Rahul Pathak : My Personal Blog

When you screw up, admit it. Sometimes, even when it’s not your fault, you should take responsibility (those of you with significant others know exactly what I’m talking about.)

Jetblue is one of my favorite airlines and they screwed up big-time. I just got this in my inbox from them:

We are sorry and embarrassed. But most of all, we are deeply sorry.

Last week was the worst operational week in JetBlue’s seven year history. Following the severe winter ice storm in the Northeast, we subjected our customers to unacceptable delays, flight cancellations, lost baggage, and other major inconveniences. The storm disrupted the movement of aircraft, and, more importantly, disrupted the movement of JetBlue’s pilot and inflight crewmembers who were depending on those planes to get them to the airports where they were scheduled to serve you. With the busy President’s Day weekend upon us, rebooking opportunities were scarce and hold times at 1-800-JETBLUE were unacceptably long or not even available, further hindering our recovery efforts.

Words cannot express how truly sorry we are for the anxiety, frustration and inconvenience that we caused. This is especially saddening because JetBlue was founded on the promise of bringing humanity back to air travel and making the experience of flying happier and easier for everyone who chooses to fly with us. We know we failed to deliver on this promise last week.

My experiences with them have been stellar and I hope they come out of this well, but that’s neither here nor there. I like their apology a great deal. And granted, after what happened, it needed to be good. What I like about itis the repeated use of “we did this…” and “we did that…” - they made it personal.

Taking responsibility is critical. We own our actions (or inaction) and there’s no escaping that. Once you take responsibility for the screw-up, you commit yourself to fixing what went wrong. It’s a lot easier to sweep things under the rug when your reputation isn’t what’s at stake. “I have to fix it,” follows much more readily from “I screwed up,” than it does from “the weather screwed things up.”

We all screw up. What’s important is what happens next.

Alison just showed me a cool pet weather widget she got from the Apple site. You upload an image of your pet and every time you mouse over it, your pet says something random to you. Cool, fun app.

It’s also smart marketing by Purina:

• Taps into a user passion - pets
• Makes people smile every time they see your brand
• Gets you word of mouth

Great to see supposedly stodgy brands embracing technology. There’s a lesson for the rest of us in there.

One of the important things to keep in mind on a consumer site is that your users will find a way to use your site to do the things they want to do. Rather than restrict them, find outlets in your product that enable them to accomplish those things.

Dogster’s Presentation at Community Next is terrific and in it they talk about “helping users achieve their goals rather than co-opting them to further your own.” I paraphrase, but that’s the gist of it. I couldn’t agree more. The presentation is excellent and highly recommended if you believe community is important.

Dave has a great post up about the list of sites banned from Digg. It’s a great piece of work. Dave got the top 10,000 domains from Alexa and then tested them against digg to get back a list of 183 banned domains. He also makes an insightful point about UGC sites that are banned:

User Generated Content sites without subdomains. One bad actor on these sites can ruin it for everyone.  Popular UGC sites like Myspace, Squidoo, 43Things, Geocities are all banned, whereas sites like Typepad, Blogspot, Wordpress do just fine because it is easy to ban one bad actor. If I were Seth Godin, I’d give Squidoo lenses their own subdomains pronto - there is good content on Squidoo that will never see the light of Digg.

Werner Vogels has a really interesting post up about the reliability of hard disks. The bottom line? You get what you pay for.

In their study they found that there was no correlation between disk failure rates and utilization, environmental conditions such as temperature, or age. This means that high disk utilization or age of the disk have no significant impact on the probability that it will fail. They did find a strong correlation between manufacturer/model and failure rates. They observed that older disks had a much lower failure rates then newer disks, where the newer disks in general were less expensive. Basically you get what you pay when you talk about disk reliability. Given that disks in general arrive in large batches you may want to take care with how you deploy these disks as you want to reduce the impact of these strong failure correlations.

You’re not done until it’s tested, deployed and running.

When working hard to build a site you think users will rave about, it’s critical to not lose sight of the operations support required to test, deploy and keep your site running. The best site in the world is a complete waste of time if pages load slowly and you constantly have to be apologize for being offline.

