The technology integrated into cell phones that make it possible for us to be found is also the same technology used to find your phone. Apparently in Las Vegas, though, a software glitch means Wayne Dobson has your lost phone, or at least that’s what GPS is telling Sprint customers. Not a long read this weekend, but it didn’t take too many lines of copy to relay one of the weirder stories I’ve read in a while. Enjoy!
Yearly Archives: 2013
Who Owns Your UX Philosophy?
Brad Feld wrote a great post on UX philosophy over the weekend. His question was not who contributed to it but instead who owns it.
I’ve been in three board meetings in the last month where it was painfully apparent that there wasn’t a person in the company who owned the UX philosophy of the product. I’m explicitly saying “UX” (user experience) rather than “UI” (user interface) as each company had an excellent designer and the application looked great. But the UX broke down quickly, especially as you went from novice first time user to experienced user.
In my experience, many small companies are 1) running for their lives and 2) consensus driven. Both of these kill good UX. For one, running fast means not taking the time to contemplate how we’d expect to interact with an application and also means no time spent thinking about the implications of design, features and experience across platforms. Some things just take time and this is one of them. In order to plan for consistent interaction the UX “owner” must have both a deep understanding of ways of interacting and vast experience across platforms, not to mention a deep understanding of the product’s intent. Acquiring those skills takes time.
As to the second point, when there are only a couple of employees it is really easy to go with the opinion of the room. This doesn’t work at all for UX. UX is a dictator’s game, for anal retentive ones at that. Someone has to have the iron fist that says this goes here and that goes there and I expect this other thing to work like this. The group can contribute, provide feedback and better be willing to challenge the dictator, but one person must take responsibility for consistently enforcing the philosophy. Everyone else, then, must follow or get out of the way.
Apple’s Churning Of The Gut
It’s the funny season in technology land. The holidays are over, the major technology trade shows are soon to pass, and thousands of tech writers have nothing to report. So we get stories like the Wall Street Journal quoting unnamed sources that say Apple halved their component orders for calendar Q1. I find the whole thing fishy (via Loren Brichter) and never personally made the connection that a decrease in parts meant a decrease in orders. John Gruber linked to a great Forbes article that could explain the situation.
Personally, I’m really bored with these stories. Unnamed sources say such-and-such, the blogosphere goes wild, some rise up to defend Apple while some rip it down. The stock price moves. Then everything returns to normal, waiting for the next big “story” to appear days or weeks or months later. Yawn.
What interests me more is why does this stuff keep happening in Apple’s name? No one comes out and says this crap about Samsung, Google, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft or any other big name in technology. It’s all Apple, all the time.
One possible answer is that Apple’s headlines are perfect link bait. Write something disparaging about Apple and everybody who follows technology clicks the link. Posts get written about it for weeks. The irony is that all the commentary keeps the story alive, drives more traffic to the original writer’s web site, which gets them to write more of this garbage. The second possible answer is that we thrive on building up companies (and people) then tearing them down. Apple was the underdog for so long and now that it is one of the biggest and most successful companies in the world, well, we can’t root for them anymore. A third is that the company is just that divisive. These have been talked about endlessly; none ring perfectly true to me. They all strike me as symptoms, not causes.
I have come to believe that the true cause is something bigger than all of this. I think the right answer is that Apple just fails to pass the gut test for most people. It’s an incredulous reaction to Apple’s success. Look, how is it even remotely possible that a company with such a small market share could really be doing so well? How can a company that had so little success, a company that survived by the skin of its teeth in the PC era, be one of the largest companies in the world now? How can a company with so few products be such a behemoth?
I honestly believe people read their gut and say it can’t be possible therefore it isn’t. Apple can’t be this successful. It’s not possible. And I know that because my gut tells me so.
I had lunch today with one of my old college professors and his attitude was almost “about time.” Apple had its day in the sun, it did well for a while, but it’s time for market realities to catch up to the company. Apple has been a fad for a decade now — since the iPod launched in 2001 — and it is time for it to fade into the sunset like some hokey 1950s western.
