Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Pick the right product for the right customer

Published
by
jason
on October 20, 2008
in Photography and Technology
. 0 Comments

A friend recently sent me a great pitch video that Steve Jobs gave while he was at NeXT. The video is a fascinating piece of marketing history, especially because the endeavor turned out to be such a failure. While I realize that this is a pitch, pitches, like any other kind of story, have the effect of convincing the audience and the people telling it. He totally overestimated the need for usability at that point, in 1991, in the development of the workstation/pc market. In addition, he projected his tastes onto a market that, to this day, has an almost supernatural aversion to being cool.

I am struck by the difference, between this pitch and the iPod pitch, or even the Mac pitch from Nerds.  He wasn’t framing the NeXT station’s differences from the point of view of benefits as perceived by the customer. Instead, he uses future tense language about how NeXT will be better and people will want what it does. Although he doesn’t seem to completely realize it, he makes the key insight that there was an audience out there that would appreciate an functionally and artistically elevated approach to an otherwise humdrum product category. His thinking was great, it was just his target that was wrong.

He needed a group of people to whom he could teach taste and elegance, and it turns out that consumers and the iPod let him do that. The best part about the iPod, aside from design, was that it changed the way people perceived the digital music player market. The positioning stroke of genius was the statement that the iPod held 5000 songs and let you take all of your music anywhere you went. It was the customer’s problem stated in the words they would use, and providing a solution to an immediate and tangible issue that they faced. Add to that the awesome experience of using the device (especially compared to competition), and you have something remarkable: a story that customers can tell each other, and an exclusive club of cool that has a badge that you carry around with you.

Most striking, for me, is the realization that Jobs, or someone, needs to be a pitch man, a maven of taste, to make Apple successful. He needs to radiate an understanding of cool. It is important because his goal is to get people to accept his definition of cool, and he knows it. He is totally right to leave the technical and user interaction innovations to someone else and be the man that can convince people that they want to be as cool as John Mayer.

UAC designed to annoy people: Microsoft misses the point

Published
by
jason
on April 13, 2008
in Rant and Technology
. 0 Comments

While this isn’t wholly surprising, it was disappointing to have it confirmed. In a recent interview, David Cross, a program manager responsible for UAC made some seemingly tongue-in-cheek comments about the rationale behind UAC and its current impact on the average Vista user.

The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious…UAC is not a perfect security boundary, but it [has helped us] move from ‘zero click’ exploits to ‘one click’ defense, said Cross.

Essentially, his position is that having a UAC prompt has made users aware of the dangers that they face in a connected world. In addition, those users have a better defense against exploits. This position was based, at least in part, on internal research that claimed that the vast majority of Vista users have UAC enabled and don’t receive prompts on a regular basis.

I wonder how much actual in-home observation time was included in that research. It has been my experience that UAC leaves non-technical consumers, think about your Mom, in essentially the same position they were in before. A UAC prompt basically gives the user a choice between allowing or disallowing an action which they don’t completely understand and almost certainly believe is happing at their request. In my limited observations, most people click “Allow” without carefully reading the prompt. Same risk as before, just more inane clicking around. It is the usability equivalent of your car asking you if you would like the engine to burn several chemical compounds, that you certainly don’t recognize, as they might be harmful to your car.

Mr. Cross would have us believe that the solution to Windows’ vulnerable code base is to force users to act as police for their computer’s activities. Isn’t this what software is supposed to be really good at? While I agree that there is no perfect solution yet, I think turning the human behind the keyboard into a filter for the “bad” things that are likely to happen on their computer sorely misses the mark. At the very least, more work on tightening down the core Windows code that is consistently exploited would be a good start.

Customer Service as Competitive Advantage

Published
by
Jason
on August 14, 2007
in Management and Technology
. 1 Comment

In the early part of this year, I read Joel’s 7 Steps to remarkable customer service. The piece resonated with me, and it was one of the reasons that I applied to the SMTP program. Customer service in the world of technology is, generally speaking, an embarrassing and dehumanizing process. Here was a person who believed that there was a better way to do it.

