Think.

Does higher conversion rate equal better UX?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:42:40 -0800

Does higher conversion rate equal better UX?:

When something I feel improves the user experience is removed because it results in a lower conversion rate, I find myself very confused. How can a poorer UX have a higher conversion rate?

One specific example: When offering additional paid features to an existing free product, upsell ads contain…

I face this often enough. It’s very easy to look at analytics and say “Oh, the conversion rate went down after your last push” and assume it’s something you added (or vice versa, in the mentioned case, where removing something you’re sure is good UX seems to improve conversion). However, analytics are never that easy. Conversion rates go up because of promotions, they go up because of streamlining into a cart, but they don’t guarantee a good user experience. I love seeing conversion rates jump after I make a change, but I really love seeing a goal met or time on page/site increase.

Imagine this: do you linger on an annoying site after you find the product you need? Nope. You jet through the payment process as fast as its janky ass will allow. You just converted. Did you enjoy it, or would you enjoy browsing through the site again? Nooope. Does it make short-term money? Usually.

Tufte appointed by President

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:30:39 -0800

Tufte appointed by President:

Edward Tufte, info-graphic and statistical display luminary, has been appointed by President Obama to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. I cannot imagine a better choice for breaking down complex information and making it obvious and available to the people. Bravo!

This has me saying “ooooo… shiny” on several levels.

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:23:43 -0800

This has me saying “ooooo… shiny” on several levels.

Dangers of Twitter as a news source

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:39:19 -0800

Twitter proving for us, yet again, that news outlets are more focused on “scooping” their competitors than fact checking.

Background: There was a random, unannounced fireworks display over Seattle this evening. I didn’t see/hear it up here in Fremont, but apparently most of the rest of town did. No one was entirely clear why the display was going off. My boss, Dave Schappell, utilizing his talent for snarky remarks that don’t translate well in text (and often enough in person, unless you know him and expect it), tweeted the following:

Seattle fireworks are for @TeachStreet profitability event - go hypergrowth go!http://www.TeachStreet.com :-)

Allow me to break this down for you: While TeachStreet is growing and doing reasonably well, we’re still a startup. We get paid like start-up employees. Our last company event involved getting beers and shuffleboard at a dive bar. Our work furnishings are second (and sometimes third) hand IKEA products. We have 8 people in our fancy “World HQ.” The air of sarcasm about wealth in our office is palpable. So the thought of us putting on a fireworks display is ludicrous. Also, Dave posts a fair amount of snark intweets (and STS emails, blog posts, etc.). We all do. We are startup culture. Our HR department is named Daryn Nakhuda.

Within minutes, Dave tweeted that he was kidding, that he expected (also somewhat facetiously) that the fireworks were for the newly-Google-acquired Picnik. However, an overzealous tweeter for local NBC affiliate KING5 (seriously, how do you get a job doing that? Sounds awesome.) retweeted Dave. And as we all know, if someone, especially an organisation of some sort, tweets something, it’s instantly true.

Suddenly, the tweets were flying about, explaining the fireworks show as a TeachStreet celebration. The dangerous nature of a tweet (and especially a RT) is the complete lack of context it carries. Another local station, KIRO, did the legwork of actually checking with Dave (which I’m guessing involved just checking his Twitter feed to see he’d followed up discounting what as said), and went to the trouble of finding out the show was actually part of Farmer’s Insurance celebration of their 100th anniversary.

It kills me to think that a news outlet would take something so flip and detached as a tweet as a proper source. I followed up with a tweet built largely on the same components: attribution of events to some promotion or celebration, followed by a link that contained no corroborating information.

To whit: http://twitter.com/gb/status/10108626165

Sadly, that tweet received far less attention than a reply to Nick about the whole situation, which mentioned my simplified-for-140-character-limit thoughts of KING5’s move (I called it “stupid” instead of my original “fairly insipid”), where the KING Tweeter-in-Chief threw up his/her hands and said “I guess I just trusted him!” (here, lest someone doubt).

