makemechangeWhat causes a business to make the leap to a new product or service? As I scanned my Twitter stream through the steam of coffee, I clicked through to Om Malik’s post, “The Economics of Attention: Why There Are No Second Chances on the Internet.” One of his points sums up what I believe is the primary reason so many good ideas and so many start-ups fail to ignite buying interest: they attempt to promote new behavior. Shifts in behavior require a perceived or a real need – and at the right time and place.

A prime illustration of this point from the not too distant past: the Storage and Data Hosting start-up boom back in the late 90′s. Sans the triumphant few like Rackspace (with great customer service and rock solid SLAs) and the moneyed up Telcos there wasn’t really enough data to drive businesses or consumers to host their precious bytes with outside firms. That is until the perfect storm hit both the business and consumer markets. First, the availability of reasonably priced digital cameras and iPods let the personal data floodgates open wide. Additionally, and more urgently, was the data deluge generated by Sarbanes-Oxley. Finally, all consumers began to trust their data to others for safekeeping.

Today its not infrastructure providers trying to win the hearts and minds of customers but the many companies creating whiz-bang widgets and tear-provokingly beautiful UIs that we find in Apple’s App Store. Why does a user choose an app and stick with it? Presently, a successful business app takes real-world behavior such as printing, signing PDFs, booking travel, reading publications, and so forth and transitions them to the new platform taking full advantage of the new feature functionalities such as the touch screen.

Business users, and consumers for that matter, will not seek out a tool they didn’t know existed. Getting attention and keeping it means more than just being beautiful and cool. Apple elegantly trained me to download portable digital media with my iPod and iTunes before the iPhone ever got in my hands. To their advantage, the form factor itself wasn’t so very different than my mobile business phone at the time – it too had a color screen and a QWERTY keyboard. Apple simultaneously trained me to use a new, yet familiar form factor and new way of using applications. Lo and behold, when I purchased my iPad, I was no virgin to touch screen technology or the App store. The hat trick for application development firms targeting the business market – understand your user’s behavior and improve their experience. If you can do that, their hearts and minds will follow.

Ilene Kaminsky is the Managing Director of Lumina’s Silicon Valley office and specializes in creating compelling customer experiences.