robojames

To listen or not to listen…

Today I came across this interesting Harvard Business case study (though it’s slightly dated). It describes a Spanish chef who has a very unorthodox restaurant business. Instead of selling just food, he sells “experiences”. How? Well, for one, it takes hours to get to his restaurant, and only 8,000 people a year actually get to be on the guestlist to even sample his meals.

Embedded within this study is the notion that listening to your customers is not always the correct approach. Certainly we in the tech industry are taught to listen to users and constantly gather feedback+iterate to make our products better. To me, the article is saying there’s a difference between listening+following and listening+leading.

For example, your user comes to you with the following:

Joe User: “Your web app need a way to report bugs. You should provide a form to do so with multiple fields, like they do on [insert competitor’s site]. Please build that!”

To listen+follow your user is to take his solutions and incorporate them as-is into your product. In this case, you’d spend X days building this submission form into your app exactly as specified.

To listen+lead is to take your users’ problems and lead them to the right solution based on your product’s core strengths and business strategy. In this case, instead of building a clunky submission form, you could build in a type of auto-detection that sends thrown errors to you. This could remove the need for users to worry about filing bugs. It also makes diagnosing these bugs easier as you’ll have all of the info about the error and not just what the user remembers to submit.

As a developer or product leader, knowing this difference is crucial to serving users in the best possible way. Everyone wins because the user is led to the best solution.

Money quote from the case study:

“Adrià’s idea is that if you listen to customers, what they tell you they want will be based on something they already know,” Norton observes. “If I like a good steak, you can serve that to me, and I’ll enjoy it. But it will never be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To create those experiences, you almost can’t listen to the customer.”

Online site design tools

As I worked on a new homepage for Gifty, I was struck by how easy it has become to use free web-based tools to create graphics, designs, and basically everything you really need in order to develop a web front-end that’s at least half-decent. I thought I’d share some of the tools/sites I used:

Balsamiq Mockups - I learned about this from the Techzing! podcast. It’s a really cool web-based wireframe / mockup tool (though you get a nag message every 15 mins or so if you use it free). It has a bunch of pre-rendered graphics/buttons that you snap into a blank canvas, helping you visualize your site layout. My crappy rendition is shown here.

Picnik - Just bought by Google, this service lets you upload and manipulate graphics. It appears lightweight at first but it did everything I needed it to do, in a really easy way. Can’t wait to see what becomes of it with Google’s resources behind it.

Colour Lovers - A neat site that I used to generate a “palette” of colors to use. I already had my initial red, so finding a subsequent palette based on that was easy and really helped me figure out how to keep my colors consistent. Here’s my palette.

Da Button Factory - Yup, basically does what it says - button creation made easy. I still remember achingly creating my own .gifs for an old website I made way back in 2002 in Frontpage. No more!

Free Gradient Maker - Had to include some gradients to make it all web 2.0-ish.

jQuery - Not graphics/design related, but I found a library that powers an animated slideshow on the homepage.

Paintbrush - Ok, I snuck in a desktop app here at the end. But it’s free, and is basically the equivalent of Paint for Windows.

What does this all mean? On first glance it appears to bring us closer to a browser-centric OS world, as the forthcoming Chrome OS intends to do. But truthfully I needed to use that last desktop program to tie everything together. More likely, this all means that any walls that existed 5-10 years ago for amateur web designers to create decent-looking sites are coming down.

But most interesting (to me), it appears to signal an opening for a company/product that can tie all of these kind of services together in a neat and easy-to-use package, especially aimed at web developers who are decent with back-end work but are lost in setting up a front-end. Will be exciting to see where we are in another 5-10 years!

A Real Tomorrowland

I visited Disneyland last month and had a great time. However, the worst part of Disneyland is always the number of people waiting in lines for stuff I want to do. We even went on a Monday in the wintertime and it was jam-packed. It got me thinking about the incredible amount of data that Disneyland could harvest and how they could benefit their customers by opening this data up to them. For example, Disneyland could use sensors to track the movement of their customers (in aggregate, of course!). Give everyone a sticker or pin or something to wear  as they enter the park, explaining of course what it is. Then take that sensor data and do cool things like:

• Calculate the velocity of every attractions’ lines by feeding updated GPS data for every sensor into a central server.
   
• Build up a database of information that can be shared with the public, allowing us to see (for example) how long wait times are for certain rides, at certain times of the day, on certain days of the week, at certain times of the year.

