Blinksale 2.0 Announced

For invoicing, Work Industries uses Blinksale, a simple, web-based invoicing system. It lets us and our clients keep track of billables in one place. We just signed up last month, but already we’re pretty happy. Blinksale was recommended to us by the good folks at Hop Studios, and they deserve the discovery credit.

Yesterday I received an email from Blinksale announcing Blinksale 2.0:

With the rollout of Blinksale 2.0, we will also be raising our monthly subscription rates. Our new base rate will start at $12 per month. However, we have happy news for you: All existing Blinksale subscribers will receive their current monthly rate for a period of 24 billing months starting in May 2006. That’s right, all current Blinksale subscribers will still be billed at their current rate for 2 more years.

Reading the announcement email I first thought, ‘oh man, they’ve doubled the price on me.’ Then I read further and realized that my pricing would be grandfathered for two years. This is excellent, not just for me and my budget, but as a customer service practice. Well done, Blinksale!

So, if you’re looking for a great little invoicing system, give Blinksale a try. For the next two weeks or so, you can get the original pricing and, when version 2.0 is released, you’ll keep your original pricing and get all the new features. Pretty darn decent of them, if you ask me.

Creating Passionate Users, Notes from Audio

Update: Here is a link to the original post on Kathy Sierra’s blog about her talk, Creating Passionate Users.

Via a roundup post of audio and video stuff to hear / watch on the pretty-much-always-excellent 37 Signals blog, Signal vs. Noise, I came across an audio recording of a presentation by Kathy Sierra on creating passionate users. The file is very large, many MBs, and about 1 hour long, in .m4a format, which seems to play really well in quicktime, and I listened to the whole thing.

If you’re at all interested in how to design software or websites or games or any product that people will invest themselves in, I recommend listening. Download the file to your computer and add it to your MP3 player and listen to it sometime when you’re walking somewhere, or on the bus. It’s a great talk from Montreal, I’m told, though I don’t think it sounds like a conference. Rather, it sounds like a presentation to a group of students, likely computer science students, or employees of the university.

As I listened to the presentation I made some notes. The notes are available in fairly rough, unedited form at the link to this full post. Kathy Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users, is also well worth checking out and adding to your RSS reader. What? Don’t have an RSS reader. Don’t get what all the noise is about? Well, in the hopper here at Work Industries, is a post for you explaining what is RSS, why it matters and how it can work for you. Coming Soon!

Until then, try to have some fun with my ungainly notes, if you dare.

Attributes of Products People are Passionate About

• Continuous learning and improvement
• Know what it looks like to be an expert
• Path to getting there
• Plenty of ways to spend money
• Idea of community
• Part of the tribe
• Stories of people
• Outsiders accusing users of drinking the coolaid

Continuous Learning and Improvement

• no one is passionate about something they suck at, there has to be a feedback of improvement as you go, users have to get their foot in the door to success
• learning provides a higher-resolution user experience - it improves / enhances the appreciation of the experience
• those who have invested in the learning get a higher-quality experience / better appreciation of the experience
• is it really about the product that people are passionate about? Or is it tools that people use to do things that they’re passionate about?
• for example: “I’m passionate about my K2 skis, but really I’m passionate about skiing, not just the skis.”
• teaching your users about what they’re doing makes them more passionate about the tools that allow them to do it (Nikon cameras teaches their customers how to make better photos)
• this enhanced resolution / appreciation actually helps to graduate users up the complexity and quality scale, through a product line (from entry-level products to more advanced)
• teaching can happen in offshoot ways too - red bull runs a DJ academy to train DJs on spinning records - it’s further up the same social value chain for their users
• phychologists call this misattribution of arousal: your brain cannot tell the difference between what caused a good feeling and what happened to be there at the same time - there is an associative response
• learning acts as a drug to the brain that produces an incredibly good feeling
• that brings along all the peripheral things in the context to the brain’s memory stores of that event
• by helping users learn and advance, your software product become part of the great feeling of learning, endears itself to users
• BUT there is a problem, our legacy brain has a filter system that’s always trying to keep information out, not always in conjunction with conscious mind
• things that are not emotionally engaging get caught in the filter
• the things that get through depend on chemicals and memory
• the things that get through are weird things (unusual, unexpected), the things that stand out from the rest, that are differentiated, that your brain thinks will provide a different scenario from the rest - we predict in how we allocated attention - Book: On Intelligence
• the brain is always looking to see that it gets what it expects - it is a prediction mechanism
• the things that align with what it expects don’t get brought to the front of attention because they’re not unusual
• the brain is tuned to pay attention to certain things inherently - things that can be a danger (spiders, dogs), that are a threat - also: the faces of other people who look like they’re afraid of something (transferance) - also: beauty, things that are associated with health - also: cute, innocent, baby-like things
• also: fun, derived from the play drive - also: funny, not the same as fun, but creating pleasure - also: when there is missing information, something not quite resolved and the brain has to figure out what’s missing, like a puzzle
• the brain has a dedicated centre just for processing faces, use them to effect how people are reading / engaging with a story - Book: Mind Hacks - recreational neuroscience

