CollectiveX: How to lose customers and frustrate people

Today I came across CollectiveX, a site for managing a group of people on the web. Interesting, I thought to myself. That’s pretty much what I’ve been looking for for a client who wants to manage their board members, various committees and all their associated meetings through a web interface. It sounds good, it sounds perfect.

I went through the CollectiveX tour and was impressed. Slick interface, simple to use and easy enough to get people over the suck stage and into the kicking ass (as Kathy Sierra puts it while talking about creating passionate users).

So I decided to sign up and try the darned thing. When I did, it felled over and I started noticing bad things.

Here are the 3 things I noticed, that I’ve also sent to them via their fancy feedback device in the footer:

1. On the pricing page I had no clue how to sign up. The buttons are practically hidden. No difference is colour or shape from the rest of the design. They’re lost! I wanted to sing up and couldn’t.
2. Go through your copy on the site carefully. On the pricing page the price for the entry-level premium package is $36. On the Create a Group Account page it tells me I’ve selected the $34 package. C’mon, folks. Get it straight! You’re asking for my credit card and you’re telling me two different prices.
3. Um, make the sign up work. It no work for me (Mac, OS 10.4, Safari browser). I hit submit and get a cryptic error that looks like a custom 500 and tells me to go back and try again. It’s great that you’re sending an email to the development team, but if you’re out doing awareness work (as you must have been to come to my attention), then make the thing work.

So CollectiveX, you folks have a product I want to try but can’t get working. I’m ready to be a good client of yours. I’m trying. Please help yourselves. You’ll also be helping me.

The Economist Discovers Peer-Produced Media

A friend and I have an ongoing discussion about technology and change. It goes like this: change opportunities in the organization she works for only really exist once The Economist writes about them. Before that, as far as her boss is concerned, nothing noteworthy has happened. From my experience, this kind of follow-the-established-follower mentality pervades many organizations. So I want to let you know that you (yes, all of you out there with tremendous frustration at not being able to sell your innovative ideas internally without some random external article) are not alone.

The best stories I get from my friend (because they provoke the most outrage in her) are when she tells me about her boss bringing copies of The Economist to her desk to show her articles. Topics like podcasting, blogs and wikipedia have recently appeared in The Economist, and dutifully, they have then appeared in her boss’ outstretched hand at the corner of her desk.

‘Look at this,’ he’ll say (as my paraphrase of her paraphrase). ‘Isn’t this interesting. Do you know about this? We should think about doing this.’ Then he’ll dawdle off to take a conference call, completely missing the fact, my friend assures me, that she had sent him an article on the exact same subject 6 to 10 months prior. A week later the boss will knock at her desk again to inquire how the new, new thing he’d pointed out was coming along.

At this point in her story my friend will make choking noise, squeals of derision and, if in dire straights, will violently shake her hands. I love it. This is the source of Dilbert resonance. I ask her to tell me more. I snort in agreement. I provoke her by calling to her attention the indifference with which her boss received the aforementioned article, 6 to 10 months prior. She indulges me and raises her rancour another level. It eats away at her like an unfilled cavity in a sensitive molar.

This story comes to mind because today I was pointed to an article in The Economist about new media entitled Among the Audience. The article introduces a broad survey that ropes in some of the bright lights of the current web vogueness. Its topic?

The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media… that will profoundly change both the media industry and society as a whole.

Interesting and well written. I recommend it. Andreas Kluth does a nice job of laying the current cultural effects of digital technologies into a common and simple historical context, from Gutenberg’s movable type to MovableType, the blogging software. There’s also someone calling a big, brand-name media honcho an ‘ignoramus!’ which is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

Unfortunately, most of the components of the survey require me to sign up as an Economist subscriber to read, so I’ll never know what it says. Audio files from some of the luminaries are also available, to anyone, though I have not listened to them.

I guess I should go warn my friend that her boss is due to come knocking.

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

Nature versus Nurture in Music Recommendations

Steve Krause writes a lengthy review / overview of two different approaches to music recommendations: Pandora and Last.fm. As he sees it, Pandora‘s algorithm-based approach is equal to the nature school of thought while Last.fm‘s behaviour-based approach is equal to the nurture school of thought.

