The Holistic Web

“Taking someone else’s idea and increasing the quality by 5% occurs at the price of a 50% decrease in their commitment to execution”

http://aphotoeditor.com/2008/02/06/how-to-manage-people/

Boy, isn’t that the truth?

An excerpt from an article about the limitations of transistor technology:

Mr Rattner says that when the first 22 nm silicon chips appear - just two chip generations out - it will prompt a generation of single-system chips that make it easier to interact with technology.

“We are right at the start of the information age. We think we are so sophisticated with our hand-held devices and internet access. But we have asked an enormous amount from users to tolerate - why is it that my mother-in-law calls me up and says ‘I’ve got this error 22 message’?

“How do we soften those interfaces and make them more human? That’s a very important next step. We are in that era of technology where we start to move away from machine imposed limitations.

We seem to have so much innovation in technology, a reasonable amount in business model (eg Google Adwords is an innovative business model) and so little in usability.

I had a play with an iPhone the other day. I went in skeptical, but came away impressed. Feature wise, it’s no better than other products, but the usability is just staggering.
My Motorola phone can play MP3s, take photos and videos, etc. Yet, it only lets me store about 30 SMS messages! I’m sure some engineer from Motorola would say, “ahhh, but there’s a good reason for that” and give some very good rant about standards/technical architecture/etc. The iPhone shows all your SMSs - in a threaded conversation window! So, Motorola (and Nokia, etc), you keep your good reasons, and I’ll seriously think about buying an iPhone. I’m not a fan of Apple as a company, but with their continued UI innovations I’ll probably end up as a customer anyway.
A project I’m working on is an overhaul of a large website, including all aspects - technology, content, usability, design, process, etc. I’m test things as simple as the words used to describe things and finding dramatic changes in usability. The section called “IT and Communications”? Uhhh, how about “Computers and Phones”? This isn’t just my opinion, I have hard data that shows these subtle changes make significant productivity differences.

A lot of techies say “oh, I am user centric! I always do what I think is for the user”. This is not what’s best for the user. You are probably the single worst person to decide, as you are close to the project and an atypical user. Intuitive designs are almost never intuitive to those making them.
I once had a chat over coffee with Gerry McGovern and spoke to him about usability challenges on a site I had. I said “hey, about some surveys? Some sophisticated web analytics analysis? Rate this page function?” etc. Gerry say there and nodded slowly, thought for a second, and in his soft Irish accent said “why don’t you ask them?”

It seems pithy and not very practical, but think about it for a while. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I see truth in it.

Please, no more Error 22 messages either, ok?

I’m constantly fascinated by online dating sites. In some ways, they are a microcosm of all that is best about the web, and some things that are worst.

The thing I find interesting is that time and time again I hear people, particularly women, complain there are so many “freaks” on dating sites. I’ve always found that curious - why is there more freaks one dating sites than in real life? Of course there isn’t, people on dating sites live in the real world! I have one idea that may explain it.

Traditionally, people have met mostly through their social networks. Friends of friends, someone at work, etc. Implicit in this, there is a certain filtering. Your friend’s friends will, broadly speaking, come from a similar social background. Black or white. Working class or white collar. Rich, middle class or poor. Arty or sporty. All those things are important, although we would like to think otherwise. Frankly, the chances of me dating a black, working class, poor, sporty girl are slim. Not that there is anything wrong with any of those things, it’s just that humans naturally are attracted to those similar to themselves.

In the book Freakonomics, a study was done about dating sites. They looked at people who had said in their profile they were willing to date any race. Those with this who had then initiated contact with someone had in about 95% of cases (I don’t remember the exact number) done so with people of the same race. It’s just how we are. People say opposites attract and in a small number of ways that is true, but when it comes to backgrounds, like (generally) attracts like.

Online dating doesn’t have those filters. There isn’t a “I have a working class background” filter. David Weinberger blogged a few years ago about darkness defining relationships. What he means is that the things that really define relationships are very vague and messy. Being a “friend” isn’t a binary state, despite what MySpace would have you believe - there are many types of friends. The guy you chat with in the cafe, your work colleague, your neighbour, your partner, are all friends, but not only with different “levels” of friendship (best friend, casual friend, etc) but lots of types of friends. There’s one you talk mainly about sport with, one you discuss personal stuff, one who is mainly office gossip. The definition of “friend” has a lot of darkness in it. And that “darkness” is especially important in finding a life partner, the most important relationship in most people’s life. Yet how can a website hope to capture that? Traditional social networks have done a great job of filtering out people to pre-qualify a lot of those “dark” attributes, but a dating sites can’t (yet) compete with that.

Perhaps someone will come up with a way to make that happen, and allow people to pre-qualify. Or maybe it’s a good thing that it doesn’t happen - relationships which are viable but would never happen in real life can happen through dating sites. That’s another argument.
In the mean time, dating sites will remain full of freaks.

I’ve been keeping very busy on my new site: www.ecommercespot.com. It’s a new venture which offers information, training and consulting to ecommerce site owners, helping ecommerce site owners take their business to the next level. I find many ecommerce sites get to a certain level, generally slightly but not terribly profitable, and get stuck there. I’m offering information and services to help them break through that level.

