The Holistic Web

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently (as always), and one thing that has come up again and again and again is: you can’t trust what people say. Let me give some examples of stuff I’ve been reading:

• In a double blind clinical trial for a sleeping tablet, 90% of people reported it effective, versus 60% who reported the placebo effective. I read a lot of clinical trials (yes, strange, I know), and it’s quite normal to find that ratio of effectiveness vs placebo.
• In “Blink” (great book), a case where people were tasting Sprite and asked how much lime was in there. The answer would be directly related to the colour of the can - a greener can would invariably give a more limey taste, with no change to the formula at all.
• Adding a phone number to a web page increased sales dramatically - without generating a single phone call. A phone number generates a perception of trust. I didn’t do follow up research but I’m sure none of the new customers would attribute their signing up to the appearance of a phone number, but statistically, there’s a fair chance they did.

I’ve bumped into many, many more, but some are a bit too complex to be contained in a blog friendly nugget. The thing in common is that people say one thing - and truly believe it - but the real reason is not at all the same. They say it has more lemon, but it doesn’t.

Our minds are fooled very easily. As horrible as it might seem, the conclusion to reach is that many of our decisions are determined by our subconscious based on reasons we don’t know.We try and rationalise things, and so we willingly offer an explanation is prompted, but often that explanation is simple a rationalisation of what has already happened subconsciously, and isn’t the real reason.
Yet, so many people and companies still believe in things like surveys and focus groups (where as well as the above issues you also get group think). I’m not saying those things are useless, they have their place, but unless you understand these broader issues and make sure you are asking the right questions in the right way, you’ll get a result that seems right, but probably isn’t.

It increasingly seems that to be successful in the online realm, you need to be a psychologist as much as a marketer. Fortunately, the process we use is fundamentally based around people’s psychology - I’m growing increasingly aware of how right that approach is.

Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it before (from me and others). Several months with no blogging. Actually, I have been blogging a bit over at my shopping carts blog, but that’s a different audience. I haven’t been sure what to put on this one, but now I know.

I’ll continue on the other blog with more tactical shopping cart/ecommerce platform stuff, and this one with more strategic ecommerce work, which makes up an increasingly large percentage of my work.

But you are more than welcome to say “I’ll believe it when I see it”

“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?

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.

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.

As the Web 2.0 hype spreads wider, sooner or later it’ll start spreading beyond its trendy enclave and start to penetrate main stream websites. I’m sure that’s already happening in a few places (such as gmail), but by and large web 2.0 is dominated by small start ups. When you get big companies deploying stuff, they want to measure it - and rightly so.

However, web 2.0 is resistant to the normal sort of measurements. What are the traditional measurements? Let’s go through some Web 1.0 measurements and see how many of them are relevant in the Web 2.0 world.

New to Web 2.0

• Measure onsite buzz. Web 2.0 is more than just technology, it’s also about engaging your customers and partners and allowing them to contribute. So, measure the comments on your blog. Measure the track backs (ok, not strictly onsite). Which subject generates the most comments? Which subject generates the most positive track backs? Which post caused a big jump in the number of RSS subscribers? Which page on the Wiki is getting the most edits? The most page views? The most vandalism? Let your imagination run free, I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface here.
• Measure offsite buzz. This should be done in Web 1.0 world as well, but I very rarely see it. What are people blogging about you (without a track back)? Posting in forums?

The interesting thing is many of these things are very difficult to do in traditional analytics packages. Show me how you work out in webtrends or websitestory how many people clicked on button X which invoked AJAX action Y. Yes, there are ways to do it, but it’s really hard. Web vendors are going to have to either make a radical shift, or people are going to need to start instrumenting their applications - building measurement into them. I suspect it will be a combination - people will need to write against an API/webservice their statistics provider exposes. That has some pretty major repercussions for both statistics providers and for application developers. There’s certainly a great opportunity here for the right people, and vendor lock in will be pretty enormous - unless someone develops a standardised statistics API (I doubt that’ll happen).