The unfortunate reality of infrastructure is that if it’s performing well, it’s invisible. Most of the time most of us in the United States never think about electricity, running water or being able to pick up the phone and call someone. (This wasn’t the case growing up in Nigeria, but that’s another story.) The same is true when we think about websites. We focus on what we can see and interact with and not on what’s behind it, unless something is not working.

At Judy’s Book, infrastructure and ops form a significant part of what we do. Interacting with data feeds (inbound and outbound), setting up and configuring machines for development, test and production, managing builds and monitoring servers all take time and resources. Planning for and anticipating the ops impact of your product decisions is critical.

Make sure your ops team doesn’t feel like they are invisible.

Recently, one of our developers had a mini-rant about the new to properly document bugs in tickets. Apparently, writing “comments are broken” is incredibly unhelpful. Go figure. Of course, he’s dead right, without describing a problem completely it’s a hell of a lot harder to fix.

An alternate approach is presented in this oldie but goodie - a list of logbook entries between airline pilots and maintenance personnel.

Some of my favorites:

Problem as reported: Something loose in cockpit.
Service Response: Something tightened up in cockpit.

Problem as reported: Aircraft acting funny.
Service Response: Aircraft warned to “Straighten up, fly right and be serious.”

Enjoy.

Switch to ‘Comic Sans.’ Ok, that’s not true. The power font of choice is Calibri .

Usability News has a fascinating article about the impact of the font of an email on the reader’s perception of the writer of the message. The article is dated January 9, 2007 and the results are really interesting and worth a browse. The three fonts tested were : Calibri, Comic Sans & Gigi (Study funded by MSFT Advanced Reading Technology Group.) While we would expect fonts like comic sans to be taken less seriously than other more formal fonts, it’s really interesting to see a rigorous approach to the subject. (I realize this is probably old hat to people in the offline publishing world so my apologies if I’m boring you.)

The table below lists the fonts that were chosen as most suited for email in an earlier study:

The study goes on to talk about the perception of the writer and attempts to correlate it to font choice. The conclusion from the paper was that font choice impacts things like the perception of stability, practicality, professionalism etc. These are all things that we know anecdotally.

As a side note, if you’re still sending out rainbow text in Script, please stop.

From CNN this morning, an interesting article on a startup for selling ‘Heartbreak diamonds’ - jewelry from relationships gone sour.

(CNN) — Joshua Opperman thought he’d met the woman he’d marry and spend the rest of his life with. But when they broke up a few years ago, he was left with a broken heart, an expensive ring and an idea that he’s turning into a business.

Opperman said he was depressed after the split and even more depressed when he tried to sell the engagement ring he’d spent most of his life savings on.

“I tried to sell the ring back where I bought it and they wanted to give me 32 percent back,” he said.

The 29-year-old real estate broker decided to open the online jewelry auction site “I Do … Now I Don’t” after reading an article about other people in the same predicament.

Jewelry is definitely ripe for online commerce:

• offline experience for most people is so poor; online provides a more efficient market
• gems & precious metals are commodities
• great weight/value ratio -> shipping makes sense

In addition, providing consumers with a way to recoup investments in an auction format while helping them avoid an emotionally embarassing conversation/negotiation with a jeweler is fantastic.
An interesting point in the article is the focus on customer stories and Joshua’s desire to capture those and get them online. This is a great idea from two perspectives - search engine worthy content and drivers of conversion. This goes to the notion of aggregation +UGC being key components of any online business.

The article goes on to state that most items sell for 50-60% of retail so if you’re looking for a good deal, might be worth checking out.

We were just having a conversation at the office about video reviews and some of the disadvantages they have relative to a text format. The primary one was the fact that you have to absorb information at the pace of the presenter, not at the pace you can assimilate.

Coincidentally, I just came across a great post on 37 Signals’ blog about using freeze frames as opposed to video to quickly convey meaning. They have a great example there from Youtube. Pictures from the post included below for convenience. Pretty clear which one conveys more at a glance.

vs.

Great, thought-provoking post.