Algorithmically, Pandora versus Last.fm is something like the nature versus nurture debate. Taking the nature side, Pandora’s recommendations are based on the inherent qualities of the music. Give Pandora an artist or song, and it will find similar music in terms of melody, harmony, lyrics, orchestration, vocal character and so on. Pandora likes to call these musical attributes “genes” and its database of songs, classified against hundreds of such attributes, the “Music Genome Project.”

On the nurture side (as in, it’s all about the people around you), Last.fm is a social recommender. It knows little about songs’ inherent qualities. It just assumes that if you and a group of other people enjoy many of the same artists, you will probably enjoy other artists popular with that group.

Like Last.fm, most music-discovery systems have been social recommenders, also known as collaborative filters. Although much of the academic work in the area has focused on improving the matching algorithms, Last.fm’s innovation has been in improving the data the algorithms work on. Last.fm does so by providing users an optional plug-in that automatically monitors your media-player software so that whatever you listen to—whether it came from Last.fm or not—can be incorporated into your Last.fm profile and thus be used as the basis for recommendations. Compared to relying on users to manually provide preferences, this automatic and comprehensive data capture leads to far better grist for the data mill.

I don’t have any experience with either music-recommendation system, but I love the way Krause connects software product design, data mining of enormous sets and basic psychology so people can understand the respective approaches. To me, this is one of the finest things an expert can do - make a subject approachable and comprehensible to a wider, general audience.

For some background on the N-vs-N expression, check out the nature-versus-nurture wikipedia entry.

Oxo Reinvents Kitchen Devices

My tongs, the tongs that I use almost every day, are Oxo tongs. They are wonderful tongs. I use them on the stove, when roasting in the over, on the barbecue grill. I also use them to serve guests. I use them for salad. When cooking and serving, my tongs act as an extension to my hand. I like them so much that when we closed up the Work Industries offices recently for ski days in Fernie, I brought them with me to cook there.

So I read this LA Times article about how Oxo has reinvented kitchen devices with some personal bias. I wanted to like the article because I already like the tongs. I like them so much I travel with them. Okay, I’m a cooking nerd. But I don’t think about them much when I use them. And I hadn’t really appreciated all the consideration that had gone into their use until I read about it, which I suppose is a measure of how well they’re designed.

In the LA Times article I love the story about how Oxo came upon the breakthrough that helped them build a superior measuring cup, and I love the way they sweat the small stuff and make things for people, with people involved in the making:

...people are often better at showing than they are at telling; mostly they could only articulate that the problems with the traditional Pyrex measurer were that it was “glass, hot, greasy.” But watching them struggle with the cup revealed the ultimate flaw: You cannot tell how full it is without lifting it up to eye level.

The Oxo measurer has markings down the inside, large enough to read without glasses. And the latest version is made of a hard plastic that stands up better to repeated runs through the dishwasher. (Improvements in materials and technology account for many Oxo upgrades—the silicone potholder can now be bonded with fabric; plastic can adhere to stainless steel in a mixing bowl.)

The measuring cup is one of five Oxo products that were not in-house eurekas but came to the company from outside in the last 10 years. “We have some very passionate consumers,” said Gretchen Holt, who handles media for the company, demonstrating to editors why “they should give a damn” about an Oxo breakthrough. Ideas also flow in from retailers and wannabe inventors.

I love it! There are always more smart, capable people with insight outside of whatever organization houses the creation.

As someone who cooks a lot, Oxo products have become a relied-upon standard, and, now that I’ve read about products like the cutting board that doesn’t slip on the counter when you cut on it, I will seek out other Oxo products because of my excellent experiences.

I’m pointing out the Oxo article because I think some great parallels can be drawn between how they design kitchen tools and how I believe web tools and websites should be designed. In particular, the article demonstrates the following guidelines.