Let’s get this straight: we’re becoming a society that checks their twitter stream for the latest news. There is no denying that; why else would all the local stations bother setting up twitter accounts and paying people to tweet and retweet? But let’s take a step back. If the same thing were to happen 40 years ago, if a newspaper or TV news broadcast blurted out groundless gossip and overheard tidbits the reporter heard on the subway or at the water-cooler, would the reporter have any credibility afterward? Would Walter Cronkite have explained LBJ’s death as caused by a case of chicken-pox because he overheard someone say that before going on air? Of course not. Would he have just thrown up his hands and said “Oh, I guess I just trusted the guy who was making a new pot of coffee in the break-room”?

Now, with that thought in your head, I heard the cure for baldness, cancer and inability to dance is hiring my fiancée… just trust me on that.

A Clear follow-up

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:16:26 -0800

Okay, so after my rants about Clear being rather a joke, and several tweets about dealing with customer service and the need of sending out a tech to my home before considering any sort of refund, I have to say this: Honestly, they’re not that bad.

I’ve had far more headaches with customer service, tech support and the like from Comcast than my little circus with Clear resulted in. Things seemed a bit over the top, but the tech was super helpful, the customer service was always helpful and usually pretty happy and apologetic. And when I took the mobile wimax modem on a weekend trip, I found the speeds to be pretty sweet (for a mobile device).

What did I learn? Any sort of WiMax/4G broadband is HUGELY dependent on your area, the terrain, and a lot of little factors. If you, say, live in Portland and travel to, say, parts of Texas with frequency, Clear’s mobile 4G would be fantastic, and you’d probably have an easy time getting decent speeds at home. Unless you are in a hilly area (strike one against Seattle), have an apartment that faces away from the nearby towers (strike two for me), have a house with brick siding and double pane windows (strike three). Transitioning from a crazy fast connection speed like Comcast (I was between 20-30Mbps last I tested) to at even the best of WiMax speeds (~5-6Mbps) is kind of like having the pitcher nearly hitting you with one of the 3 strikes. I was only getting ~1Mbps downstream, which was closer to getting hit three times by the pitcher, only to have the ump call strikes each time.

Luckily, however, after the hoops, Clear did the right thing and said “Obviously our offering won’t work for you. Send in the modems and we’ll give you all your money back.” And they did, no strings. Any bitterness I might have harboured was blown away.

So I have to give a big thumbs up to Clear for handling things like a bunch of decent folks, instead of turning the screws like so many of their competitors.

The Decemberists Covers Archive

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:40:28 -0800

The Decemberists Covers Archive:

maniacalrage:

56 (56!) live covers from various Decemberists shows over the past few years. I wish, wish, wish I could download some of these.

When they broke out into Crazy About You (here in Heart’s neighborhood) last summer, people went apeshit.

weliveinthefuture: New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Company...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:22:01 -0800

weliveinthefuture:

New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Company will soon sell commercial jetpacks for about $75,000. The 200-horsepower dual-propeller packs can ‘reach heights of up to 2,400 metres and top speeds of 60mph’ and don’t require a pilot’s license.

via sarahspy:good

===

The Jetpacks they promised us are just around the corner. You will have to go to New Zealand with your $75k to learn how to fly them.

JETPACKS!!! The future is now… in New Zealand.

(via jasonpermenter)

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:49:06 -0800

(via jasonpermenter)

kidcasting: Black Dynamite, 2009 Just like the rest of the...

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:46:36 -0800

kidcasting:

Black Dynamite, 2009

Just like the rest of the movie, the kidcasting was awesomely bad. God damn, what a great movie.

"What’s urgently needed at Mountain View are senior strategic designers with sufficient experience,..."

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:34:36 -0800

“

What’s urgently needed at Mountain View are senior strategic designers with sufficient experience, clout and guts, empowered to stand up to geeky top management, MBA-driven product guys (Jonathan Rosenberg), left-brained quality assurers (Marissa Mayer), Microsoft-bred (Vic Gundotra) and countless other dominating engineer-managers to boldly demonstrate why pulling a trick like Buzz is short-sighted for Google’s long(er) term business interests.

Let’s not mince words: Google is not very good at design. The cacophony of its recent designs in Wave and Buzz are proof positive that Google’s single most valuable contribution to strategic design, its sparse search page, is but a distant memory now. Welcome to the Microsoft Ribbon-land.

”

- Buzz launch wasn’t flawed, Google’s intentions are « counternotions

syska: Hot Snakes - Kreative Kontrol Fuck this industry...

