicalTurk are slowly maturing. The company announced a new metric called "Service Sales" encompassing all those services, and disclosed it had been growing by 74% year over year.
• Purely digital offers (Amazon App Store for Android, Kindle Direct Publishing) are basically a platform model on steroids.

In a recent article, Chris Dixon explained why he thinks two models are currently competing: Amazon.com is heralding the centralized e-commerce approach, while eBay's strategy clearly supports a decentralized paradigm.

• Contrary to eBay, Amazon.com always maintain its control over the customer accounts, and often competes directly with its third-party sellers.
• The leading e-retailer provides an end-to-end solution which ensures a great customer experience for the buyer. Through its multiple acquisition, eBay built a basket of services that are well segmented but less integrated. Most of those products kept their own brands (cf. PayPal, Magento, Hunch, GSI Commerce).
• eBay does not keep any inventory. Amazon.com's numerous fulfillment centers and facilities can be considered one of the company's most impressive assets. Being able to provide such a strong link between the physical and the digital world is definitely a key offer to help other companies transition to the web.

Centralize vs. decentralized e-commerce