Opinion – Page 3 – latoga labs

The Key to Technology Loyalty – Think Small

March 20, 2007 Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago my good friend Jon Hodgson was visiting me over the weekend (my previous posting Visiting With a Performance Tuning Guru has more details). We spent a good deal of time getting caught up on the details of what we have been working on recently…the kind of catching up that you can only do in person regardless of how often you talk on the phone). We also spent a good deal of reminiscing about the past and how the experiences we had when we worked together at Resonate still affect us today. The keys to technology loyalty and success were one of those experiences.

Anyone who has had the pleasure of working with Jon is familiar with his signature phrase when dealing with technology features: “Someone who was raised by wolves would know better!”. He used to use this phrase a lot while we were at Resonate working on the early versions of Central Dispatch and Commander. We were constantly providing feedback to product management and engineering (sometimes you have to cut to the source to get stuff done) about the little things in the products that annoyed our customers and us [Pre-Sales] Systems Engineers. (The intrinsic link between a stellar systems engineer and customers is something that most companies tend to not understand or at least not give adequate credit to.)

We agreed that those early experiences reinforced by our experiences since are the source of our shared belief that these little usability items are what create and help sustain technology loyalty amongst users. Users can and will usually overlook small usability issues during the early stages of a product. But if those issues don’t get resolved or fixed as the product grows and matures, you eventually end up with death by a thousand paper cuts.

These small items can be as basic as user understandable configuration names instead of techie/programmer like names. Configurations that are intrinsic in nature; help that is there to explain it in detail if it’s not; or small little UI features that save time. One of Jon’s that I really agree with is that a product should be easy to install (and I add easy to configure in our new Web 2.0 world).

For most tools, if a user can’t get your product up and running within 15 minutes you most likely already lost the sale. We are all busy; what should they expect from a product that wastes their time with a bad install? Most of the time users won’t waste more time to find out. This extends into the configuration of service based applications. If I can’t get basic functionality up and configured within 15 minutes, it’s too long. Sure, there can be more advanced features, but keep them hidden until I ready for them.

In today’s social based technology world, this is even more important. There are numerous web based applications that I hear real users willing to sing the praises of because of how easy they are to configure or use. With every product out there having multiple competing products vying for attention (many of them free or open source), customer loyalty and involvement with the product is key.

It still amazes me how few technology companies really understand this.

My Coffee Cup Is Talking To Me

March 17, 2007 Leave a Comment

This morning I went to my neighborhood mega-corp coffee shop (they get enough press the way it is, so I’ll give you three guesses to figure out who I’m talking about…and the first two don’t count.) I was having a nice relaxing coffee with my wife and our dog, when all of a sudden my coffee cup started talking to me!

I thought that what is had to say was important enough and relevant enough that I wanted to share it with you. Here is what my coffee cup said to me:

The Way I See It #225 (…figured it out yet?)
“People don’t read enough. And what reading we do is cursory, without absorbing the subtleties and nuances that lie deep within — Wow, you’ve stopped paying attention, haven’t you? People can’t even read a coffee cup without drifting off.”-David Shore
Creator and executive producer of the television drama House.

I find this relevant because I have spent the past 6 months in deeper exploration and participation of the blogosphere…man do I hate that term…the world of self-published content. What I find so interesting about this world is the same thing that most professional journalists originally complained about: the lack of depth within the majority of content.

How many blogs have you gone to where the majority of the postings are just a few sentences that refer you to another posting. Recycled content with no added value. There is nothing wrong with pointing your readers to something that you find interesting, but explain what and why you find it interesting, don’t just say “this was cool…” and provide a link. I don’t even bother looking at, let alone reading or even scanning, blogs like that. That’s the quickest way to get me to unsubscribe from their feed.

This makes me think of a new social phenomenon that I have seen mentioned a lot lately…Twitter. Think of it as a micro-blogging service where you are forced to do short content with the goal of explaining what you are doing right now. Interesting social experiment, but I find it difficult to finding adequate time to write up the items that I really find interesting for here. I also am finding it harder and harder to have large blocks of concentration time to work on items. The last think I need is to break my time up into smaller chucks so I can tell the world what I just did (or didn’t do). Again, what is the value in snippets of thought or meaningless comments about “having lunch with my Grandma”? (Yes, that last one was pulled right from the Twitter website as I write this).