Why should I care about what you’re telling me?

• instruction without a goal is pointless, provide the benefit up front before you try to explain something
• play a game: why? so? who cares? so what?
• one party has to explain something / provide some information to the other party; the other party is resistant to receiving the information and keeps responding with why? so? who cares? so what? until it really does matter to them
• joke about the game always devolving until the other party (receiver of information) is going to either lose their job or never have sex again for the information to start to matter to them
• right before that stage (real bad thing) is the most important thing and this is where you should start to explain / provide the information
• it’s not that they won’t get it before you get to the real bad thing, it’s that it won’t matter enough to them until then - Book: something about being in flow, the psychology of optimal experience
• Flow: the zone, when outside stimuli stop mattering and you believe you’re just one small step away from success, you believe that you have the knowledge and skill to meet a worthwhile challenge - the challenge has to be high enough to be worth engagement and you have to believe that you have to tools and knowledge to solve the problem
• as a software product maker you have to evolve with your users to be able to offer challenges that ramp up with their belief in their own skills
• most powerful learning experiences (not necessarily good) are when things explode in counterintuitive ways you did not predict - these provide the deepest, most memorable learnings that last and stay with people
• be discriminating about what has to be remembered - not everything has to be available for your users all the time - somethings should be referenced if they don’t need to be responsive, if they are volatile, if they are dry and rote
• at the same time we are always in the process of forgetting - this is a healthy thing for us because we have a relative ability to remember and a limited ability to store things in long-term memory
• the things we talked about before (faces, sex, shock, novelty, weird, etc.) are the things that intrude on forgetting, cancel it out
• subtle changes to tone and language, to a more personal, conversational mode, enhance recall of content by 40 percent (using ‘you’) - the brain doesn’t distinguish between conversational writing, listening and an actual conversation
• one of the most important things to learn from successful game development is the idea of levels and progression for users through those levels
• the narrative can be built as a repeating spiral that users pass through repeatedly in different levels, without an end - but with a payoff - the payoff has to harken back to the original motivation of engagement
• one payoff leads directly into the next capability challenge, with the payoff contributing directly right away to the pursuit of that challenge
• a series of regular, compelling payoffs works much better than one big distant payoff
• the actual payoff can be trivial in many ways (example of martial arts belts) but their meaning to the key peers / tribe makes them worth pursuing
• in studies of gamers done by Paul Allen’s company, boys think that just getting to the next level is motivation enough to pursue the goal, while girls wanted to know what’s the point, in that next level what do you get, girls had to know about the goal, simple achievement was not enough

The Tribe

• where you find passion you also find this idea of the tribe - who is in and as importantly, who is not - belonging to something larger than the individual - i.e.: people buy t-shirts to show their affiliation - t-shirt-first development will provide a barometer of loyalty - t-shirts act as a cultural / tribal filter for people to see who gets their affiliation and who doesn’t
• where there is passion there is also always legends, myth, founder mythology, gossip, etc. that circulates amongst the tribe
• having the great story at the beginning is very important because this is what people grasp onto, what they use to seed the tribe
• successful tribes also make their users into heros - they take things that happen in the community and blow it up for all to see, hear, share in
• you have to find the key evangelists and if possible you want to not make it anyone with an interest in whatever it is that they’re boosting
• if you want your users to be talking you have to give them something to talk about, the seeds of the story - easter eggs are a great way to let some people discover parts of the story - these are an example of user treats