• Create iPhone/Android apps that allow visitors to see heat maps of various areas of the park updated in real-time….and provide SMS updates if desired (“Space Mountain’s wait time is now under 30 minutes!”, etc). Hell, just plaster the park with displays that update - better than that rickety old manual system they use now! (see photo below)

Far-fetched? Probably, given the concerns people would likely raise about privacy, and given the primary customers that Disney wants to attract (worried parents). But maybe Disney would be more comfortable rolling something like this out at a smaller scale and iterating…they already have a perfect area of the park to test it out on - Tomorrowland !

[2nd photo courtesy of flickr/huffmans]

The Data Deluge & Business

“Older industries crunch data with just as much enthusiasm as new ones these days. Retailers, offline as well as online, are masters of data mining (or “business intelligence”, as it is now known). By analysing “basket data”, supermarkets can tailor promotions to particular customers’ preferences…”

“But the data deluge also poses risks. Examples abound of databases being stolen: disks full of social-security data go missing, laptops loaded with tax records are left in taxis, credit-card numbers are stolen from online retailers. The result is privacy breaches, identity theft and fraud.”

Put the Music back in iTunes

As a music geek, I love all of iTunes’ options and features - smart playlists, tagging, even stuff like per-song volume adjustment and start/stop time. I use them all and they’re now second nature to me. It’s an extremely deep application, with a ton of nooks and crannies.

And yet…as iTunes matures, its focus has shifted from being the best music-listening experience to being a better store & hub for iPod & iPhone. Aside from Genius, a feature that tries to better group similar songs into mixes, iTunes simply hasn’t been innovating as fast as it could. I understand their focus here - after all, the overall strategy was likely always to make iTunes just good enough to help Apple push the sale of their hardware (like the iPod) and control the experience. But all that said, here are my suggestions for improving iTunes so that it’s once again on the leading edge of music applications:

• Over-the-air syncing with my portable player. If I add a new album to iTunes, it should instantly sync with my iPod…and vice versa. Same for new playlists. I spend just as much time listening to music via iPod (or, these days, Android) than via my computer. And everything is now connected to WiFi & 3G - I shouldn’t have to plug in to sync everything. If using Android has taught me anything, it’s that OTA updates for *everything* are the future…!

• Full integration with Pandora and Lala.com. I absolutely love Pandora, the web’s best internet radio player. iTunes should capitalize on its success and build a Pandora plug-in that lets me stream it and keep a history of what I’ve played (ideally, I’d be able to copy the songs too, but let’s not get carried away). Same for Lala, the cloud-based music player that Apple just acquired. At the very least, there should be a way to “tab” my music interfaces (like with web browser tabs) so that iTunes holds all my music listening needs. Open-source player Songbird does some of this, and if they’re smart, they’ll hustle on all of these features to really differentiate themselves from iTunes.
   
• Promotions for concerts and new albums. It’s true, I’m asking for ads in iTunes…as long as they’re relevant. There’s clearly a market for people who want to know when their favorite bands are in town. I shouldn’t have to use a 3rd-party app - I want an Inbox/Alerts feature built into iTunes. After all, it already knows which bands I like! Same for new album releases. Lala already has notifications for the latter, and I’ve found it incredibly useful. This is another area that Songbird is experimenting with.

• Built-in universal keyboard shortcuts. I should be able to, say, hit CMND+Z to start/stop a song regardless of whether I’m focused on the iTunes app or not. I admit this is likely a niche feature, and I currently handle this with 3rd-party app SizzlingKeys, but if the aforementioned Pandora/Lala/website integration happens, I want this app controlling all of that.

Again, I recognize that Apple’s focus for iTunes is now centered around integrating its iPod, iPhone (and soon, iPad) products. I just hope they remember to keep innovating in ways that actually make the music experience better. Because if they don’t, they’re leaving themselves open to being flanked by more agile competitors like the aforementioned Songbird, or the Europe-only Spotify…and that’s when things get really interesting.

I just want to wave and go

I love the intentions behind Square, Payware Mobile, and iCharge - 3 services that are pushing to take personal money transactions to the next level. However, the way they’re all approaching the problem still falls short of the ease, simplicity, and innovation that I wish were upon us by now.

To back up: the idea behind all of these services, more or less, is to make it easy for individuals and small businesses to process money transactions. Their proposed solutions all involve hooking a small attachment to a mobile phone, which allows you to scan your credit card and register the transaction. Here’s a quick video on how Square’s implementation works, for example: Various tech blogs are excited about this. While it’s interesting, this model is still not ideal…basically, I’d rather credit cards be cut from the equation altogether. I just want to use my phone to transmit a payment to the merchant or friend in question. Maybe have my credit card info embedded into my SIM card and utilize near-field communication or something…and smooth the transaction out with a standard mobile app that runs on both phones. And just email my receipt to me and don’t require me to sign anything. Wouldn’t that be nice!