For those techies amongst you (and I know I have a few reading this blog), the site is built using the wonderful Sub-Sonic framework for asp.net, which I’m loving so far. It’s actually the complete starter kit that comes with the framework. I’ve made a few tweaks to it (which was insanely easy to do), and will make more, but it’s about 90% out of the box at the moment.

Anyway, still working on the site and a lot of the background stuff behind the scenes (it’s a bit like an iceberg - the website is only 20% of what I’ve done), and looking forward to moving forward!

I was just reading a five page abstract (via getabstract.com) of a new book, “Black Swan” about the impact of unusual events. That quote jumped out at me. How true that is! We call people experts who can look at the past and explain why it happened - narration. Yet the vast majority of “experts” are completely unable to predict the future with an accuracy. This applies in any area of expertise - investment is the most obvious one, but far from the only one.

Maybe a real expert is someone who says “I don’t know what will happen, but these are the sort of things that can help us prepare for just about an eventuality, be they good or bad”.

We all know about the trend of increased transparency. Blogging, product reviews, comparison sites, etc. Here’s a great new trend which is sure to grow: recordings of customer service calls. A customer having problems with their credit card, and recording the call and publishing it on the net. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this in the future.

via Trendwatching

I didn’t get twitter at first, but now that I have a few (not many) friends there it’s starting to make sense, and the IM integration is really nice.

So I’ve been thinking about it lately, and wondering, is anyone out there doing micro-newsletters?

What I mean is rather than the normal predictable one long email a week style newsletter, just a regular feed of information via twitter.

“Cool event on next Tuesday for developers in Sydney, come along and find out more about product X, http://somesite.com”

“Awesome - we just got the latest widgets in stock for only $20! They’ll probably sell out soon, grab one now! http://someshop.com”

That sort of thing. It’s just as trackable as email newsletters, the same principles more or less apply. It’s much cheaper as well.

Is anyone trying this, or know of anyone who is? Any stories to report?

Oh, and add me to your twitter friends if you want: http://twitter.com/markbaa.

Going to be in, or can get to, Melbourne next week?

There’s a great looking conference on, OnlineShop2007. They are getting a good line up of speakers and I’m really looking forward to attending and learning some good stuff.

Stewart, who organises it, was kind enough to ask me to speak as well. I’ll be ranting about usability, but from a slightly different angle than you may have thought about usability. If you want to register and save a few dollars, register via this link and pay $299 rather than the normal $399.

Please pop by and say hello.

I posted a while ago about me dumping Outlook for Gmail for domains. It’s a decision I haven’t regretted for a second, in fact, I now found Outlook really clunky to use and makes me feel “claustrophobic” for want of a better word as it’s restricted to one computer. Yes, there’s OWA and hosted exchange solutions, but they are more expensive and still not as good in my opinion.

Now, Google have launched Google Apps Premier Edition. It’s a hosted version of Google’s word processor and spreadsheet for business, $50/user/year. If Microsoft isn’t very worried then they aren’t paying attention.

The most common response I’ll get to this is “bah! They don’t have a quarter of the functionality of Word/Excel”. And no, they don’t. A book was written a few years ago called “The Innovators Dilemma”. It talked about the upstart of new technologies. An example given was steam ships. In the early days, they were slow, unreliable and generally not great. The sail ship people laughed. “Bah! They will never replace our ships”. And initially they didn’t. What they did do is find a niche, as paddle steamers on rivers. That gave them time to slowly but surely improve, and if you don’t know how the story ends take a drive down to your nearest port. There are dozens and dozens of cases like this. Google Apps in my mind is a text book example. It’s not as good, but it has some unique features - the collaboration abilities leave Microsoft Office for dead. For that niche for who collaboration is most important than features, they’ll run to it. And, over time, features will be added. There’s a good chance it will never be as good as Office. One day though, people will look at it and say “hey, that’s good enough for me”. Then, goodbye to Microsoft’s biggest cash cow, Office (last I heard, Office makes more money than Windows).

It’s not too late for them, but if Microsoft’s history is any sign, they’ll do a half baked “me too” offering too late and not pay enough attention to it.

Sorry, Microsoft, you had a good run.

It’s well known that last minute offers/time limited deals have a positive effect on conversions. It’s old news to marketers. Give people a deadline and they respond. The annoying TV ads “…but buy in the next 30 minutes and get a free set of steak knives…” are designed to compel you to buy now.

Dell have been doing this for ages. They have special deals (”buy in the next 2 days and get double the RAM”). They presumably work, Dell are too smart to keep doing something that doesn’t work. Their offers are probably genuine in that they do keep changing, even if there will be another similarly good offer next week.

I saw something which is a little more suspect recently. The site of a webhosting company (I won’t mention their name, but they aren’t small) have:

One Time $19.95 Setup
WAIVED - Offer expires end of today 2/8/2007

Here’s the catch. Yesterday they had the exact same message - with yesterday’s date. I can bet I know what I’ll see there tomorrow.

Does it increase conversions? Probably. Is it ethical to lie about the offer expiry date? I dunno.