Which I think leads to the last unfathomable point that makes Apple’s case so gut-wrenching. There is no way, the gut tells folks, that Apple can continue growing at the current rate. There’s no way! But what the gut can’t fathom is that the markets Apple is playing in are so ridiculously large that there are only a handful of other things that play at that scale, and all of those are at the base level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I mean how in the world is it possible that smartphones could play at a seven billion unit market scale? After all, everyone needs air, water and food. Not everyone needs a cell phone.
The gut can’t believe it. Reality, though, can be brutally hard on the gut.
“Shipping A Product Is A Lot Of Work”
There’s an interesting interview with Sam Soffes in this Venture Beat article. Sam wrote the app I referenced yesterday, Cheddar, which is a to do list app that works across iOS and Mac systems. I love reading these interviews with people actually out trying to make products and make a living. Once companies get big they become guarded and generally don’t release these kinds of statements.
One answer I wanted to point out specifically is this one:
After I left Hipstamatic, I decided I wanted to make something. Over a year ago, I had played with Cheddar a little on a flight and thought it would be fun to make it for real. I thought it would take three weeks tops to get a version out and start making money. Three months later, I shipped Cheddar on the web as well as a native iPhone and iPad app… It turns out shipping a product is a lot of work.
Well, yeah! Shipping a well designed, fully functioning service is hard work and does take time. He says it took him three months to ship. No, it took him a year plus to ship. Even if he wasn’t actively coding Cheddar, he was thinking about it and solving problems in the back of his brain. And this is a simple idea — a task list app.
The reality is complicated things take time to develop and ship. Be patient.
The Key To Freemium Subscription Conversion
I’ve been analyzing a number of subscription services over the past year, primarily those following the freemium business model. The ones who seem to have the most success not only solve a problem but also seem to have something else in common: each one offers multiple ways to ram your head against the pay wall.
To simplify, I’m going to focus on a handful of freemium services. Freemium, if you are not aware, are products that offer some functionality for free and more if you pay. Examples include Evernote, Flickr, and 37signals’ products. To different extents, each service offers functionality for free and then gives you multiple methods where that free service isn’t enough and paying becomes the likely option.
Evernote offers more for free than most services. You can create and upload way more for free than 99.9% of people would ever use each month, for instance, and gives you access to that information everywhere. Given that you’d think Evernote would have a low conversion rate. But it’s actually really high: over 20% of active users (those who use the service at least once per month). Why do people upgrade? Bigger uploads, better security, offline access, history of note changes, collaboration options, better search and faster image recognition. And those are just feature reasons. Evernote CEO Phil Libin claims that the primary reason is because customers want to know the company will be around long-term. That’s eight reasons — and I didn’t list them all — for a customer to pay. Each customer only needs one reason to upgrade. Evernote ensures most customers will eventually run into one of them.
Flickr has an upload limit for free, or rather it has a limit of how many of your uploaded photos you can see. The Pro account adds unlimited photos, larger sized photos, more videos, HD videos, more groupings, high res images, ability to download uploaded images and statistics. Again, Flickr offers nine or more ways for a customer to hit a wall and need to upgrade.
As a third example look at 37signals’ Highrise. Highrise revolves its various price points around four or five key features including number of users, amount of storage, number of deals, number of contacts, etc. Again, multiple ways to run into a wall and need to pay.
In contrast, let’s look at a product like Cheddar. Cheddar is a subscription-based to do app for iOS and Mac that is for sale right now. According to the sales site, Cheddar has a 2.55% conversion rate, fairly anemic and, given his numbers, not enough to make it a full-time job. Cheddar offers one reason to upgrade: unlimited lists. That’s it. That means 97% of customers are more than happy with one or two lists, which is what you get for free. There is nothing else to get these folks to pay.
There is more than this required to make a subscription service work but getting people to convert partly means giving customers more than one excuse to do so.
Elia Insider 