Shortly after joining the company, I asked the question “Why do we give this information away freely? Aren’t we concerned that our competitors are bound to read it, see the wisdom of it, and emulate it?” At that point, I had about 4 weeks of customer service duty under my belt and was confident that this model could be scaled and replicated. Now, after 6 months and lots of conversations with customers, I understand why it is to our advantage to let people know that this is the way we do things.

It is hard work.

Real customer service is emotional labor. You have to dance between being truly empathetic to a frustrated customer’s problem and self preserving as a customer, pushed beyond the limits of human endurance, takes out their frustrations on you directly. The former is the norm and the latter the exception, but both efforts take a lot of energy. Add to that the fact that the problems I am asked to solve are frequently subtly complex technical issues, and I am spent at the end of the day. The payback comes in the form of a tremendous sense of satisfaction from seeing Joel’s suggestions work to make not just satisfied but fanatical customers.

The problem is, I honestly don’t think most of the people that apply for customer service jobs could do it. Either they don’t have the people skills, but are excellent technically, or they don’t have the technical skills. This is not to say that I am a phenom, by any means. It is proof positive of the draw of the promised career advancement once the customer service stint is over. I am willing and motivated to work hard because these are the same customers that I hope to be serving as I move on to QA and Marketing and, eventually, to management. Understanding them, and their needs, gives me the information I need to make decisions and trades-offs about the products on which they rely. If you ask most customer service people what they do, I bet they would say “I answer email and telephone calls”. Customer advocacy is my job. It is the best way to keep customers happy and continue to increase our revenue

You have to get the environment right.

To get people motivated and give them the tools they need to do the job of customer management takes real effort. While Joel’s steps are conveniently broken up to make them more understandable, combined they create the environment necessary to make my daily efforts possible. The entire company is oriented toward the customer. We are constantly evaluating how what we do and what we say will affect our customers.

This is hard to believe for some customers because they have been asking for this one feature (or that one) for 2 years, and we haven’t implemented it. Although it is easy to imagine us in our ivory tower laughing with scorn at your feature request, I can honestly say that we agonize over our decisions as to which features to implement when. We honestly feel badly about not getting to your suggestion, but we can’t cloister ourselves for 10 years writing the next version, so we need to choose.

Our incredibly lenient return policy allows me the freedom to say to someone “Try it, if you don’t like it you get your money back immediately, no questions asked” and “I can’t recommend that you buy FogBugz because it isn’t going to do everything you want” and “I am really sorry that we couldn’t get you connected, here is your money back and a free pass for your next connection”. All of this is intended to show that the second reason we aren’t at risk is that it is almost impossible to replicate this environment without tremendous effort, and true belief that it is worth it.

By telling customers that this is how we do business, and actually sticking to it, we make our customers confident in our ability to make them happy. We get more risk takers and advocates that push our products into markets where they might otherwise go unnoticed. And my life is better because when customers call or email, they (mostly) treat me like a human being that wants to help them, instead of their worst enemy.

We aren’t at risk at all; we have a distinct advantage, a differentiator. While other service organizations understand that these are good ideas, they aren’t able to implement them (the environment isn’t right) or they won’t implement them (don’t want to do the hard work). In the rare cases that I come across one that is able and willing, dealing with the company is such a pleasant departure that I find myself liking them, even if they are one of our competitors.

Software design is easy…

Published
by
Jason
on August 13, 2007
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I have been reading about the process of interaction design, and I have come to recognize many of the seemingly innocuous decisions that I made during past efforts that resulted in simply awful design. The scary part is that it is very hard to tell the difference between an harmless design decision and a very harmful one until you have invested a lot of effort in implementing it. Furthermore, good design thrives on a detailed understanding of your users’ desires and expectations.

In this last statement lies a cornerstone of Cooper’s methodology for creating software that really works. I believe that the innate desire of developers and managers alike is to believe they know the user. Therein exists a dangerous pitfall according Cooper. What I am thinking when I say “user” and what you are thinking are most certainly different. Instead, he recommends that people take the time to make up detailed personas that very specifically describe the users.

