Every once in a while I hear a phrase that seems so exacting to its meaning that I want to share it. In this case, it's "demand aggregator", as in "The internet doesn't bring together people into communities so much as it brings together demands into one place."
No doubt everyone reading this already has had that conceptual breakthrough. It may be quite old news to most of you.
However to me, it was new and allowed me to think of several situations in new and unique ways. Much of my time is spent helping companies create communities around products, services, offerings of this or that. And I often recognize the mutual cause that creates these communities.
But I'd never thought of that cause as demand aggregation. It's a higher level of understanding, me thinks. Amazon isn't a book-selling site, it's a place people gather to buy books. NextStage isn't a tool-selling site, it's a place people gather to use powerful yet inexpensive tools.
It's a question of on which side of the information stream you're standing. But the ramifications are amazing. Probably obvious to most, amazing to me never-the-less.
Consider a small to medium business site. You know most of your traffic comes for your products, services, offerings, ... Either make the page offering such tender morsels a landing page or your designated home page -- don't make customers search for what they want because searching takes time and time is the killer of internet apps. The longer it takes for someone to achieve their goal the less likely they are to complete their goal, and if their goal is making a purchase?
Now, this concept of "demand aggregator" is pretty obvious when you think about it, yes? You might not use that term but the concept and practice behind it are pretty obvious, don't you think? It clarifies design and redesign, doesn't it?
So go look at your sites.
Is your site aggregating demand where and how it should?
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