An open letter to the Microsoft Office team:
You have to produce ONE specific feature to secure your future. If you do as I suggest, you will kneecap Google Docs and breath new life into MS Office. Just one feature. It may not be easy, but you have smart engineers and they can figure it out.
Feature: Multiple people need to edit documents from a network share at the same time and see live updates.
I’m talking about the entire Office Suite. I don’t care about any other 500 features you have planned. They are all bullshit. There is only one thing that makes me want to use Google Spreadsheets or Etherpad instead of Office. Multiple people can work on a document at the same time. This is the killer app of the future. Real-time collaboration. As someone types I need to see it.
I know it’s hard. Cry me a river. You have thousands of people. Move mountains. Change the operating system. Invent something. Do whatever it takes.
If you fail to do this one feature, you will never take a positive step forward. Consider yourself warned.
Love,
Glen
Help make this feature a reality
If anyone knows someone at Microsoft…pass the message along. Maybe just click the “Tweet” button below. Help yourself out by pressuring Microsoft.
- (2) Comments
- Tags: Technology
Different Kinds of Spam
22 Feb 2010I get spam from alot of different sources. Each one is a pain in the ass. Why can’t government figure out how to make this manageable?
- Snail Mail. Every day, my mailbox is full of coupons and solicitations from charities and political groups. I get magazines and newsletters that we never read. We just throw it away. I feel horrible that we are wasting so much paper. This is the worst kind of spam because it pollutes the environment.
- Email. The obvious one, of course. I get about 50 emails a day from unknown sources, that I can never unsubscribe. I can’t find an appropriate filter in gmail to make them go away. I was considering banning the world Viagra from all email and filtering that to straight deletion. I am not even sure that would work. I’m going to try though. If you email me something with the word Viagra in it, I may not see it.
- Cell Phone. For some reason, I get exactly one kind of phone spam. It’s for insurance for my car. It’s bizarre. Why is that the only kind of spam I get on my phone. I can’t make it stop.
- Wordpress Comments. I get about 10-40 junk comments per day. Of these, usually 1-2 sneak past my multiple layers of spam control. Most popular one to make it through? Essays for college papers. What is that? This is a real nuisance type of spam, because I don’t check it all the time. Also, I am constantly afraid of my Wordpress installation failing for some reason. I really need to back it up more often. I am going to do that today.
- Instant Messenger Invite Spam. I get invites about 2-3 times a week from some stranger to connect on IM. It’s slimey and preys on the weak. I can’t stop it from happening. It’s depressing because I know that people are being scammed by this.
- My mom’s computer. She inadvertently clicks on something she shouldn’t. Next thing you know, she gets tons of popups and bad software put on her computer. It’s an awful practice. Some programmer made software intended to be impossible to get rid of. Bad programmer. Bad.
- Door-to-door Salesman. Someone knocks on the door and wants money. I feel bad for these kids who look like they are clearly having trouble finding a better job. They seem hard working, but this isn’t the way. I can’t just delete them like other spam. I feel like I need to be polite. It doesn’t happen often, but takes the most time per instance to make go away.
That’s alot of different channels to spam me. Making this list is depressing. Seth Godin would never approve of these shenanigans.
- (2) Comments
- Tags: Random
The UX of Grooveshark
21 Feb 2010I stumbled on this music site called Grooveshark accidentally via Smashing Magazine, but I am glad I did. It has a rich user interface with alot to like.
The obviousness of what to do first is the best part. I typed in a song. Ting Ting: That’s Not My Name. It was there right in front of me and then I was listening to music. The whole experience was in Flash, but it didn’t look overfly flashy. I saw the add on the right, but the neat thing was the promo at the bottom.
Very clever and not obtrusive. I wonder how much money they are making off that link. Also, right-clicking was a custom menu which I appreciated as a serial right-clicker.
There were a few downsides to this service. First was the sketchy nature of the songs. Some would play, some hung. I wonder what the legality of this whole thing is. I thought it wasn’t legal to play any song on demand, but clearly they are doing just that. It was neat to see the “cover versions” of those songs.
Additionally, I wish there was more connections like “If you like this song, here is another band you would like.”
Overall, neat service, with some questionable issues. Work a look if you build a Flash/Flex app. Also good if you are looking for some obscure song.
- (2) Comments
- Tags: UX
The UX of Infographics
19 Feb 2010There are three kinds of infographics.
- Ugly and useless
- Pretty and useless
- Useful
A website is like a big infographic. It is usually filled with noise and chatter and happy talk. Usually, it written for the author or author’s boss, not for you. Over and over again, I see infographics on the web that are terrible. Fast Company has a series of great infographics, which are the exceptions.