Doris is a stay-at-home mother with 2 children, ages 2 and 5. She is passionate about mountain biking, and therefore, covets her time to ensure that she can get to the Mountain Biking Club meet-up each week. She is a big fan of Martha Stewart’s style magazine and buys much of her home decor based on the suggestions she finds there.

It is pretty easy to imagine how this kind of description would help to inform design decisions in the software you are making. And when the nearly inevitable feature negotiations start, anyone can say “Doris wouldn’t use this because…” or “This wouldn’t make sense to Doris. She would expect…”. Conceptually simple, it helps to eliminate the ambiguity of the “user”.

The model goes further to suggest that often developers and their managers forget that the user is a person, with feelings. One of the primary goals of every user of technology (who doesn’t think like a computer already) is to not look stupid. Feelings? In software? It makes a lot of sense. Who hasn’t been frustrated when the ATM machine spits your card out unexpectedly admonishing you with a blinking “Transaction Terminated”? If you are like me, you get annoyed every time you hit the print button and the computer seems to forget that you print with the exact same settings 99.995% of the time, and proceeds to present you with a bunch of options that are completely meaningless to you. I am reasonably sure I know how to use a computer, and the process of printing a document makes me question myself. It certainly feels wrong.

Ignoring the sensibilities and emotions may not be a recipe for disaster, but it is almost certainly setting you up for obscurity in the not to distant future. There are numerous counter examples. Try setting up a MySpace account. If you don’t feel at least mildly stupid by the end of that, you are either and actual dolt or so smart that you should apply for a job as a developer where I work. And yet, they have millions of avid users. The space that their application occupies in peoples’ lives is so important, that they are willing to put up with the horror that is myspace page customization. What is interesting to me is that the writing is on the wall for myspace already. Competitor Facebook took the approach of limiting customizations but making sign-up and account management much easier, and people are noticing. It remains to be seen if this will affect the long term viability of the myspace application, but I have a very strong suspicion that it will. I measure this by the fact that I have never met a single fan of myspace (the web application). They like being in touch with their friends, they like being able to post all sorts of embarrassing personal information, but they don’t ever mention actually liking the process by which they do it. In fact, several complain about it.

Ultimately, my point is that design matters. For relatively recent proof, see the iPod that every other person on the street is carrying. It is hard to get it right, and oh so easy to get it wrong. Anecdotally, I can’t think of one product that I love that I would also consider poorly designed. The way most people react to this realization is that they think they need to hire artists, when they really need a social psychologist. When developing new technology we need to think first of Doris. Artists can come along later and make our targeted functional designs pretty.

Management experience without leaving your living room

Published
by
Jason
on July 28, 2007
in Management and Technology
. 0 Comments

Management acumen is a oft sought after but rarely found talent in all industries. The lack of available talent makes companies desperate and leaves many vulnerable to the shills. The company I work for decided to do something about this by creating a management training program. An expensive endeavor, it seeks to give the participants all of the relevant experience required for management in the real world of technology. Much of the “training” has to do with understanding customer needs, learning to manage laterally and vertically, and making rational trade-offs between features, design, and income. What is much more difficult to come by, in a company full of very smart and dedicated people, are the hardcore people management skills.

Enter World of Warcaft. A well know international phenomenon, WoW has gotten attention for being an addictive money making machine. You may have also seen it appear in Wired when, in an interview, it became a source of common ground and led (indirectly?) to a job offer. For outsiders, even with the well written explanation, it is difficult to conceive just how this game could really help you develop relevant skills for business. The Wired article compares Warcraft to other simulation games that have been used explicitly to train people (e.g. flight simulators). What interests me is something a little more subtle in the virtual world that Blizzard/Vivendi have created. They have created a virtual reality in which organizations (guilds) of upwards of 40 people are required for continued success, and simultaneously remove most of the barriers impeding an individual’s ability to change organizations (or quit altogether).