The English language is a wonderful tool that is full of subtleties and nuances that seem to have gotten lost in today’s world. I agree with the Professional Organization of English Majors that we are facing a shortage in this world. Did you see the nuance and subtle reference in that last sentence? As an English Minor, I put it there on purpose. I know that my co-worker would have caught it. The joy of working with him is the nuance and subtleties that he weaves into our every day interaction with clients and co-workers. Granted, being a film major I don’t always catch all the obscure references..but I appreciate knowing that their there. It’s one of the joys of the job. Something akin to the way Gail Wynand would write a world changing editorial on the fly.

I have seen comments in the technology trade rags stating that blogging will start to decline. That we have hit a wall on volume of self-publishing content. I sure hope not. I see self-publishing as a great way to leverage the true spirit and potential of the internet. The challenge that we all face is to not fall into the trap of condensing everything down so it can be easily consumed, turning it into just another puff of air into the hype balloon, and using it to drive readership for an increase in advertising revenue. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem in monetizing your self-publishing to help you pay the bills, I’m a firm believer in needing multiple streams of income in today’s world. But don’t minimize the value in your self-publishing for this return.

I hope to see us use the self-publishing infrastructure to unlock the creativity and greatness that we all have locked inside of us. As I had mentioned in a previous posting, just keep your critical thinking cap on so you can see the true greatness through the rhetoric and propaganda.

That is, unless you’ve already drifted off…

Community Networks: Build it and Tread Lightly

February 3, 2007 Leave a Comment

Within the last few days, there has been a huge uproar within the Flickr user community regarding some limits that Yahoo was going to start imposing on Flickr accounts. For those that don’t know Flickr, it’s the original photo sharing community. Sign-up for a free account, upload your photos, share them with friends, family, and the rest of the world. Over time the system evolved to allow comments to be left about photos, building lists of friends and favorites, etc. Now that Yahoo has been the owner of Flickr for a while, they are starting to change a few things. In this case, they wanted to limit the number of friends that you could have (limit it to 3000) and the number of tags that are associated with a photo to describe it.

Thomas Hawk has done an excellent job of reporting of the announcement then description of the user reactions followed by his coverage of the slight modification of the new limits. This gave me flashbacks to one of the recent user backlash against eBay. I would have thought that Yahoo/Flickr would have remembered that little incident and taken a different approach to their limit changes.

What this just continues to exemplify is the need for community networks to think and act differently with regards to product management (actually any software company with the continuing movement toward online and community based products). Having spent over 10 years in the software industry working with customers and product managers (including some time as a Product Manager), I’m still amazed at how many crucial decisions are made without clear understanding of the customers or without doing something as simple as asking the customers.

I’ve seen product features be designed with no idea of how a customer uses the product. Products built based upon huge assumptions made from the ivory tower of the corporate office. Even a product manager sit in front of a large fortune 100 customer listening to them state their specific needs only to later say “I think what the customer really meant was…”. As someone who sells technology for a living, my job would be so much easier if at least 60% of what was built was what customers ask for. (I know there is a huge discussion that can be had about innovation here…but that’s for another time.)

Getting feedback from users has only gotten easier and easier over the past 10 years with new internet based technologies. You have internet based user forums, online surveys, user groups, etc. Mostly it’s the time to market pressures that the technology industry creates itself that prevents this from happening.

In the world of community network type services and products a totally different approach is needed. It’s the community that makes the product successful, so why isn’t the community used to drive the development of the product? Flickr, and most community networks, succeeded because of the evangelizing that is done by early members. These same members should be given the option of continuing to drive the success of the business. In the case of the latest Flickr changes, it was a Flickr early user who suggested the change to one of the limits that eased a lot of ruffled feathers.

All the advances and changes in the technology landscape, and yet some attitudes are so slow to adjust.