• Better tools equal fewer tools. The better your tools are at doing their job, the fewer specialized tools you need to do portions of that job or similar jobs. Or, put anther way, the better the execution, the less need there is for alternate yet semi-same tools.
• Big ideas and breakthroughs are rare while small, incremental improvements are always available to be tackled. Whatever diety your ascribe to, we need to recognize that godliness and goodness lives in the details.
• Sometimes people don’t know they want a better product. Not until they’re presented with a better product, at least. For instance, I wasn’t really dissatisfied with my steamer basket - it’s the typical spaceship-style, unfold steamer that sits in about an inch of water, with a peg in the middle and a ring through the top of the peg - until I read in the article about the Oxo steamer. I never thought about using that peg for anything, it was pretty unusable. But because of the peg, I have to break my asparagus (a common steamed items in these parts) in half to fit in the steamer. Oxo has created a steamer with a removable peg that folds flat when not in use. Brilliant!
• Tools need to be designed with a relentless focus on serving people. Sounds simple, but it can never be repeated often enough.
• People come in all manner of varieties but tend to do things in common ways.
• Tools come with inherent biases and their design shapes the possibilities of their use.
• A rich interchange is happening between professionals and amateurs with both benefiting from the exchange of information and practices. At the same, a new type of person (user) is arising, variously called the pro-am or prosumer, someone between the professionals and the amateurs. As tools for everyone get better professionals have less tool-based advantage and must rely on craft, experience or knowledge-based advantage. Think of photographers, journalists, athletes and chefs. The amateurs are catching up faster than the professionals are pulling away. A key driver of this trend is the web. The web, as a tool, offers the following biases: transparency, decentralized coordination and constant feedback loops. Consequently, we see cheap coordination of resources, anywhere-to-anywhere networked communication, and increased access and storage of information.
• Connected Consumption: As the exchange of information continues to accellerate, and people have greater access to timely, contextual, peer-reviewed information, they purchase habits become more responsive and changeable. Most of the time I’ve seen this phenomena expressed as an increase in the fickleness of consumers, and this can be true, but I also believe that companies that deliver on their promise develop greater momentum and loyalty. The same way that someone who always sticks to their word becomes more trusted.
• Others I’m missing? Please comment.

Can Brands Enable Social Engagement?

MediaPost has a great article given by J. Walker Smith, the president of Yankelovich Partners, entitled Productivity: Meet, Greet, Then Market.

These days, the best way to get people’s attention is not to engage consumers with a brand, but to host or facilitate a context for people to engage with one another. People don’t want to see ads; they want to see their friends. And while they’re doing so, they’ll do business as well….Instead of isolating people into private experiences shared with no one else or clustering people into closed communities of narrow interests, the Internet is bringing people together in new and unprecedented ways.

...

(What makes for) the killer app isn’t Fox’s online content; it’s social engagement at MySpace.com. Social engagement is the platform on which business can be done.

I love reading how the advertising industry talks to inself. Overall I see the industry having a very hard time dealing with the web and finding ways to engage with people and charge for that engagement. Mostly existing tactics have been ported from existing media.

The article does hit a couple of good grounders identifying the new value drivers online but it misses the home runs:

• social engagement is not the ‘latest killer app,’ it’s not an app. Social engagement is what we do as humans. The web just allows people to do what they want in new ways and at different scales.
• people are most locked into experiences not by the interface or subscription fees or the data that they have invested in a site and will have to reinvest in another site, which is painful, if they make a switch, but by other people. And not just by volume but by quality. What’s quality? It’s different for each of us, that’s what makes it interesting.
• ”...where people are engaged and interacting, they’ll do business, too.” Only if that same place meets their needs. I use Flickr to store and share my photos. But if I wanted to print them in an album and Flickr only offered a subpar option, I’d take my photos elsewhere to have them developed into an album. Portability is here and the people formerly known as audience know it.
• “There’s a new appreciation that people like talking to other people, not to brands. In fact, at Yankelovich we’ve documented how little people want to be marketed to these days.” People talk to brands? The reason advertising is in such deep decay is that people in the industry say and write these kinds of things. If no one hears a brand in a forest, does it exist?
• “Technological advances always increase control, but in the past this has mostly been an increase in collective rather than individual control.” Wrong. Almost all recent (the last 20 years) computer technology has been focused on serving the interests of organizations because they were the ones buying it and that’s what they wanted. The shift to enabling individuals to do things with computer technology (task enabling) from enabling organizations to control their employees (control enabling) is what I see as the biggest shift in what is collectively called Web 2.0. The best delineation I’ve encountered of task-enabling technology versus power-enabling technology is in Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology. Read it and you’ll see.

As a personal anecdote, I recently stopped using Yahoo as my RSS reader. I had been thinking about it for awhile but waffled on moving because I’d invested my time in subscribing to over 100 feeds. I had no way to export them so I kept using Yahoo and I kept hating Yahoo for giving me no way to export them. Then I reached a tipping point and it became worth it to move all those feeds to Bloglines. Why? So that I could create a blogroll like the one you see to the left under Leading Readings.