Recently in Usability / Design Category

Coming soon to your local design-fetishist arthouse movie theater. Immediately added to my Netflix "saved" list in case I miss it in theaters. (Here's the film's Netflix page if you want to do the same.)

(This is an extended version of an email I wrote to one of the local tech mailing lists here in New York, in response to a developer's question. It seemed generally useful enough that I'm reposting it here.)

A very common design problem in web services project these days is the issue of user search. Most web services now involve pools of data that are far too large to be entirely "browseable", even if we're only talking about finding another user on the service. Very quickly you start to see a specification develop of increasing complexity, involving boolean ("AND/OR") concepts, keywords, and all kinds of other demands targeted at extremely precise results tailored very exactly to the knowledge domain or data set. What's the best way to go about building this user experience?

This is an extension of an earlier post, which covered how one goes about calculating customer lifetime value (CLV). In this series, I'll be examining the key levers you use to maximize your business, seen through the perspective of CLV.

In my previous post around customer value, I reduced the CLV equation down to two key components:

• How much profit you make off each transaction with the customer - i.e. monetization
• How many transactions you get with the average customer - essentially, retention

To transition this a bit more to a customer-centric, rather than monetization-centric, view, your typical business has three key components:

1. The core value proposition to customers - what do they expect to get out of interacting with the company, service or product
2. The monetization of that interaction - how does the company make money off of delivering the core value proposition?
3. Customer acquisition - how does the company find and acquire new customers that find its value proposition compelling?

I'd argue that for most web businesses, it's all about these three components. Everything else is a support function. Any successful business will have to necessarily address all three of these, at least implicitly - you may not have an active acquisition strategy, for example, but that just means you're implicitly depending on word of mouth or another passive method. If you don't have a value proposition, well, that's somewhat more troubling.

I'll cover these each in separate posts. I'm going to start with value proposition, because not only is it the heart of the business, but it's also the one component you can't take a passive approach to, whereas there is at least (some) argument that you can leave the mechanics of acquisition or monetization until after you've solved the central value proposition question.

Back when I was at MIT, we used to call the standard Leatherman tools a "nerdtool" -- like a Swiss Army knife on steroids, they included pliers, knives, several screwdrivers, and a bunch of other components that you might or might not know what you were supposed to do with them. All-in, those things weighed at least a pound, didn't really fit in your pocket, and wearing one on your belt was the style equivalent of wearing two blackberries in holsters these days. (Some of you will think that's uncool, some will think it's cool, and that's exactly why the comparison is apt.) Even carrying one in your bag was somewhat of a commitment in the name of MacGuyver.

I still follow knife and tool design because it's a very interesting intersection of mechanical design, ergonomics and aesthetic design. Out of the various objects you're likely to find someone carrying every day (watch, eyeglasses, wallet, keys, etc.) it's one of the few where there is a great deal of attention paid to the functionality of the design, because it matters. In contrast, watches and glasses these days are almost solely about fashion, because the core functionality has become a commodity.

Portland, OR-based Leatherman has two new designs coming in May 2009, under the "Freestyle" moniker. These are 4.5 oz, stripped down multi-tools based on the popular Skeletool design that have been immensely popular as a replacement for the old nerdkits. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like they include basic screwdrivers, but having both a good knife and good set of pliers in a compact, light package is still better than trying to get things done with your bare hands in lots of situations. I'm going to have to try to get to a store and look at one of these firsthand when they arrive in May.

(By the way, since this post begs the question: my regular pocketknife is a very small (1.25" blade) Buck knife that has a skeletal steel frame and bottle cap opener built in. It's small enough to fit in my pocket with my wallet and cheap enough that if I ever brought it to the airport by mistake it wouldn't be a big deal. Unfortunately, it's no longer sold - it's been replaced by the Buck Transport, which in all honestly looks like a plastic piece of junk to me.)

