For profit, or not for profit

Hav­ing attended SXSW Inter­ac­tive and the IDEAS con­fer­ence this year, it was inter­est­ing to com­pare how the profit world and the non-profit/government world push design and usabil­ity for­ward. The profit world seems to be moti­vated by profit and mar­ket share, they gov­ern­ment world by Sec­tion 508. Both have had their suc­cesses (wired.com, Library of Con­gress — Amer­i­can Mem­o­ries) with mod­ern usable design. But which side is doing bet­ter and why? Do you have a bet­ter user expe­ri­ence on a com­mer­cial site, or a gov­ern­ment site?

  1. Christopher Phillips says:
    November 10, 2004 at 1:38 am

    My impres­sion is that the cor­po­rate world is tak­ing the lead on this, more inter­ested in fig­ur­ing out how to meet the prac­ti­cal needs of poten­tial cus­tomers whereas too many edu­ca­tion orga­ni­za­tions try­ing to fig­ure out the min­i­mum amount of work they need to do to pass a spe­cific check­point on a list…

  2. Jeff says:
    November 10, 2004 at 10:43 am

    I agree. I don’t think this is going to change any­time soon, it’s just the nature of things. One side is moti­vated by profit and well funded, the other is moti­vated by pun­ish­ment and is under­funded, in many cases.

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