Dear Outlook,

We’ve had many good times together. While I don’t like all your many siblings, you are one of my favourite children in your family. I love the way you are so together & integrated. Yes, we’ve spent hours together almost every day for almost 10 years now, laughing together, crying together and collaborating together.

But, as time has moved on we’ve grown apart - I think you’ve felt it as well. I feel we are moving in different directions. I need to move around a lot more, and need a partner that can move around with me. Yes, you have Outlook Web Access, and you do look very sexy in that. But you are still such good friends with your cousin exchange, and his tastes are just too expensive for me.

So, I’ve started seeing someone else. Yes, I’ve started seeing Gmail for Domains. I know what you are thinking, and yes, she is ad supported. No, she doesn’t integrate quite as well as you. But she does have much better search, her calendar is getting better, she looks very good in firefox (sorry, I know that’s a sore spot for you but it’s true) and most importantly, where ever I am, so is Gmail for Domains. She suits, yes, even enjoys my itinerant lifestyle.

Please don’t hate me. I’ll always have a special place in my heart for you, Outlook.

Affectionately yours,

Mark

PS. Please don’t tell your sister, Excel, that you saw me flirting with http://www.editgrid.com.

I just moved house. I was chatting with my new landlord last night, and found out that the new house has snail mail. Literally.

The landlord, who used to live in the house, said “careful when it rains. Snails will crawl up into your letter box and eat your mail. Best put a handful of snail pellets in there to keep them out.”

That’s just too strange for words. If I find any spam (as in processed pork) in my mail box then I’m moving.

I’m excited. I’ve been in the online business for a while now, I published my first site in 1994, and started doing it full time in 95 or 96. I worked through the dotcom boom for a few companies ranging from a failed startup through to helping manage a relaunch of MSN globally. It was a rush back then, no doubt about it.

But recently I’ve been feeling that excitement again - the excitement of big change, of endless possibilities, of opportunities unexplored. I truly believe we have only scratched the surface with the web, and there’s still ideas and opportunities out there that haven’t been dreamed of.

I see two big differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the dotcom boom.

First, there’s real money now. There are lots of profitable online businesses. Yes, there’s still some silly valuations going on, time will tell how silly they are. But importantly, people aren’t ignoring profits like they did back then. We know it’s possible to make money - big money - on the web.

Secondly, and slightly more controversially, a lot of the dotcom boom was driven by techies. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. There’s still some of that around. However, I’m seeing a lot of techies completely missing the point of all the changes that are going on at the moment. For example, slashdot had a discussion today on AjaxWrite , an Ajax powered online word processor which is allegedly Microsoft Word compatible. There were some valid comments there, and yes, Ajax Write does currently suck, but they were so busy focussing on the technology, why their DOM usage was poor, why they should have been using a Java applet, or whatever, that they missed the point entirely: AjaxWrite will improve and it will get to the point where it’s good enough for a lot of users. It’s a text book disruptive technology. The point is lots of techies are missing the point of Dotcom Boom 2.0, focussing too much on the technology and less on how the technology is enabling average users to do really cool stuff. And that’s exciting because it leaves so many more opportunities for those who can see on both sides of the fence.

Yes, it’s a great time to be in the online space, there are opportunities out there and if you are smart, and as with any startup (online or otherwise) a bit lucky, the money will follow. I’m looking forward to grabbing my piece of the pie, and seeing & helping others to grab their piece. Bring on dotcom boom 2.0.

“Vanilla” is a term that has come to mean plain or simple. It’s almost synonymous for a non-flavour, despite that (in my opinion) something with a strong vanilla flavour is very nice.

I recently read up on how vanilla is made. Far from being a simple harvesting process, it is extremely labour intensive, difficult, requires lots of time and hard work. It’s quite a fascinating process (did you know they pollinate the vanilla flowers by hand?). It takes a lot of behind the scenes work to produce something that seems so simple.

Isn’t that often the way with software? (including websites) Sometimes, to make something really simple is really hard work. There’s lots of people scurrying around behind the scenes so that the user can have an effortless experience, one that they barely notice as it’s all just “how it should be”.

I would like the websites I work on to be vanilla flavoured. Simple, effortless, and taken for granted by users (but not my clients!).