What should a great infographic do?
Simple: It should make someone go, “Oh! I didn’t realize that!” Possibly they should say, “Oh, now I get it!”
Why not just write down the point in plain text?
No one reads the copy on a website. They just skim. Look at the homepage of Intuit.com. If you put a sentence/link in that garble of text at the bottom that said, “We are giving away $100 to the first person to click this link”, you would have to wait for quite some time. Sure, there are some people who read, but they are the tiny minority. You need a way to communicate knowing that the user only skims text.
Enter the Infographic
People can not help but absorb graphical information.
For example: At TurboTax, we tested a massive amount of pictures of people to figure out what worked best to entice people to buy. The answer? The box (right) and it wasn’t even close. People saw the box and made a mental connection. They said, “Yes! That is the thing I want. I want to do my taxes.” Happy people were useless, but the box was perfect. Information was conveyed better with the box than with any amount of text.
My Best Infographic
At Marketo, I had a customer who was irate. (I won’t point fingers, but she knows who she is.) The problem was that she didn’t understand what Marketo did (Marketing Automation). No amount of me explaining made her get it. So I sat down and made a quick chart to show her what we did. Click to see larger version.
The results were immediate and fantastic. She changed her tune and was happy with the product. She understood what we did and why it was great. Infographic success.
At Adchemy, my current gig, I have been helping with the public website and other infographics. People send me messy and confusing slides and I transform them into great communication vehicles. I love this kind of task.
Can you Outsource Infographics?
You can only outsource the “pretty” part. If you give an illustrator a confusing slide, he will deliver back a pretty, but still confusing slide. You can not get an external agency to understand your business as well as you do. The bottom line is that you need to hire people internally who know how to communicate well through this medium. Then you have the option of filtering them through a graphic artist. Information design is not graphic design, and vice-versa.
How to Test?
You have to try them out on the target audience and gauge the response. Did they react as you had hoped? Why not? Figure it out. Practice.
Why doesn’t everyone make great infographics? Why do most websites suck?
We have an empathy deficit in this world. Most people are not designed to understand how other people think. Therefore, all websites and infographics are judged based on the author or more likely, the author’s boss. This is how most crappy things get built. Committee decisions, consensus and lack of empathy. But that is a topic for another day.
- (1) Comment
- Tags: UX
Executing a Software Idea
16 Feb 2010Jeff Atwood wrote a post about ideas being very cheap and execution being worth millions. Although, I think the lots of terrible ideas are executed and fail miserably, his point is not lost on me. How do I translate an idea into reality. People do it all the time, but what are the steps.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a programmer. So this is a first draft at how I would approach it.
- First, you need to establish the idea in a prototype or storyboard. This is the easiest step for me because I can do it all in Balsamiq. Mockup the design. The design doesn’t have to be perfect, but it needs to be good enough to explain what it is to business people and engineers. This step doubles as the “research” phase. You should validate your storyboards with people in the target market.
- Choose a platform. I think this is NOT best left to engineers. There are engineers for every single platform. This is a business question. It’s possible to build something on a MediaTemple or other hosted service server, but I am not sure this is wise. The possibility of cloud computing may work better. Example: Google App Engine has an interesting structure and a built in payment system. Although I have never met anyone who used this as a platform. Force.com from Salesforce works well if your users HAVE to have a salesforce.com account. I hated working with this system personally. Aptana has a cloud service that uses Rails.
In any event, you need to carefully review the choices and then randomly pick one.
- You need engineers. The simplest and cheapest way I can see is to outsource. There are tons of sites out there that let you get people. I have no idea which one works best. However, there are plenty of engineers in 3rd world countries that will get your system working for pennies on the dollar. I’ve never outsourced anything and I’ve heard mixed reviews. When it works, its great. When it doesn’t, it’s a nightmare.
- Build a public site. You need the basics of a website to sell your software. I suggest using Wordpress as a CMS. I am redoing a site now using it. Although there are some things you need to do to get started, once it’s up and running, the maintenance is a dream.
- Test. Get a bunch of friendly people and give them the service for free. See what they say. Make sure it works. Scale slowly.
- Get the word out. Twitter, Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, tell everyone you know. Ask your friends and family to tell 1 person about it. Make sure they understand what it does. This is critical. MAKE SURE THEY UNDERSTAND WHAT IT DOES. There is no way someone will suggest anyone look at anything that they don’t understand.
- Improve. How can the system be better? Listen to feedback. No one builds the perfect software on the first try. You need to evolve the service.