In fact, companies in Asia like Docomo are already doing this. And here in the states, it’s been written about and anticipated for *years* now (check the date on that article!). Unfortunately, I suspect it’d take cooperation from the telecom industry, among others, to make this a reality here. Until then, we’re stuck with services that still require me to reach into my wallet, fish out my credit card, and sign something.

So in conclusion, I just want to be able to “wave and go” - i.e., wave my phone next to my fiance’s phone to reimburse her for dinner. Let’s hope these companies are working behind the scenes on pushing the necessary players toward this, even if publicly they’re releasing solutions that only get us partially there.

[photo courtesy of flickr/sharpshutter]

James Cotton - No Cuttin’ Loose

In the mood for some serious blues harp?  If so, check out James Cotton. He’s one of my favorite blues musicians, period. This is probably because he’s a bit less traditional than others - his classic songs incorporate funk drum rhythms that are energetic and driving. He couples this with one of the most wicked harmonicas out there.

Vegas, Facebook, & Google

I was in Vegas the other week and a funny thing occurred to me. The amazing hotel/casinos that litter the Vegas Strip - the ones that are publicly open as gracious hosts - are very similar to the virtual “hosts” that can be found on the web. I’m talking about sites like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and others.

Take the Bellagio hotel & casino, for example. Out in front, a free fountain show takes place every 15 minutes, set to music. Inside, huge, impressive statues and art exhibits (there was a Chinese New Year one when we went) are littered throughout. You’ll find similar free entertainment in every casino - the Venetian’s got a really impressive indoor river complete with working gondolas and live shows…Caesar’s Palace has got a crazy Disney-esque animatronic show called “The Fall of Atlantis”, along with massive sculptures and statues.

These all exist to attract people to the casinos and drive “conversions” - or, to get people gambling! Now take Facebook. They’ve built an amazing web application with numerous attractions - fan pages, games, walls - all in the hopes that users will eventually spend time clicking ads or purchasing virtual goods. The draw is the social interaction - all polished to perfection in order to drive conversions in the form of ad clicks and virtual goods purchases. Same goes for Google’s services and any other site that relies so heavily on free goods.

With no upfront-paying customers to lean on, both the casinos and these web services have to rely on constantly providing quality, new, free stuff to draw their customers in. The moment they stop innovating in this regard, it’s over. It’s why things move so quickly in both industries - and why following their progress is so much fun. Now if only Facebook & Google also offered cheap all-day buffets for their users…

Tech Podcasts

It took me a while to warm up to podcasts, but I now enjoy listening to them quite a bit. However, I’m frustrated by the lack of good technology podcasts. What I want to hear are discussions driven by actual software developers and product managers who are in the process of creating & growing their businesses / projects - all while being entertaining, insightful, and humble. I realize that’s asking a lot - and it’s certainly a sweet spot that most current podcasts can’t seem to attain.

Take Leo Laporte’s popular This Week in Tech podcasts. They’re very entertaining, and Leo’s a great radio personality - but each show varies wildly in quality according to the guests. Additionally, they are extremely slanted toward the consumer (and journalist) point of view, which makes sense - that’s what they are after all. But this leaves less room for below-the-surface discussions. In other words, I want to hear about how the under-the-hood technology works and how each business is being developed. Instead, discussions frequently fall back on gadget reviews or usability. I find myself spending an hour listening only to look back to realize I didn’t learn a thing from the whole podcast.

Another podcast I’ve tried: Stack Overflow. An interesting show that, frankly, I can’t take anymore because of the endless self-promotion the two hosts do for their projects. Which is of course their right - but the signal/noise ratio of interesting developer/business insight to “how to order Stack Overflow stickers” (or whatever) is annoying. Not my cup of tea, unfortunately.

All that said, one fascinating podcast I’ve found recently is called TechZing. It’s by two developer-entrepreneurs and chronicles their work on multiple startups & projects at various stages in the pipeline. They talk about small-ish side projects (like Tweetminer) to more notable startups (like LocalBacon), as well as everything in-between. It’s actually a fairly inspiring podcast, and the two move comfortably between talking business strategy and low-level code/programming issues. Plus, hearing their behind-the-scenes stories of how their startup vaulted into the TechCrunch50 conference this year was an extremely entertaining listen. Here’s hoping the TechZing guys keep it up! And if anyone knows of podcasts that are similar to TechZing, please leave a comment and let me know!

[photo courtesy of flickr/grizzly_lightning]

Gifty

In my spare time I created a little CRUD web app called Gifty. It’s a service that helps coordinate and manage gift purchases for special events (holidays, birthdays, etc), and is especially useful for large groups of people. It’s powered by Google App Engine. Feel free to check it out if you’re interested!