Someone asked me today what the difference was between UX and Product Management.  I explained with an analogy.

User Experience (UX) is like being Willy Wonka.  The chocolate factory was the ultimate in UX Design.  Not only was everything awesome, but it was easy to use.  No one had to ask how to eat in the candy garden.  There were no user manuals for how to fly with Fizzy Lifting Bubble Ade.  Sure there were lots of bugs in the system, like the dessert in the 3 course meal gum, but what product doesn’t have bugs.  The point is that Willy is a dreamer, a visionary.  He understands people at a core level and knows how to make them fanatic customers.  He knows how to hit just that right tone of form and function.

Product Management is the flip-side of Willy.  Product managers need to manage the process of building the chocolate factory over a period of time with limited resources.  Beyond resource constraints, there are technical limits and business realities.  The product manager has to be shrewdly tactical and make a million decisions.  The Oompa Loompas are the engineers and developers who work the system and do the actual building.

A great product needs both.  In a startup tech environment, often one person will do both.  I think its an incredibly fun process to do this.  Product Management needs to dream with one hand and make tough practical decisions with the other.  Great product management figures out a way to build the chocolate factory.  Bad product management builds the Slugworth factory.

I recently upgraded my DirecTV so that I get HD and DVR in one box.  It took a week to get it actually working.  Some technical problem, lets skip that.  The device has an ethernet port so I bought a special ethernet to wifi connection.  It took a little while, but I finally got it working.  Then finally there was a SATA port to have an external hard drive.  I bought  one of those to expand the amount of space.  I can’t get that working.  Ugh.

Ok, but here is the part I want to write about.  The onDemand feature allows you to download content through the website.  My God, who designed this monstrosity?  It is nearly impossible to use.  I tried to download the second season of Dexter and seriously, this is taking me 15 minutes.  Who thought this UI was a good idea?  Did an engineer do it or a very untalented designer or wait wait…the HiPPO!  A HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) got involved with this.  Someone with absolutely no idea what they are doing made the decision.

You have to literally SCROLL through every single available show at a snails pace.  And you can’t filter it at all.  There are all these shows that you have to pay for and you can’t get rid of them.  Search works like crap.  You can’t download a whole season or anything easily.

And to top it all off, they didn’t have all the shows.  Just some of them.  Ugh.

Why am I so stressted over this?  is it because it’s 85 degrees here.    Or maybe it’s because Katie and the kids are camping and they aren’t here?  Yes, it is that.  I miss them very much.   Stupid DirecTV.

I don’t have a Blackberry.  I appreciate it’s UX very much for the primary user.  It’s downright addicting.  However, the UX of the person WATCHING the person using the Blackberry isn’t nearly as good.

Hold on a sec.

Click.

Spin ball.

Type.

Wait.

Wait.

Ok, I’m back.  How lame is that?  Every person with a blackberry stops engaging in the conversation at hand and starts looking at the little screen and spinning the little ball.

You know what is really happening?  They are bored of listening to you or your meeting.  They are bored!  So they look at their email to kill time.

I heard a reporter on NPR saying that you should use the “Crossword Puzzle Rule”.  In any situation, would you pull out a crossword puzzle and start working on it?  Stanley from The Office TV show does this regularly.  It’s a joke, but he is basically saying, “I am bored with you and would rather entertain myself.”.

People looking at their blackberry are bored with the moment at hand.  They are entertaining themselves.  That’s why it is so addicting!  However, there is a downside.

Being entertained too long will make your day go by very quickly.  Smelling the roses is important.  Memories are built on the moments when you are NOT entertained with mindless info-tainment.  Memories are not made while you are using your blackberry.  Life is short enough as it is.  My wife and I just celebrated our 10 year anniversary and it seems like we got married about 2 months ago.  The kids are growing like weeds.

I definetely do not want to have a blackberry.  I check my email enough as it is.

Business Model #1:  Enterprise
This is when your product costs over 100k.  Maybe even in the millions.  The sales cycle is pretty long.  It requires lots of documents to make the sale and build the product.  RFI, RFP, MRD, PRD, Roadmap, the list goes on and on.  This is a tough business to be in.  If you are good at it, then you could get very big like Seibel or Oracle or any other big expensive product suppliers.  If you are a startup, you have to get VERY lucky.  Remend tried this and was not lucky.  They got caught in the classic enterprise mistake.  One customer (the first customer), since they are paying so much, can bully you around to customize the product.  You end up making a custom thing that no one else can use.

