Five web UX guidelines

In the year 2009, I am dumbfounded at the number of rookie mistakes companies make on the web. I'll keep this short and simple, you should absolutely abide by these when building ways for your users to interact with you.

Understand that every little delay you introduce to your customers creates abandonments. Studies have been done on page load times, additional fields, text entry errors, etc, and they all lead to the same conclusion - every bump in the road creates abandonment.

1. Make your text fields forgiving. Google is a master at this. Doesn't matter whether I enter Mar 20, 3/20, 20 Mar, etc. Google figures it out. I don't get an error message saying "please enter in the form mm/dd/yyyy". Same goes for phone numbers. This is trivial to do in code, absolutely no reason it shouldn't be done.
   
2. Make it clear why required fields are required. Some are obvious to the user, most are not. A simple "why?" link giving the user the ability to learn more about why you required their birthday, SSN, and underwear size is easy to do.
   
   
3. Your user is not going read everything you show them. You have three seconds (used to be five) to give them a reason to read for another three seconds. And so on. You screw up those three seconds? Good bye.
   
   
4. Your competitors are a click away. Take a look at their sites. What do they do to make things easier. Amazon allows me to return items doing no more than sitting at a computer and dropping the item on the front porch. Why do Best Buy and Walmart make me go to their store? Yes, this has everything to do with UX - your processes are exposed through UX.
   
   

Yes, there are only four there. That's the point - do more with less. Always look to what can be removed from your site to add clarity, not what can be added.

Google makes LIFE's images available

Now this is a great application of the web, combining Google's image search with what is arguably the finest image archive out there, LIFE's image archive.

I wonder what the usage rights on for LIFE images?

Hell hath no fury...

... like a mother insulted. Or something like that. At least that's the way the weekend appeared after Motrin released a viral marketing video aimed at, well, not sure what. Google on "Motrin Moms", and you'll be up to speed in no time.

I watched the first shot across the bow from JessicaKnows, one of the twitterers I follow, and I watched the fury grow from there. Soon I checked out the hub-bub, and while I didn't see why the video was that bad, I certainly understood the reaction. Duh.

Yes, I'm late blogging on this, I figured I would wait for the dust to settle a little and see if I have any insights combing through the rubble. Whenever I see good or bad marketing attempts, I like to try and dig into the deep, root cause on why marketing is successful or fails.

I've read a lot of the reaction on this, and much of it centers on the "baby carrier" and "official mom" specifics. But there's a deeper learning here, one that I haven't seen made mention of yet:

Don't trivialize mom or the job she does

It's not just baby-carrying moms that were upset (and no, not all moms were upset), it was a broad section of moms that felt trivialized and talked down to. This is where Motrin failed. And it is such a fundamental principle. I've been at social gatherings with moms in the room, and believe me, we husbands of moms know when to start slowly backing out of the room with our beer and take cover.

The ad looked like something a few 20-somethings put together, with a voiceover from a 20-something that didn't sound old enough to be a mom, with an attitude that came off as condescending. Ouch, a no-no for the most important customer segment out there.

When I was at Whirlpool, we had a saying that guided our innovation: Mom is a tough customer. Amen to that. It kept us focused that we would never be able to pull the wool over our customer's eyes, and forced us to maintain a high bar on our innovation projects.

Don't guess what your target segment's needs and attitudes are, engage them and find out.

My Innoview with Robbie Cape

In a previous life I spent three years running Whirlpool's Connected Home Technology group, where we researched a myriad of home-based solutions that leveraged information technology. I still have a lot of passion in this area and keep a watchful eye on it, so I was intrigued when I first caught a glimpse of Cozi, based here in Seattle. I thought it would be a perfect match for the Whirlpool brand, so I reached out to Robbie Cape at Cozi and put him in touch with some former Innovation contacts at Whirlpool. Sure enough, Cozi and Whirlpool have partnered up to help busy families.

I wanted to undersand Robbie and Cozi a little deeper, and Robbie has graciously agreed to talk about Cozi.

JR: What gave you the inspiration for Cozi?

RC: The needs of the family inspired Jan and I to build Cozi. We saw an incredible gap between the needs of the family and the degree to which technology and software were addressing those needs. That represented a wonderful opportunity for a couple of guys who love to (1) build simple technology experiences, and (2) address the needs of the typical "consumer." The Cozi vision was the perfect problem for us.

JR: Where have you found the greatest adoption for Cozi?

RC: Cozi has been adopted right across the United States; there is no one area where we have more adoption than others. Cozi tends to appeal most to families with kids between the ages of five and fifteen. Cozi families tend to have multiple PCs in their home and are comfortable with the internet, and they are far from "techy". In fact, most Cozi families talk about themselves as "no tech - no time".

JR: What was the biggest challenge getting Cozi to market?

RC: I'd say it's the same thing that challenges every startup: staying focused. It happens to be one of the things that this team is really good at, so it came naturally to us. Jan is exceptional on this front and he constantly reminded us that we needed to stay true to our original vision for v1, deliver on it, and then begin to iterate. That's what we're doing.

JR: What has been the biggest challenge growing the business?

RC: The biggest challenge has been acquiring customers. It's almost always a tough nut for a company starting with little marketing money. For us, it was especially hard since we didn't build in viral from day one. Why not? Because we needed to stay focused on what families were asking for. While sharing matters to them, it wasn't their #1, #2, or #3 requirement. And while it might have helped us get the word out on Cozi faster, we decided to optimize for the needs of Cozi families rather than for the growth of our user base. What's much harder to find is GREAT people who have the drive, experience, and ability to execute. I urge entrepreneurs to find the best partner (you need a partner to get through the challenges of a startup) and ensure their first few employees are all about execution. If you can execute, there is no stopping you.