Tips, Tricks, Pitfalls to Watch Out For

• if you want passionate users you have to listen to your users - but it turns out that users are really unreliable, they’re not capable of envisioning any sort of breakthrough idea, they’re going to ask for incremental changes relevant to their experience - also: when people try to articulate something it changes / adjusts the nature of what they want (the quantum mechanics of user feedback - asking for the information changes the information they would have given you if they didn’t have to explain it)
• this doesn’t mean we need to ignore users, but asking them directly what they need / want is fraught with difficulty and unrealiable - rather, observe users in their native habitat (in the wild) to get both the bad stuff, the pain for what users are going through, but also to get the good stuff, the joy and fulfillment that users can experience from their products
• Essay, Paul Graham: Dignity is Deadly - when you’re a start up you can - choose how you’re going to be - dignified and staunch or daring and revolutionary - and when you become too corporate you don’t gain capability you just lose capability because you’ve cut off some of the things that might have been the most important attributes that you had - talked about how working in a large corporate environment you can still keep some of that start-up mentality
• the longer you do something and the more successful you get doing something the more you get stuck being safe and making small incremental improvements, which are the things customers ask for - but really you need to tackle the whole problem and not just the little niggling parts of it that cause irritation and get mentioned - do the hard thing
• watch out for what happens when you’re working in an environment with a lot of people who are trying to go for consensus - you end up with something that’s okay for everyone but not great for anyone - keep the pointy edges to things without killing each other - and now the expectations of users are so much higher that to surpass them and create something people can be passionate about you have to reach much further
• resist featuritis where you’re trying to please all the users with features - features do not replace well trained, well pleased users who are passionate about a product and love to use it - this is based on perception, not on a number of features or actual use but on perception
• figure out how to get your users past the suck threshold as quickly as possible - what can you do to get them feeling good about using the product - what kind of training, hints, clues, feedbacks can you give them to speed them along the learning curve - how soon can they have enough capability to be creative with the framework / tools they have - this is where you have to invest your emotional energy for your users
• don’t be tempted to get rid of all your critics, don’t be too receptive to the critics or you’ll end up again trying to please too many people / groups and not making the passionate ones happy - if you have something that people really love then there will also be people who really hate it

The Secret to Passionate Users

• It doesn’t matter what they think about you. Don’t worry about how your users perceive you, they just care about themselves and the result of interacting with what it is that you provide them - tools, books, experience
• How will the user feel about themself as a result of what I just created? Will they say, wow, I just learned something and now I can go and do this and that and all these great things that I couldn’t do before.
• Everywhere there is passion there is a user having an ‘I rule’ experience. So how can you create what you create and help your user have that experience?
• Indicative of this experience are users using first-person language, talking about themselves in their experience. If they’re talking about you, your product, tool, then you haven’t delivered a great experience to them.
• Never forget that there are real people out there using the product and they have feelings and hopes and aspirations and insecurities and as tool builders we have the opportunity to bring joy to someone else’s life.

END

Questions

• How would you go about inspiring passion and learning with tools than don’t enable creativity but are geared towards interaction?
• Even if you’re not helping people be creative you can still provide them with feedback on achievement, like level markers, badges for achievement, rankings in context, etc.
• How would I bring the points you’ve been making, about creating passionate users, if my product is really something boring?
• Two ways to address that: (1) possible approach is to try to go back and see if there are assumptions to be rethought - can I find something interesting in here - why do they need this piece of software in the first place - what is it about their work that this will help fulfill - example of Basecamp - (2) - this just is a boring task and there’s no way to sex it up but there is still the misattribution of arousal that you can deal with, so you can leverage that to create a positive feeling for your product

7 Ways Non-Profits Can Use Podcasts

To follow up on yesterday’s 10 Ways Non-Profits Can Use Blogs Britt Bravo presents 7 Ways Non-Profits Can Use Podcasts.

Once again Bravo does a nice job of highlighting some great examples of podcasts working for the organizations producing them. And once again I’d like to reconfigure his article and suggest that it’s really a list of tactics non-profits can use to distribute and collect audio content. Need a primer of podcasts and podcasting? Wikipedia has a great podcasting definition with details on the distinctions of podcasting from other audio production and distribution techniques and formats, such as broadcasting and streaming audio.

And speaking of podcasting, this Saturday I’ll be at a day-long workshop hosted by Tod Maffin called From Idea to Air. The day will be dedicated to learning about the business, craft and process of telling stories with audio. Let me know if you have any items you’d like me to bring up at the session, or any questions you’d like me to ask.

Steal this Idea: Buying Futures of Gasoline

Buying gasoline has always struck me as a great example of irrational behaviour masquerading as bargain hunting. People drive around until they have nothing but fumes left in search of cheap gasoline. People put $5 in and wait for the price to drop. When prices are high, a common brag is how cheap someone was able to buy some gas. People are crazy for a few cents off the price of gas.

