Matthew Ingram on Wal-Mart And Scalable Experience

Matthew Ingram gets to the core message from Wal-Mart’s abortive attempts in downloaded movies, paraphrasing Ian Rogers of Yahoo Music:

Inconvenience doesn’t scale.

When providers of services structure user experience to be painfully annoying or unusable, people will stay away in droves.

What was Wal-Mart thinking? “We have 800K visitors a day, so…” They thought they could muscle their way in, and force a broken experience down the throats of dumb consumers.

Scalable experience — like iTunes and Kindle — will be about breaking down barriers to adoption and improving user experience by some quantum leap.