- Pay Taxes and Bills. Try and have money left over when it’s done.
Engineering is critical, but overall execution involves alot of moving parts. What did I miss? What do you need to do to execute a good software idea?
- (2) Comments
- Tags: Technology
The UX of Buzz
11 Feb 2010Three letters. WTF!
Logged into GMail and got (what many of you got) a thing about Buzz. I wasn’t sure what the thing was but clicked on it. The next thing it says is: You are following 30 people and a bunch of people are following you.
WTF!? I didn’t want that! Huh? What just happened!? Is this list public? Who sees this??
OK, calm down, calm down. Start from the beginning. What is buzz?
Summary
Buzz is Twitter (Or Facebook Status) inside GMail. If you type something in there, alot of people, often everyone can see it. It’s like Twitter that way.
Why is it freaking me out?
Because GMail is the place where everything is private. It’s not my employers email. It’s not my wife’s email. It’s my personal private email. It’s my sanctuary. Everything in there is for me and me alone. Now, this rule has been broken. Now, there are parts of GMail that are very very public. I hate this with a passion. It messes up my primary mental model of what GMail is. Private.
Why is it brilliant?
I didn’t even realize what was happening and suddenly I was actually using the system the way Google intended it. It was so frictionless that I literally fell on my butt and used it more than I have used Twitter in a month. Even my mother-in-law used it. Most of the messages on it from people were “WTF is this thing?” They certainly nailed the “frictionless system”. The traffic on Buzz must have jumped from zero to a gazillion overnight.
One especially insidious trick is that my IM client (Digsby) thinks that a buzz message is an actual email. This is huge for Google. They just inserted a twitter look-a-like into my #1 killer app; email. Absolutely brilliant. This is not a well you can go to often. I hope they made a good bet, because if this thing sucks then they will hear about it forever.
What will happen next?
Initial surge of activity. Some people will get hooked. An ecosystem will arise similar to the Twitter ecosystem. Twitter / Facebook and Buzz will compete for mindshare. Google will eventually win overall. Facebook is still fine because it has other value, but Twitter might end up suffering.
What’s interesting from a UX standpoint is the lack of 120 character limits. This may be Twitter’s saving grace. They have simplicity going for them.
Why the name Buzz?
I don’t know if Google is aware of this, but Yahoo has totally built a web property called Yahoo Buzz. How is this not trademark infringement? I see the TM next to the Buzz logo. Is there a lawyer in the house? Besides, it’s a pretty bad name. Buzz. It’s got no heart. Guzz? Gooz? Glooz?
There is so much to think about with this new development, I am just overwhelmed.
- (4) Comments
- Tags: UX
Product Idea: Mobile App for Sales
10 Feb 2010I had this idea while talking to a friend. It’s a different spin on a previous idea about competitive analysis and product management.
Summary
A mobile app that connects to a SaaS service which gives a salesperson a unique view into prospects. Specifically, helps make social connections with prospects.
In Story form
A saleswoman is sitting in a lobby, waiting for her appointment to get her and bring her to a conference room. She opens up her mobile app and hits the name of the guy she is meeting. She jumps through a few tabs, Blogs, Tweets, Connections (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter follower, MySpace, etc), Company News and What’s New. On the Tweets tab she sees a tweet about seeing a great movie that weekend. She is also notified that a linkedIn connection of hers replied to that tweet agreeing about the movie. Lastly, on the company news page she reads the latest press release of the company.
The appointment arrives. On the way to the conference room, the saleswoman mentions that she just talking to a friend about a movie they saw and casually mentions the name. The prospect perks up and says, “Yeah! That person replied to my twitter post!” Conversation ensues. Topics about the press release are discussed too.
In the meeting, several new people arrived and handed out their business cards. During the part of the meeting where the saleswoman was not engaged, she punched in the names of the new people. The app instantly adds them to her portfolio of people. She sees that one of them is friends with a friend on Facebook. Later, the saleswoman says, “Your name sounds familiar. Do you know [friend]?” Conversation ensues.
Requirements
- Central system to login and enter credentials for Salesforce, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
- Unified schema to keep track of connections
- Web crawler to find blogs, news, and any other information.
- Mobile app UI
- Subscriptions $10 a month per person
I imagine it’s free to download and get limited or redacted information.
The technology is not especially difficult to build. Lots of open source tools to help with the web crawling. Bandwidth wouldn’t be enormous. I think it’s a winner. If anyone builds this and makes a fortune, please put some money in the tip jar on the right.