By way of confession, I have over 200 days played (200×24hours) in the world of WoW. I have two maximum level characters, and I am a member and officer of Bad Blood (a guild in the top 300 in terms of progression in the US). To get where we are, we raid 4 hours a night 5 days a week. In addition, to give us the best chance of success we have to put in additional time each week gathering materials and completing activities that give us access to progressively more difficult content. We are challenge junkies. A group of geeks who get their kicks from figuring out just how much additional damage, to the tenth of percent, they will be able to do if they pick up a particular piece of digital gear. For an idea of the level of complexity and coordination take a look at this video, prepared by another guild, designed to help people understand one of the encounters we recently mastered. At our level of play it takes 25 people, acting in unison, to get things done. If one person screws up, everyone fails. And we do this, without ever meeting each other.

Imagine for a moment, that you never had to meet any of the people that you work with. You have no opportunities to share passing conversations about the kids, your favorite sports team, or what you did last weekend. All of those informal measures of the quality of your co-workers being masked by anonymity. I know many of my colleagues, who have had experience with consultants, have an idea how difficult it is to get work done in this type of environment. Now take away the friction created by your, and your colleagues’, dependence on a salary, and reduce the cost of switching organizations to almost zero. It starts to give new clarity to the phrase “herding cats“.

It makes every moment that we spend together important. It means that frustrations and outbursts need to be managed carefully. It requires an increased sense of unity of purpose. It applies in immense amount of pressure to leadership, and forces them to identify and jealously guard talent. My experience has given me insight into the true value of positive feedback. When a kind word, spoken honestly, is basically the only currency that you have, other than success (which is unpredictable), you are forced to use it carefully. I have had to learn to listen carefully to what people mean, and not what they say, or type. I have been forced to learn to express myself clearly and concisely under pressure. If I can’t get an important message across quickly, it can mean hours of wasted effort. It is effectively the equivalent of condensing weeks or years of people management experience into 20 hours a week.

As remarkably unlikely as it may seem, I have tried to avoid exaggeration and hyperbole wherever possible. Still, I can imagine my readers’ incredulity. To that end, I will leave you with one more question that may help to highlight the value of this experience: how long does it take to explain a difficult concept to an audience of people you work with on a tele-conference, and how many people retain it afterwards? The limitations placed on communication on WoW make those skills extraordinarily important, and ultimately, a key factor to your organization’s success.

Google Alerts make me more productive

Published
by
Jason
on May 16, 2007
in Technology
. 0 Comments

At my last company ( MyPublisher ), I became very interested in what people were saying about our products and services. In order to research what was being said along with who was saying it, I started to collect a list of sites where people commonly posted about products in our category and searching for posts there etc. Every time someone linked to an external blog I would bookmark that so that I could check on it periodically. Finally, I used Google to search for a few key terms, including the company name, and would browse through the results. The issue with all of this was that there was no way to immediately tell if I had visited a link or not. Nor could I tell that I had forgotten to check one of my sources. I spent an inordinate amount of time reviewing old information only to realize 100 words in, that I had read it already.

Enter Google Alerts.

One day, I was clicking around in my Gmail account and I ran across the my services link. Right at the top of the list was the mysterious Google Alerts feature. Google describes them as:

… email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

The configuration only requires you to plug in a search term and select how often you want Google to tell you about new things that it has found that match. It literally saved me a couple of hours a month. Not a lot of time in abstract, but keep in mind that those hours were previously completely wasted and totally annoying. Now I use it to keep track of a bunch of companies and people who I like to keep tabs on.

Every once in a while, it really helps me at work by letting me know about something really good ( or really bad ) that is going on with our customers. By getting and staying informed, I am armed in the battle for excellent customer service with the weapon that is timely relevant information.

For example, I have a Google Alert configured to tell me once a day about anything new that references Fog Creek Software. Recently, it informed me of a blog post (one that I would very likely have never seen otherwise) which detailed the poor experience of one of our Copilot users. I used this information to reach out to a customer who rightfully complained about a bad experience that was the result of a bug in our software. He not only responded positively to my effort to apologize but also made himself available to troubleshoot the problem he experienced. I helped him by recognizing the issue and compensating him for the trouble. He is helping us by providing us with a source of information, should we need it, about a bug in our software. In addition, I would hope that it may lead to some repeat business for us in the future. In my opinion, it represents a small but important victory in an effort to ensure a truly enjoyable customer experience.