Do You Really Need To Update…?

May 25th, 2010 · Product

Whilst away on vacation I received an email from EasyDNS to say that they had updated their interface. At first sight of this email I winced. Why? Not because I am a stickler for change – though no doubt some might agree – but because most of the time when there is an interface upgrade, there is no real “value added” when it comes to usability.

Any assessment and need to upgrade, update or change something should always be a value added proposition. What’s the point really in making it no easier, or harder, even, for your userbase to go about their daily tasks, right? So it leaves me even more mythed, when I go to login and review the new interface which seems to do nothing more than make the processes more complicated.

This is the second time in the last year that I have been faced with so-called web site upgrades, that leave me feeling nothing more than “rather meh” about the changes. So here are a few points I think are valid in tailoring the end result of a site or service upgrade:

Implicit User Feedback

The massive opportunity in doing an “interface upgrade” is that you have existing usage data, or at least you should, if you are doing any tracking at all. Knowing how people use your site, the process flows and such like, is a massive step in understanding how you can make their lives easier, reducing what might take 3 or 4 steps, and compressing them into one.

Usage stats, implicit in nature, are like a recommendation engine for any good UI developer. Briefing and informing them of the next best step. The primary question I would ask myself in the course of “upgrade” planning would be to understand what it is that users are doing, and what tools can be used to improve their processes, and no, AJAX requests and Web 2.0, are not one of them.

The real advantage of such stats at least means you are not making a complete stab in the dark when developing new functionality and layouts. If you ever make assumptions about use cases, when you have clear data, you are only doing your company a disservice.

Explicit User Feedback

Anyone will likely tell you that any web site or service should be defined by the users. The point about a wealth of usage stats underlines this very fact, but as clichéd as it is, so many sites and services online are designed and implemented without any regard for anything other than stakeholder’s intent (i.e. the business owners).

Obviously the larger your userbase the more fertile the ground to harvest from in terms of usage stats, but in the absence of this, the next best opportunity comes from directly questioning them. In the early stages this means identifying those who will provide useful and coherent feedback and tapping into that, from which you can take their concerns and issues and elucidate them in terms of new features (or NOT as the case may be).

Once you have implement this round of features, the next round of testing and feedback should involve more open beta testing, not launch or soft-launch as some developers deem fit to do. This process should bring about a final round of changes prior to a soft launch and/or further testing. Working with your userbase the entire way through the process is a definite key to success, as I have mentioned many times before, not least as a means to circumvent negativity that can come out of sudden and unexpected changes for users.

On-going Feedback

It seems obvious, but there is money to be made in listening to your users. Giving them the service they desire and need develops loyalty and new business. Providing support is one tool and avenue for on-going feedback, but more direct channels and requests for feedback are another means to solicit for free advise that can help improve your online offering. You might think you know your customers inside out, but they truly do know best, even if the feedback isn’t coherent or well collated, that’s is your job, and it is to your benefit to listen.

Above and beyond this explicit feedback over a long period of time, it is worth using A-B testing and tracking to ensure that your changes are creating the desired results and are not in fact impeding users int he course of their business on your site. This type of approach brings the view of updates full circle and provide a shining light on what can often seem like impossible to see dynamics in site use.

Making It Easier & Avoiding Pointless Changes

If your site or service has to use jargon, you are already heading down the wrong path. Nothing says more to me that a group of developers has hijacked a good ship than if you see a pointless footer tag, proclaiming “Generated in 0.215 second(s).” I am glad they got that one cleared up fast hahaha.

Product development and process management should be the driving forces behind changes, and these fact are underlined again and again in the points I have made. Not sure I can make ’said things’ any clearer, and if it isn’t an improvement it shouldn’t be introduced. Even more so when resources and time are at a premium.

That being said, and to round things off nicely, if your are going to do nothing more than change the design and layout without improving form and function then you might as well not waste your money at all on any ‘upgrade’ to your site. Identifying hurdles and removing them is key to your success, and this should be at the forefront of your guiding light.

Don’t forget, that providing tools that allow your users accomplish their tasks at lightning speed and seeing them use it, not least register their appreciation of that fact, is very fulfilling, and it ultimately makes the job you do a lot more fulfilling.

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The Sun Sets on Stink Digital

May 12th, 2010 · Work

It’s a sunny evening in Farringdon, perhaps a sign of things to come this summer: Long, warm and sweet evenings shadowing London town. The 6pm beer watershed has been breached and beers are flowing whilst energies are expended on a new portion of the Darker Side of Green project, to be launched tomorrow by the Stink Digital team, along with Skinny, NY and Attik, SF on behalf Lexus.

Today brings the 20+ months I have been working for Stink Digital to a close, and it has been an interesting ride. So much has happened on so many fronts in that time, from the personal to the work-related, and with the arrival of Britain’s first coalition government in some 70 years, it seems like a perfect moment for a change of direction, not something I could have predicted a month ago when I decided to take the proverbial plunge, but serendipitous to say the least.