JR: What other ventures have you been involved in?

RC: Cozi is my first startup. Before Cozi, I was at Microsoft for 12 years; I had a bunch of different jobs there, the most interesting one was the six years I spent on the Microsoft Money business. My last "job" at Microsoft was to build a startup team (we started with 2 people!) to help Microsoft figure out how to deliver annuity value to our best enterprise customers. It was fun to do a startup at Microsoft before I did one in the "real world."

JR: Can you talk about what's next in Cozi's future?
RC: Family Life - Simplified. That's what's next. We will continue to work with laser-like focus on delivering on this promise, simply. It turns out to be really hard to design, build, and deploy simple software; it's much hard than it looks. We are also focused on building the revenue side of the business so we can continue to build value for families for years to come. Thankfully, things are going very well on that front.

JR:Thanks Robbie for taking the time to post your thoughts, and best of luck to you and Cozi!

About Useless Meetings

So I'm reading more and more about people complaining about useless meetings. Nothing new, Dilbert (ok, Scott Adams) has made a fortune on this topic. But for some reason I feel people are feeling more and more helpless about it.

You control how useful meetings are. Yes, you. Even as an attendee.

There are four types of meetings:

1. All-hands. Ok, I admit I don't have any secret recipe to make this one more effective. Which is why I usually skip them. Worked for Amazon for three years, Whirlpool for three years, and I attended exactly one at Whirlpool. Once I found out how useless they were, I used my time more wisely.
2. Your meetings you call. Clearly this is up to you how useful they area.
3. Meetings that request your presense, and you're integral to the meeting. Meaning you are providing input. Here, you can keep this on track by asking up front for the goal and agenda of the meeting. And making sure the meeting organizer keeps on track. Or you punt for those organizers that have a track record of wasting your time.
4. Meetings that request your presense, and you're not integral to the meeting, at least on the surface. These tend to be the meetings that fill up your calendar, at least in larger companies. Whether they be reviews, status meetings, whatever. These can be easily solved by talking to the organizer. Why are you there? In a previous life I went to my boss basically asking to have an hour of my week back by skipping out on one of his weekly metrics meetings. He told me why he wanted me there, that I provided value by helping his techie managers think through business problems and offer a customer perspective to issues. This was a perspective I didn't realize, and it made me realize why my boss valued me on his team. All of a sudden those meetings weren't a waste of time after all - they were opportunities for me to reinforce my value prop to the team and strengthen my performance.

In short, you control whether meetings are useful. Take control of your calendar - you own it, your time is a precious resource, use it wisely.

And I recommend anything by Tom Peters to shake yourself from the "I'm a trapped employee" mentality to "I'm a free agent" mentality.

The new era of advertising

Google gets it.

I wondered when this would happen, and great to see Google make inroads here.

Can you imagine the disruption this is going to cause in marketing departments?

Now, there are a lot of problems with measuring advertising, but imagine what you can collect with advertising campaigns in a much more fine-grained, accurate manner.

• People who watch this channel also watch this channel. Not from anecdotes or surveys, but from user behavior (so have different campaigns on those channels).
  
• People saw x seconds of your commercial before they switched the channel.
  
• x eyeballs actually saw your commerical.
  

and so on.

This is a baby step that will eventually change how we think of advertising. And not just TV advertising. Satellite radio can do the same thing.

Marketing as a Customer

This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, primarily because my wife is a manager at a local restaurant.

She does a great job. She only works a few nights a week, and usually she tends bar. She has a loyal following, people ask for her by name, and customers come in when she knows she's working. The policy is that the restaurant closes at 9pm, but she will keep the place open until it makes sense to close. As long as there are customers coming in, leaving good tips, she keeps it open, and creates customer loyalty. She's been doing this a couple of years, and the results for her have been impressive.

There is a flip side to all of this - you have to be a good customer for her to do this.

This gets me to thinking - how do I market myself as a customer? Yes, indeed, noodle on that for a bit. As a customer you are marketing yourself on why you should get a better deal, better service, better treatment, etc than other customers. Being a customer might be good enough. Then again, maybe not. Do you have a value proposition

I recently put this to test when Washington Mutual hit me for two overdraft fee recently. I have a sizeable amount in a savings account at WaMu, enough that WaMu makes more money on my savings in one month than they do on fees. I asked for a refund, and I did not get one. Clearly, I did not market myself correctly, as my value proposition was clear and beneficial to WaMu.

My recent Fathead experience, I must have marketed myself correctly. They sent a replacement Fathead despite it being out of warranty.

Pay attention to how you market yourself as a customer. It will have an impact on your customer experiences.

Bittersweet news on Clearwire / WiMax

Great to hear that $3.2B is going be to invested in Clearwire, but not so great that Comcast is one of the investors.

I'm waiting for Clearwire to be available in Snoqualmie so I can dump my Comcast broadband connection. Can't stand Comcast (hence we have Directv, despite their faults). Maybe I need to go back to dialup.

Interesting that Google is investing so much. I truly hope there is choice in software apps/services when WiMax is ready for primetime.

Painful to watch WiMax emerge so slowly. So much promise five years ago that has largely been untapped.