A week ago I posted about trying to jump completely over from client-based email to only using Gmail's web interface. In particular, this was prompted by the recent availability of offline mail reading for that interface, which made it unnecessary to have Thunderbird downloading copies of all my email so I could work on reading and answering messages when not connected to the net.

Now that's the kind of conversion rate I wish I could achieve more often. Based on a Google Website Optimizer run on one of my sites from January 14th to today, February 3rd. And the best part is that the aggregate percentage has been rising steadily over the past week, which means that the current effective conversion rate may be 5 to 10% higher than this.

My first experiences with email were all server-side applications. Bulletin boards, Compuserve and dialup Internet, then the Athena Unix terminals of my years at MIT. At the time, it made sense - modems were slow, downloading messages took time, and there weren't attachments.

In the interim, I've been a die-hard user of desktop email clients. At my old finance job, I regularly received 100-150 emails a day, which sounds like a lot until you realize that if you're working on 10-12 projects or pitches, that's only 10 emails between team members per day. (Bankers tend to use CC: reflexively, but you are expected to be up to speed on all the threads even if you're not the direct recipient.) I was an Outlook power user by day and a Mozilla Thunderbird wonk by night, plus I carried (and still carry) a Blackberry that gets checked compulsively. (The dog, mind you, gets jealous about how much attention the berry gets.)

Even when not connected to the net, I want access to my email - it's not just a communications tool, it's also a major database of filed information I need when working. But with the addition of offline Gmail access via Google Gears last week, the final issue tying me to desktop clients has been resolved - I can now read and write emails on flights and away from wifi using Gmail.

For the next week, I'm going to try using Gmail's web interface exclusively when at my computer, a MacBook. I've removed Thunderbird from my application dock so I don't open it by mistake, and I've installed Google Notifier in my menu bar so I can see when a new message has arrived. There's a printout of the cheat sheet for Google Mail keyboard shortcuts and I'm going to to my best to force myself to use them so I can get up the learning curve faster. And I'm going to see how using a web-only interface to my email box works out.

I'll admit I'm skeptical... I have a hard time seeing how a web-based app can outperform a "sovereign" application like Thunderbird or Outlook. (Although I was never really happy with the keyboard shortcut support in Thunderbird, relative to Outlook.) But there are a lot of obvious benefits as well, including the ability to get the same interface wherever I can access a web browser. I'll post in a week how it's been, and whether I'll be able to remove Thunderbird from my MacBook permanently.

After reading Amy Iris's post on encouraging retweeting, I wanted to add an option for users to easily retweet posts on this site. Unfortunately, the method that Amy's recommending is very manual, and I'm a little bit lazy about things like that (especially anything that makes it harder to post something to the site, and won't work for automated posts from services like Posterous and Flickr.)

Exchanges like the one on the right are why I'm really, really wishing the iPhone had a built-in chat application (not just SMS) that could run in the background, even though I don't own an iPhone myself. (I've highlighted the time stamps to make it obvious how little time I had to respond before Marissa dropped offline.) Because folks are using an installed, application to reach their IM logins (most likely Google's own Google Talk app), they're not able to stay connected unless that application is in the foreground, because Apple doesn't allow third-party applications to run in the background. So you get that contant login-message-logout pattern from iPhone users. In an ideal world, Apple would let third-party apps run in the background, but on a mobile device I can understand why they don't. So they should at least provide a "built-in" chat application that can connect to the major IM networks and stay logged in even when in the background, given that instant messaging is as common a method of real-time interaction these days as voice calls or SMS (at least for certain people.)

If Apple is just doing this to force folks to SMS via the AT&T network, they should be ashamed of themselves. There's no reason users should have to be paying on a per-message basis for sending 140 character text clips when they have a TCP/IP connection available for web browsing, etc on an unmetered basis.

Even my Blackberry Curve handles this issue better than the iPhone -- and it's pretty rare that I say that for anything unrelated to its hardware keyboard.