Lots has happened in nearly 2 years, from laying on the beach in Cannes, basking in the glow of the awards of Silver Cyber Lion and Grand Prix for Film that Stink Digital and Adam Berg won along with Tribal DDB and Philips for the ground breaking work on Carousel and the 21:9 Cinematic Experience web site, to the assault course of endeavors to get work for Shelter, Diesel, Dulux, and many others completed.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with many different, interesting and creative individuals, too many to name and from more companies than I care to mention also, but it has been a real pleasure and I have picked up a lot from the experience along the way. Last.fm offered a strong spring board after honing my skills indie contracting for so long and Stink Digital has helped to further cement that.

As I said, it has been a great experience, and I have many crazy, funny, amazing and enriching times, and they will last long with me. To that end I wanted to thank the guys at Stink Digital and wish them every best for what the future holds.

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Why A True Belief in People Really Pays Off

May 11th, 2010 · Opinion

Venture Hype’s review of Super Angel Ron Conway Nice Guys Don’t Always Finish Last is an interesting one. It’s testament to the fact that decency, honesty, perseverance and a real belief in people can win through in the end.

For those of you who don’t know it is Conway who has angel invested in soem of the web’s best known properties, everything from Google to Paypal, both of which were his eventual saving grace after the crash of the initial dot com boom. But Conway is more than just ‘money’, his uncanny ability to produce results comes from a real belief in the people he deals and works with. He is very much a ‘people person’.

Conway consistently connects and reconnects people, not just for his own benefit but for their own, and rather than being a guy who struts around on a pompous high horse, he makes every encounter he has a meaningful one. No person is left untouched by him, and the power of recall is impressive, using his brain as a mere hive, network and conduit of information. Above and beyond this, his faith in people is unerring. By way of example, his real belief in Ev Williams, the founder of Odeo – a guy who paid back investors after the venture failed – proved fruitful when Williams followed up Odeo with new web darling, Twitter. The reality is MOST investors would have walked away time and time again.

This kind of approach really pays off, especially in the context of my previous posting, Want to be an entrepreneur?, when a commitment to a visionary is not just about a leap of faith but a real belief in that person and that their ideas. Such people, with the drive and stamina to make a successful business, will indeed keep coming back again and again, and it is only a matter of time before they succeed.

But the need to have a real belief in people stretches far beyond simply the realms of angel investing, it comes down to the very core of a functioning business. Exercising trust in individuals builds confidence, helping to foster creativity and productivity in your business. Ensuring that work gets done right and that new channels are developed and improved upon by team members who love what they are doing is critical to success.

The dynamics of a team are critical to success, and being impervious to them only leads to losses in the long term. Engendering trust, confidence, creativity and productivity through real belief is a way of harnessing work for the better, and one that costs nothing at that. You therefore ignore team dynamics and people skills at your own peril!

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Free Agent Central – A Quick Review

May 7th, 2010 · Opinion

One of my ex-colleagues at Stink Digital put me onto Free Agent Central, a nifty web service for managing your business online with estimates, billings, earnings et al.

The Free Agent service makes it ’super easy’ to run your business, or at least appears to, which is why it is handy they provide a 30 day FREE trial to test your woes. It didn’t take me long to get signed up and set up, that’s for sure, but then this is where the fun begins. Cutting to the chase:

Great Service for UK Business

Commerce no longer readily respects national boundaries, though Free Agent seems to steadfastly pinned to the outline of of the British Isles. The service is very clearly and squarely aimed at freelancers who work in the UK and who perform 100% of their business functions within UK borders. To their target audience, usability aside, Free Agent Central performs a flawless service, but the greater the percentage of your revenue that comes in from overseas, the more annoyed you will become with Free Agent.

The lack of a blanket coverage of support for multiple currencies really sucks. You can easily estimate and invoice in 2 or more currencies, tying in the costings and billings to the XE.com data taking the pain out of having to track the FOREX market rates yourself, but that’s pretty much where it stops. Importing data form your bank accounts or Paypal, gets butchered. All transactions return as UK points at an exchange of 1 to 1, despite the currency being included int he files, and when filling in your own expenses, whether for foreign trips or purchasing software online in another currency, you have to convert it yourself which either means using the present day exchange or waiting for the transaction to hit your statement.

Things To Watch Out For

The major hurdle of multiple currency flaws aside, there are a few other annoying things I didn’t like so much about the service:

Non-Taxable Income – If as a freelancer you end up working for your previous employer. They are legally obliged, as I understand it, to deduct tax as source, given that moving from permanent to freelance could be seen as a “tax avoidance” scheme. To this end, your corporation tax will end up getting totally miscalculated in the system.
Invoice Themes – There is a mismatch between the HTML versions of the invoice and the PDF that gets generated, and there this no way to create your own styled themes for them. No doubt any designer would be annoyed by this, though I suppose it is not the end of the world. A properly and legally formatted invoice is of course ultimately key.
Site Search & Reporting – It would be super handy to have company wide search for all kinds of resources and the ability to build some custom reports from them. Of course you can export data out of the system and use something like Crystal Reports or Excel to do the same, but it obviously adds complexity.
Help Systems – In system help is rather sucky, and Free Agent are using Get Satisfaction for ticket track et al, which is fine to a degree, but I wish the basic and first line of support was a lot more effective. That being said the are definitely responsive and don’t ride rough shod over security and privacy for it – plus points to Free Agent!