Personally, I don’t like this model.  It’s not my style.  You have to slow down releases to a crawl.   You have to cater to single customers.   In general, it’s hard to be creative with this model.

Business Model #2:  Per Seat Subscription
Salesforce is the best example of success with this model.  Your product costs about $20-$50 per seat and you sell hundreds of thousands of seats.  Usually these are SAaS models, where the product is on a website.  It is incredibly hard to sustain this model because competitors come up all the time and ruduce the margins.

This model is tough because you have to scale to many users quickly.  This means you need to make the product simpler.  This isn’t always B2B.  Often this is a B2C play because there are no many more customers in that space.  Personally, I like the B2B space most.  Helping solve business problems is the most rewarding for me.

Business Model #3:  Flat monthly Subscription
This was the Hotkoko model, as well as the Marketo model.  A few thousand a month doesn’t require a RFI or RFP.  A medium level executive can make this decision.  It’s not so much money that it needs huge oversight, but it’s enough to make the customer feel committed and pressured to use the darn thing.

I love this model most.  You can build a pretty substantial product with alot of features. In fact, for this amount of money, the customer expects cool things to be rolled out pretty frequently.  These sort of products often live in a perpetual state of beta.  The key is to keep working on scalability and quality so you don’t paint yourself into a corner.

There are other models out there, but these ones were high on my mind.  Do you know which business model you prefer?

A nice review of Marketo.  I really feel like Marketo is starting to gain momentum in a serious way.  Articles like this make me feel all warm inside that I was able to have a positive impact on a company and on the people who use the product.

This raises an important thought for me.  Positive feedback is critical to making someone feel good about their work and feel committed to the organization.  Without positive feedback, you just don’t know if you are making a difference or having an impact.

In a large organization this is harder, but certainly not that hard.  It’s up to the manager to keep the employee appraised about how their work is being received by the target audience.  Sometimes that means saying, “Hey, I showed that thing you made to the CEO, he really liked it.  I told him YOU built it!”  That kind of statement goes a long way to keeping someone happy and engaged.

It’s always great when you can directly tie your effort to the companies’ bottom line.  This is especially valuable because a company exists to make money.  I felt similar feelings when they announced the improvements to the Intuit website made the company a boat-load of money.

Do you get enough positive feedback?  What can you do to get more/better feedback?  Each circumstance is different, but think out of the box about it.  Don’t “fish for compliments”.  That’s too obvious.  Rather ask your boss to help you tie your work to their goals in tangible ways.  Or maybe some other way…I’m brainstorming but the point is that it is important to feel good about your work.

Every once in a while, I do a little exploration on the web to look for interesting things.  I don’t do it that often because it is a road that leads to everywhere and I could get lost for hours.  However, I feel compelled to do it a little bit of the time and this morning was one of those times.  I started with a Google Search of UI Blog.  Here is what I found in the order I found it:

1. User-Interface Blog - Looks promising.  I will subscribe.
2. Jensen Harris Blog - Microsoft Office guy who blogs about UI.  I am going to subscribe.
3. Microsoft Officce Labs - Like Google Labs.  They are ideas and experiments.  Good place for some beta software.
4. SharePointPedia - This is a neat resource on SharePoint.  They are trying to use it like Wikipedia, which I think is fairly brilliant.  Sharepoint might be the coolest web application that exists.  I love it.  I wish I could install the latest version at Marketo, but unfortunately, time is a scarce resource.  Hopefully, we will get an IT person in this year.
5. Taskmarket - This is a site where businesses can find freelancers.  I am going to try it for graphic design.  The neat thing: It’s based on Sharepoint.
6. Sharepoint public demo (latest version) - Sharepoint reminds me of Intuit’s quickbase.  Great applications that don’t get enough respect.

That’s when I came up for air.  I like Design blogs.  If you know if a good one, let me know.

I wrote this a while back for the book too.  It described the design process in most organizations as I perceived it.  I cleaned it up a bit and made it into HTML instead of a Word doc or PDF.  I called it Design Pitfalls.