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:47:57 -0800

syska:

Hot Snakes - Kreative Kontrol

Fuck this industry lockout, it’s an all fucking media lockout

First Hot Snakes I owned; only Hot Snakes I don’t have on vinyl.

The Attack of Momputing

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:31:36 -0800

The Attack of Momputing:

viafrank:

Computer nerds got a sneak peek at a largely still world that has never made contact with the “higher web,” the silent majority. The ones that don’t know a browser from the internet or what the address bar does, the ones whose web experience is pre-determined by what their homepage is set to. The ones that disregard most information in a desperate attempt to just find something that seems halfway familiar. The users who figure out one way to do something and get overwhelmed if there is more than one way to accomplish a task. You know, the users who are largely failed by the complexity of computing’s abstract models of interaction, labeling and filing. For them, computing is walking down a dark hallway with your fingers barely grazing the wall to guide you.

Yet another reason UI/Interaction design is one of the most under-appreciated fields out there. Our job is to help these people, and often enough all we get time/cycles to do is “make things pretty before we ship.”

Things people try to log into

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:01:27 -0800

Things people try to log into:

mrgan:

The amount of information-ignoring necessary to go from 1. to 5. here is just stunning. The degree of faith people put in Google’s top result makes Catholics look like hippies.

I don’t really blame anyone here and I have no clue what the solution is. My only takeaway is that I’m terrified of dealing with technologies of this level of popularity.

While Facebook Connect certainly isn’t helping matters (“Click on anything with a Facebook logo, input your info and YAY!”), I’m with Neven here. There is a level of pure motor-memory/unconscious motion happening in these folks that blows my mind.

Logging in to Facebook and the reflection on how real people view the web

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:29:00 -0800

When Marco mentioned people mistaking an article about Facebook for the real deal, it took several readings of the actual page for it to sink in what was actually happening. Gruber distills the essence nicely:

Fascinating. ReadWriteWeb has a weblog post that ranks highly in Google’s search results for “Facebook login”. The comments on the post are filled with complaints from confused people who think that this is the new Facebook login page.

It’s funny, yes, but it’s a fascinating glimpse at just how confused many people are about how web sites and browsers work. They don’t use bookmarks, they don’t type “facebook.com” in the location field. They just Google for whatever they’re looking for and assume the first result is correct. All this argument over whether the iPad is too simple — if anything it’s probably still too complex.

People—LARGE amounts of people—utilise the web the same way they watch TV: turn it on, turn your brain off and mash buttons until you find something you like. Click “The Internet” and start typing into Google, clicking on the first thing. Neven Mrgan nails it with the following analogy:

It’s like… Like if you asked a friend if there was a Starbucks in his neighborhood and he said, yeah I think there’s one half a mile down, maybe. And you drive half a mile and see a big carwash place, and you park and walk in and ask to speak to the manager. And you tell the carwash manager how unhappy you are with this terrible new Starbucks redesign.

People aren’t just ignoring the obvious signs that they’ve done something wrong, they’re complaining loudly that someone has done them wrong.

My head has been spending some background processes on this today and the main issues to address break down like so:

People default to complaining about something before they will stop to think they may have been the erring party. This is a much bigger problem with society than I want to get into here, but it makes me think “Conan was right.”
We (UI and Interaction Designers, especially those dealing with designing browser experiences) might need to take some time to explain essential details of the internet before a user gets started. Google is taking small steps to make people more aware of what a browser is (their Chrome videos and whatbrowser.org), but taking the “Don’t Make Me Think!” approach (no offence to Steve Krug, since that’s not the whole of his book) to far might be leading us to the wrong extreme. We all love “it just works” but we need to build in a little learning. Even if it’s something as rudimentary as first-load pages on a browser that explain “To visit a web site, type it’s address here.” It’s some basic physics here: If everything is as slick as a frictionless plane, we’ll never get anywhere. Once we add the right amount of friction, then progress can be made.

This is entirely typical of a normal text message conversation...

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:41:51 -0800

This is entirely typical of a normal text message conversation between me and the Bean.

A very long short conversation with Clear

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:25:00 -0800

We’re in the process of cutting the cable TV ties and switching to an ala carte internet streaming/Netflix/over-air HDTV setup for viewing pleasures. In the midst of the switch, I got the harebrained idea of just canceling my Comcast (er, Xfinity) accounts all together, and switch to a different internet provider. I wasn’t keen on getting DSL (don’t think our place even has a landline), but my former provider, Clearwire, had made some marketing pushes (new name, Clear) and they were touting 3-6Mbps WiMax, which sounded alright for my internet needs. I knew it would be a step down from cable’s speed, so I decided to cancel Comcast after things were working with Clear(wire). Good call, that one.