And for what? An average-sized fuel tank is around 60 litres. Let’s say that I fill my tank when it’s almost empty. I add 50 litres at each fill. If I drive around, peering up at the gas signs until I find a station selling gas for $1.10/L then I pay $55 for my tank of gas. The following week, I drive around peering up at the gas signs and Bingo! find a station selling gas for $1.00/L. I pay $50 for my tank of gas. I laugh and ask people to guess how much I paid for my gas. Hoo-hah! I beat the system. I saved $5. Not such a big deal.

A few neighbourhoods away, someone else has just paid $1.05/L of gas. In another neighbourhood, someone paid $1.15/L. The price goes up and down, sometimes you pay a little more, sometimes you pay a little less. But you have to drive so you have to buy gas. The game of finding lower-priced gas is just a diversion from the pain of having to buy it in the first place. Maybe we kid ourselves that we make out ahead of the game. Maybe we do make out ahead by playing the game. I don’t think that matters, I haven’t seen a lot of gas companies go out of business.

At the same time all the gas companies are trying to find ways to keep customers loyal. They offer a commodity product and try to differentiate it with fancy tech-sounding additives. They have a schizophrenia. They want customers to pay at the pump for convenience, yet they also want customers to come into the store to stock up on chips and pop. But it’s a gas station. People pull in for gas or to use the bathroom. That’s about it. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of opportunity for building the business based on the site.

Now I have an idea for how gas stations can make their customers loyal: selling gas futures. What are gas futures? They’re essentially price speculation in the present on the future price of gas. It’s what commodity traders do all the time. Buy at one price and exercise at another. Here’s how it would work.

I’d partner with a major gas company to roll out a new brand. Let’s call it PriceMakers. Customers sign up with PriceMakers and get a PriceMakers Petro card. They use that just like a gas debit card, except that the card trades in gas instead of debt. When the price is low customers can buy lots of litres worth of gas and add them to their PriceMakers Petro card. When the price is high they can cash in those stockpiled PriceMakers litres at the price they originally paid for them. It’s simple hedging. Every month the PriceMakers members can see on their statement how much they saved on their gas bill by using their PriceMakers Petro card.

So what’s in it for the major gas company? A few things:

• Cash up front for future goods
• A loyal customer locked in to your product
• A trackable customer and their behaviours
• A customer you can market other products to
• Residual, purchased inventory that remains unused

Once the PriceMakers Petro card takes off, you can extend the PriceMakers idea to other commodity purchases with price fluctuations, such as air miles, long distance minutes and electricity. Purchases can also be extended to where there is price discrimination based on geography, such as in airports, where a cup of coffee or a sandwich costs double the same thing on the street.

Now, where the idea gets really crazy is when you open up the PriceMakers website and start to let people trade their credits to each other. Then you tap into a network effect and the growth of the program can be exponential. Geographic barriers are destroyed and people can trade gas from low-priced locations to high-priced locations. PriceMakers takes a small piece of these customer-to-customer transactions. Maybe there’s a membership, or maybe not.

So what do you think? Would you sign up? Would you tell someone about it? Would you use it?

If you have any ideas to contribute or questions, please add to the comments.

10 Ways Non-Profits Can Use Blogs

Over at NetSquared Britt Bravo has a great article listing 10 ways non-profits can use blogs.

The common point of all 10 items on the list at once indicate a blog’s role as a clearing-house and collection-point for information among the various constituents involved in a non-profit. This is a great way of seeing a blog, but this strategy is certainly not limited to blog websites. An effective website, regardless of whether it includes a blog-type structure, offers a great opportunity to non-profits that need two-way communication with the world. And really, isn’t that all non-profits?

The article does a good job of orienting the strengths of blogging to the non-profit sector, and using the right language to describe the phenomena. I recommend it as a primer for those new to blogging and a refresher for those familiar with social software.

If you’re interested in learning more about how non-profits can use blogs to connect in the networked world, you’ll want to check out Word Power, a strategic blogging workshop coming May 17-21 to the Hollyhock Centre on beautiful Cortes Island. Local Vancouver blogger Rob Cottingham is wired into the event as his company, Social Signal, is presenting it.

I think I’m going to be in Toronto the days before (May 15 and 16) at the Mesh Conference, but if I was available I’d have loved to participate in Work Power.