This is another in the series of stuff from the book that wasn’t exactly going anywhere.  I hope it helps someone out.

I was looking at some of the documents I produced in writing the book.  I really like some of them.  They don’t string together like a book, but taken individually as just a single serving of UX, they actually are useful.  Well, I think so anyway.  I am going to package them up and post about them.  Maybe I will just start with one.

The first one is about information architecture.  It explains how a user finds a needle in a haystack. I hope you find it useful.  Please let me know.

Three bits of interesting UI news today.

First is a spotlight from the ExtJS blog called VersoChat.  Mostly, I just read the blog, skimmed their website and looked closely at the big JPEG on EXT.  Default skin, but very nice icons.  I wonder where they got those ones.  The Information Architecture (IA) is definetely designed for a power user.  It’s laid out for someone who clearly uses the thing every day.  I like it in general, but that is a very hard space to get into.  I think the chat window could potentially have the rich text editor from EXT, but maybe that’s not needed.  I wonder if the user on the other side has the same EXT base to chat.  Overall, very interesting.

Second, Yahoo released a nice stencil kit for making prototypes.  They include the YUI code and design patterns with the stencils.  It’s an excellent way to get people to use YUI, not justinside Yahoo, but elsewhere.  Yahoo definetely has a strong UX team.  I wonder how they feel they are doing.  YUI has sort of dropped down in the list of libraries as of late.

Lastly, I saw news of an ajax library today from a company called Gaia.  It looks ok.  I haven’t used it enough to give it a fair review.  However, it looks like it is targeting asp.net users.  This is a good strategy based on the pain I have heard regarding using Microsoft’s native components.  Maybe Microsoft should buy a company like Gaia?  I had suggested to TargetProcess that they consider ExtJS, but maybe Gaia is better for them considering they are an asp.net shop?

On a side note, I have noticed that Firefox 3 comes with a keyboard shortcut (control-K) to go to the searchbox on the top right.  Previously, Wordpress had used control-k to mean “add a link”.  This is the same keyboard shortcut for MS Word.  Since FF3 co-opted that shortcut, not I have to click Alt-Shift-A.  This is annoying.  It’s an awkward position on my hard and I keep hitting the caps lock key in the process.  I wonder why Firefox chose that shortcut since it has been reserved in general for linking.

Like I always say, “A design decision creates the world in which ordinary people have to live.  Someone made this decision and I have to live with it.”

1. Go to http://maps.google.com and search for your house.
2. Then click “Show search options” to the right of the search box.
3. Notice the box “Restrict Results to:”
4. Change the box to “Real Estate”
5. Click search again
6. Notice the left hand side shows real estate listings.
7. Click one of the listings.
8. Click on the detail bubble on the right.

Side note: 3bdr, 2bath, 1400 sq feet = $830k.  1400 sq feet!

Ok, back to the UX.  I think Google made some serious errors here.  This feature is BURIED under a pile of clicks and drop downs.  I suppose they are trying to keeep the main UI simple so people won’t get confused with too much functionality.  However, the design seems messy to me for someone who wants that functionality.

As Google grows, their products are starting to get more and more features.  This is a critical time in the evolution of Google.  How do they handle feature bloat?  Do they redo their signature UI to make it more sophisticated including menubars and other UI tools that have worked well in operating systems?  Do they bury features like this and have lower adoption and usage rates?

My opinion on this is that Google needs to introduce a structure across all of their products that combines several of their existing options.  Notice at the top of the page on Maps that their are links to lots of other google sites.  On the top right is Help, My Account, Web History, etc etc etc.  Lots of stuff.  Plus the maps themselves have options like Real Estate.

Side note:  The language of “Restrict results to: Real Estate” doesn’t totally make sense.  It sounds wierd.

As I was saying, Google needs to make a coherent and consistent options UX across their products.  I think the top of the screen is the right place, but they need more power in it.  Put things in menus.  Menus are extremely useful as a product line grows.

You cant just keep adding functionality and not consider the UI.  Google is in danger of making their products hard to use if they don’t clean up once in a while.

Of course, all of this does not say it’s not a great feature.  I love it.  Google UI is really well done for the most part.  I am just raising the yellow flag that they are introducing some UX that are awkward at best.