Side note: I am starting to feel less aversion to starting a business one day. I used to think I would never ever ever do it again. However, I think what I hated was a service business. Having to sell a big project and then work through it. However, a technology company; building apps like this. That might be fun. If someone would fund a year or two. I probably could do it with an outsourcing model. However, I don’t really want to do the VC “get funding” thing. I also don’t want to do marketing. Well, my plans aren’t well baked. However, I love coming up with product ideas.
- (1) Comment
- Tags: UX
Presentation Review: Avinash Kaushik
8 Feb 2010A great friend and mentor, Avinash Kaushik, presented at Adchemy last week. Avinash is an analytics evangelist and industry visionary. He has two books on Analytics and speaks frequently. I worked with Avinash a few years ago at Intuit where we had a very prolific and fruitful working relationship. The whole company turned out to see him do his thing.
Avinash’s style is pretty unique. He is exciting, entertaining and utterly authentic. His stories stem from real experience and his point of view has been crafted over years of hard work. He has a great sense of humor, although it skews towards the bawdy. The great thing about Avinash’s talk was that he didn’t devolve into mathematics functions. There isn’t a magical formula you need to do what he is asking. You just need to be thoughtful, skeptical and objective. Too often “data” is anything the analyst says it is. You could make a decision on “data” that is ill-informed and doesn’t actually help you with your goal. Other times data is just noise which obscures the truth of a situation. Avinash is excellent at drawing attention to the underlying truths and not just the numbers. If I could sum it up what I learned from the presentation it was “Figuring out which numbers matter is the most important and least understood thing about analytics.”
To illustrate one of his points, Avinash had a case study about Barack Obama’s presidential campaign site. He had several different possibilities with videos and different images plus calls to action. He said, “You probably won’t guess the winner.” I answered immediately in my head, “Soft fuzzy family shot, and ‘learn more’ button.” I thought the question was simple. (Video loses to static image. Family shot loses to loner shot, and Join Now loses to Learn More). There wasn’t even a slight question in my mind. This made me recall my first meeting with Avinash.
<tangent>
I was sitting in his office with Florence Tang, a graphic designer. The first thing he said was, “Make sure it’s clear: You guys don’t know anything. Testing, that is how we know things.” I asked the same question that I would ask today, “Who gets to decide what to test?” You can’t test everything. Who designs the tests? At Intuit, the answer was often (unfortunately), “Business people and marketers.”
</tangent>
In his presentation, Avinash did call out WHY as an important factor in testing and analytics. Just testing “what won?” is insufficient to learn anything. Why did one test win over the other? What process in test creation/production contributed (if at all) to the winner? Is the testing just improving our situation on local max island or is it potentially moving to the big island? WHY something is better allows you to learn and incorporate the learning into future tests. Just a “winner” and a “loser” doesn’t give that insight.
On that topic, Avinash had one slide with concentric circles.
This slide kept itching my mind. I think my problem with it is that it shouldn’t be displayed this way. Competitive Analysis is not subsumed by clickstream. Maybe if it was like this:
Am I nitpicking Avinash’s presentation here? Yes, undoubtedly. I think Avinash was a engaging and educational speaker. Pointing the obvious is often extremely hard. I am hoping that his message of thoughtfulness, skepticism and objectivity is taken seriously by all those who see him. He isn’t just entertaining!
- (3) Comments
- Tags: Random
3D Physics in Flash
3 Feb 2010http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/
The challenge is to find places in your application or website, where you can add a touch of this kind of magic. It’s can’t be gratuitous. It has to be fun and natural. I found a place where it will work in the enterprise app I am designing. I am excited to see it in action.
UPDATE: Yes, these are 2D physics. But they feel so REAL! It was a psychological slip to think of them as three dimensional.
- (6) Comments
- Tags: Technology, UX
The UX of the Magic Moment
3 Feb 2010The minute I get started on something, I make enormous progress. Things get accomplished. The problem is starting to work on something versus procrastinating.
Simply stated, I procrastinate…then comes a magic moment, then I make huge progress.
What happens exactly in step 2? Why did the moment start there? Couldn’t I have started it further to the left? Why don’t I start work right now? What am I waiting for? The Muse? Inspiration?
This is a critical question to being a highly productive person. The ability to force yourself to put down the stuff that wastes time and do the thing that needs doing is valuable indeed.
Hmmm…I need to cut this post short. I have to work on something. What could you be working on right now? Make that magic moment happen.
- (2) Comments
- Tags: UX
About commadot.com
Started in 1996, Glen Lipka has been been randomly publishing about User Experience, Technology, Human Psychology and other subjects.