After two days of fiddling with the modems (this time I got a home/stationary modem and a mobile, USB modem for kicks), I made some discoveries:

Looks the same. Isn’t. The home modem looked EXACTLY like the old Clearwire modem (which they wouldn’t allow me to use), but in the same “optimal” position (only place I could get 3-4 bars), it performed even worse, barely cresting 1Mbps in one out of ten bandwidth tests. The others ranged from 900Kbps to an abysmal 292Kbps. Comcast was spitting at least 20Mbps, even while I was streaming some video.
The mobile modem is even worse than the home modem. This USB abhorrence shipped with a snazzy little thumbdrive containing the driver/connection software. Except, for some unknown reason, it only shipped with the Windows version. After a lot of work, I found the Mac version on their website. Now, had I tried to set things up without an existing internet connection, I’d have been screwed. But it gets better…
Mobile needs a redefinition. Even with proper software installed, the mobile modem would not connect. It would attempt, say it was connecting, disconnect, and try again. I set my laptop by the “optimal” indoor location for 20 minutes, and nothing happened.
Going outside made no difference. I walked outside, imagining my apartment some wireless scrambling device, much like Gene Hackman’s workstation in Enemy of the State. So I tried some outdoor positions, with no success. My neighbour, Alex, piped up out of the night-time ether, “That Clearwire or Verizon?”
Optimal positioning, only 5 blocks from a Clear tower, is on top of a shed, in a plastic bag. Alex explained he and his buddy were using Clearwire, and that they could barely load a website, until they ran some wires out to their shed in the back alley, covered the home-style modem in a plastic bag to protect it from Seattle, and positioned it on the roof. That sped things up. But not amazingly.

So I spent another day trying to “optimise” as much as I could, at one point considering constructing some sort of amplifying antenna out of hangers and foil. I finally, after tripping over cables strung from the living room into the kitchen, decided I’d had enough. Sticking it to the Man (cable monopolies, etc) wasn’t working out this time. I’d just stick with cable, only in internet form.

Thus begins the portion of our story where our hero attempts to cancel his Clear service and return the modems he’d purchased. I searched the Clear.com site for information on canceling service. Anyone who has canceled anything telecom knows this information is rarely published on a company site. Clear’s online FAQs are quite terrible, geared toward selling the inquiring new customer on service. But two things were ever-present on the site: a toll-free number (blegh) and a “Chat Now!” button. I decided on the internet option, as I’m much scarier and intimidating in text. After filling out some cursory info, the following chat took place.

Hello Greg. Please wait while we find a CLEAR specialist to help you.
Your question was: I need to cancel, return purchased modems and get a refund.

There are 25 people ahead of you in the line.

All agents are currently busy. Please stand by.

An agent will be with you in a moment. Thank you for your patience.

There are 22 people ahead of you in the line.

The next available Agent will be with you in a moment.

All agents are currently busy. Please stand by.

There are 19 people ahead of you in the line.

[Truncated: Imagine 30 minutes of updates like the above. It’s like being on a customer service phone queue, with the one advantage of being able to choose your own music and take a toilet break.]

There are 2 people ahead of you in the line.

All agents are currently busy. Please stand by.

An agent will be with you in a moment. Thank you for your patience.

There are 1 people ahead of you in the line.

You have been connected to [REDACTED].
[REDACTED]: Hi Greg!
[REDACTED]: I’m sorry that you wish to cancel. May I ask why you wish to end service?
Greg: I used to use Clearwire about 2 years ago, then went cable, and decided to try it again. And I’m getting worse connections than I did 2 years ago in the same place.

[REDACTED]: I understand. I am sorry to hear that.
[REDACTED, with cut and paste immediacy]: Our Account Services department will be able to assist you; if you are the account holder, you can reach them by phone at 888.888.3113 M-F from 6am PST – 8pm PST. They will send you a UPS label via email to return the equipment if leased (at no cost to you). The equipment must be returned and restocked before accounts are canceled. Please do not return equipment to the store, as this will slow down the cancellation process.