Otherwise Great

I understand that any service has its shortcomings, and the reality is that Free Agent Central is the perfect solution for a UK-based business and the prospects for its future look rosy and great. I would definitely recommend it to anyone steadfastly set in the UK, but beyond that, it has to sort out major flaws for those wishing to use it as a 100% of their accounting solution.

I suppose the added advantage of their focus on the UK market is that they really know their UK Tax and Accountancy inside out. This means they can provide extensive and useful information and tools to that end. The Free Agent blog provides a dearth of information for newbies and old timers alike. Allowing you to keep abreast of what is going on from budget-to-budget.

My Wish-list for Free Agent Central

Having used the service for almost a month now, the following are a few of the items I would love to see in Free Agent Central. No doubt they will be coming, now that the company has received a round of funding, but I will write them down anyhow:

Multiple Currencies – First and foremost is for the system to be able to handle multiple currency for every kind of resource in their system, from estimates, to bills, to bank accounts etc. According to a support specialist I spoke to, this functionality is in the pipeline, but they are not able to disclose any road map.
Email Alerts – The system makes it easy for you to auto-email your clients, something I loathe, as I run a personalised business, not a monolithic corporation. On the flip-side, however, I would also like to be alerted when recurrent invoices and other events occur in the system and re-act accordingly, rather than being forced to log-in to do so.
Flexible Invoices - It would be nice to be able to configure invoicing payment details and other things by territory, and to be able to enable and disable elements for different contacts. US payment details for US clients and the same for UK clients, makes sense.

So there you have it. Draw your own conclusions and feel free to ask any questions you have about my own experiences, or go sign up here!

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Want To Be An Entrepreneur?

May 6th, 2010 · Opinion

It’s an interesting read, Caterina.net’s Want to be an entrepreneur? Drop out of college. The obvious conclusion from the title is that if you drop out of college you can succeed and create a world beating business. If Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg et al can do it, why not you? Right?

Factory Production Line

In the article Caterina talks about factory models, and how university and schooling as a whole churns out students like a factory production line, and how from a business perspective, advice and mentoring from successful business leaders is the way to go. Effectively an apprenticeship model. But who do you think the greats followed? As the saying goes: “It is those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world who actually do.”

Sure you can’t necessarily learn everything in college and you can teach yourself an awful lot these days online, but can you really do everything? Surely at some point your overall, and undying success comes down to an effective model and a functioning business that is backed up by hardcore experience and knowledge of business from thanks ranks of the MBA-ers and McKinsey alumni.

Of course, Facebook isn’t just Zuckerberg, Apple isn’t just Jobs and Microsoft isn’t even just Gates. These guys are simply the visionaries that kick started the revolution – with a little blood sweat and tears – but every vision needs wings and it is these other ‘factory produced’ people that add meat to the bone; so at the heart of this ‘drop out’ culture are ideas and guts, but for longevity, proper business sense.

Without those ideas in the first place, and drive to implement them, you wont go anywhere. Napster was a barn storming success until the law put a damper on the party and Roxio snapped up the software and took it nowhere, but look where Sean Fanning is now? His drop out status couldn’t make Snocap a success, nor could his mega bucks, and after nearly 10 years out of the limelight. Who really knows who Napster and Fanning are? The class of 2010 certainly doesn’t … Oh how fickle the internet world can be!

Bad, Awful and Great Decisions

There’s only one way to succeed and that is to truly believe in what you are doing and to go at it unerringly. And when you get knocked back and shot down, or you hit a hurdle and fall down, you simple pick yourself up and keep at it. The history of business is strewn with poor decisions, bad judgments, failure and more, even for the most successful business guys and gals.

It’s about luck as much as anything – and hard work makes good luck, as the old cliché goes – real belief in an idea, whether original or not and making the best execution of it. Bullshit is the universal language of business. If you’ve got the drive, aplomb and the ability to coalesce your ideas, you can make them happen. Any old fool could fall off the back of a truck tomorrow, take a site that is only half of your idea and turn it into a million bucks.

Clearly success owes as much to the chaos theory as the notion of top down management and control and frankly speaking it’s a waste of time to talk about how to generate success, if anything the only science of success is in knowing how to maintain it once you reach the pinnacle and don’t decide to sell out at the top. All I can say is “… avoid doing a Ratner” and make sure you know how to foster that start-up mentality, avoid crushing creativity and know how to learn from the latest and greatest, From Zero to a Million Users.

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