Greg: Ah, so I just waited 30 minutes for a phone number. Awesome.

[REDACTED]: I am sorry Greg. We cannot cancel online.

Greg: Thank you for that, at least. Nothing I could have seen on the site.
Greg: Understandable. Thanks.

[REDACTED]: Your welcome. Is there anything else I can assist you with today?

Greg: Magically making it Monday?

[REDACTED]: Thank you for chatting with Clear today! If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us. We are available in live WebChat 24 hours a day, or by phone from 9am to 10pm, seven days a week at 1-888-888-3113. Don’t forget you can now get nationwide coverage with our 4G+ service! Have a great day!

[REDACTED]: Have a good one Greg!

So essentially, I waited 30 minutes to have someone copy and paste information that should have been on their website. Granted, given the speed they expect their users to accept as “super fast,” perhaps 30 minutes is equivalent to downloading such a page on said service.

Here’s hoping they don’t balk on taking back purchased modems with the heavy usage of “being set on a window sill for a day” and “being plugged into a laptop that traveled outside for 20 minutes!”

dorkgasm: There’s just something strange and awkward about this...

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:07:40 -0800

dorkgasm:

There’s just something strange and awkward about this vintage 1960s Jamaican postcard I found at Creation Station in Lynnwood…can’t quite put my finger on it…

Brainvasion

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:50:05 -0800

A year ago, today (5 Feb), someone cracked open my skull and looked at my brain. They then cut out an invader, and stapled me shut.

That may sound a bit insane, and in reality overly simplistic, but I’m being entirely honest. On 5 Feb 2009, doctors at Swedish Medical Center - Cherry Hill performed a craniotomy to remove a mysterious growth that was pushing into my left temporal lobe, causing seizures. While I was originally told it was a meningioma, I was later informed it was, strangely enough, a granuloma.

I was told it was the size of a small plum.

Thus was the crux of a turbulent, extremely difficult year that included the aforementioned seizures, 5 total surgeries (lead-up, craniotomy, bone marrow biopsy, and insertion / removal of a tulip blood filter), months of recovery, losing my job, not being able to drive for 6 months and meeting Dave Schappell. As you can tell, it has been tough.

Probably the toughest part for me today is those lingering questions. While I’m “fine” I still have no clear explanation of what really happened, what caused the growth, and if I have to worry about it anymore (aside from my yearly MRIs). Even one of the best neurosurgeons in the nation responded to my paranoid questions several months after with essentially a shrug of the shoulders and more or less saying “you’re fine, we removed it.”

Except, I’m really not fine. I worry incessantly about my brain, removing myself from any activities that might lead to hitting my head. I take my anti-seizure drugs religiously, stringing emergency pills from my keyring, with me at all times. I may have healed, but I feel horribly broken.

Yes, I feel amazingly lucky to be alive and without life-destroying brain damage. I am exceptionally grateful to have had the support of my wonderful fiancée, Sabrina, through every moment of this. She even agreed on the engagement knowing the chaos that was pending. I am lucky.

But for some reason, I doubt the worry will ever cease.

Go easy on the "page flip" animations, though

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:58:19 -0800

Go easy on the "page flip" animations, though:

sourjayne-ux:

We know this is on a screen, right? That we’re not limited by the boundaries of a physical sheet of paper, that we don’t need to pick up a piece of paper and flip it over to continue reading content on a screen?

Great points about adding shiny for the sake of shiny. I think the iPad page flip looks cool, and I’d imagine the stack of “pages to go” diminishes as you go (great way to show progress unobtrusively), but the effect is also a bit superfluous overall. Think of it this way: when people started binding leaves of paper together to make codices, did they feel that they needed to make each page look like it was part of a continuous scroll, the common form of written communication ‘til that time? Were scrolls made to look like some clay tablet, so people would feel comfortable using them?

dorkgasm: What every stoner dreams of… ($9.95 at the 7-11 by...

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:47:57 -0800

dorkgasm:

What every stoner dreams of…

($9.95 at the 7-11 by our apartment)

Note the weight of this slab of cavities (lower left). Damn. Reminds me of the 1Kg Cadbury Dairy Milk someone gave me for xmas when I was living in Tasmania. It was so overwhelming that I mailed it back to my family in the states.