Rahul Pathak : My Personal Blog

While reading the WSJ online, I selected some text and clicked my right mouse button. Instead of seeing my context menu pop up, I got the following monstrosity from the site. It overlays a window onto the page, completely obscuring what you’ve selected, in an attempt to provide ‘helpful’ context.

I already have a context menu, I know what it does. To be fair to the journal, they allow you to turn the feature off, but it bugs the hell out of me. I mean come on, who the hell wants a giant blue box obscuring your screen every time you try and use your context menu? This had the same effect on me as the Snap site preview and those horrible double underlined content ads you see all over the place.

Don’t break the browser. I’m pretty sure this hurts more than it helps.

Dave had a post a few days ago about how there’s opportunity in any industry once you start to dig beneath the surface of what’s happening. Along those lines, here are a couple of tidbits I found fascinating:

The WSJ Online has an article (username/pw required) about how Bank of America is offering credit cards targeted at illegal immigrants in an effort to get more of the Hispanic segment. Regardless of your position on the politics of this you have to admire the business thinking behind this.

LOS ANGELES — In the latest sign of the U.S. banking industry’s aggressive pursuit of the Hispanic market, Bank of America Corp. has quietly begun offering credit cards to customers without Social Security numbers — typically illegal immigrants. …

Bank of America defends the program, saying it complies with U.S. banking and antiterrorism laws. Company executives say that the initiative isn’t about politics, but rather about meeting the needs of an untapped group of potential customers.

I also saw a post this morning on the “Unusual Business Ideas that Work” blog about an DePrice.com successfully making money in software affiliate sales by creative traffic acquisition and affiliate discounting.

“I started DePrice.Com in December of 2004 with 9 dollars,” says John. “As an affiliate, I didn’t need any inventory. I simply signed up with several vendors, got permission to offer discounts out of my own commission, created a simple website and started selling software, using forums, Froogle, search engines, etc. The very first month I’ve sold about $2000 worth of software, clearing $500. Next month, I tripled my profits. Last year, Deprice averaged $17,000-$20,000 in sales a month. This January our sales are up 20-25%.”

The post goes on to describe how by focusing on popular titles, and using his own commission to end up with the lowest available price for an item, DePrice was able to get customers talking about the site and get cheap traffic. Hats off to John Gromovski for figuring out how to make money in this segment of the affiliate market.

In general, I completely agree with Dave. No matter what industry you look at, there are people winning by creating value for customers. At the end of the day, you have to find a way to do this profitably. The key is to find an industry you’re excited about and then dive deep.

When designing a web site, it is critical that you write out your site flow and nav explicitly early on in the process. It’s very easy to wave your hands over certain elements and go “well, just click on this and you’ll get the right page.” Don’t do this. Define what the right page is, define what happens when a user clicks on it, and define how a user can leave after they’ve gotten there. Page flow is one of the most critical design elements. Writing it down forces you to understand it in the design phase and makes you aware early of development impact.

Granted, there are some situations that aren’t knowable without wiring up some pages and interacting with live data, but the more thinking you can do up front, the better things will turn out

I’ve linked to this blog before and I’m doing it again, because it’s terrific. Required reading for anyone interested in technology and software. Jeff Atwood has an excellent post on iteration quality vs. speed which he illustrates using the superior kill ratio of the F-86 vs. the Mig-15 in dogfights. I’m also a closet aircraft geek which may help explain why I liked this post so much.

Boyd decided that the primary determinant to winning dogfights was not observing, orienting, planning, or acting better. The primary determinant to winning dogfights was observing, orienting, planning, and acting faster. In other words, how quickly one could iterate. Speed of iteration, Boyd suggested, beats quality of iteration.

This insight has been borne out in our experience at Judy’s Book. The more you invest in enabling yourself to change faster, the better you’ll ultimately perform. Site design changes, incentive system tweaks, all have consequences that can only be known through measurement. Often, what happens is not exactly what you want and the quicker you can respond, the quicker you’ll end up in a better place.

There is a fantastic post on ‘On Startups’ (a blog I highly recommend) talking about why ‘me-too’ companies aren’t always a bad idea.

“Yes, there are competitors, but nobody has built a product yet that users really like…”

And there, quite simply is the crux of the motivation.  It is easy to discount companies as being “me too”, but the reality is we have seen a fair number of successes in the past in categories that we have felt were already crowded.  The reason is that nobody had really solved the problem quite right.  This is what motivated Matt, and this is why you shouldn’t let me (or others) talk you out of a startup idea simply because it might be labeled a “me too” idea.

This makes a ton of sense. Until the use case is really nailed, there is opportunity for new entrants. I think a critical element to consider, however is that your take on the idea shouldn’t require users to change existing modes of behavior. If they can do what they’re doing on the existing sites but get better results and more utility from you, then you’re on to something.

Andy Monfried has a great post on his blog about having the courage to make decisions that aren’t safe and goes on talk about how he doesn’t want to build another cool company, but rather to change how media is bought. Not only is this post though-provoking and right  on the money, it’s engaging and extremely well written.

I’ve never met this dynamic young lady – but her adventurous journey, made me think about many of the opportunities we all take, and others we miss out on.

How many times have we said to ourselves that we will be more daring, take on more challenges, and generally just confront life head on, more aggressively?

Time is NOT on our side – (as Jagger and Richards wrote) – time works against us, and each day that passes in our lives makes, joining the proverbial circus, harder – more difficult, and more fraught with risk.

I’ve made a decision.

It’s really easy to get caught up in incremental improvement and to not take the intellectual steps needed to even dare to think big. Funnily enough, Andy Sack and I were having the same conversation last night. Maybe there’s something in the air.

Samsung has an iPhone competitor due to be unveiled next week at the 3GSM conference. Not sure if it will be as sexy as Apple’s offering, but it’s great to see competition in the market. It’s a great looking device. I’m curious to see how it stacks up. It has a slide out QWERTY keyboard in addition to touch screen control.

You can read an in-depth review at Gizmodo. Enjoy. Can’t wait to check this out in the flesh, as it were.

UPDATE: I found out about this on MSNBC initially.

One of the greatest challenges in product design is to create something that’s compelling, not just interesting.

It’s relatively easy to create something that people will use once or twice, maybe come back to occasionally, but that really doesn’t buy you much. Don’t get me wrong - most people are happy to get to something interesting. What really makes a difference though is when you create something compelling - a product that people come back to over and over again, something they tell people they know about, something they can’t imagine being without.

This is really hard. Not only do you have to deliver value from the first interaction, you have to deliver more value over time. Value can be measured on many dimensions. On some sites it’s personalization, on others its community, or comprehensiveness, or entertainment. You have to decide which elements apply for the space and the users you’re targeting.

“Ask an Uptight Seattleite” is one my favorite humor columns. As someone who has spent a lot of time driving in Boston and NYC, driving in Seattle has been an exercise in frustration. Passive, self-righteous drivers who compete to see who can wait the longest at 4-way stop signs are everywhere. Given this deeply held belief, yesterday’s column had me laughing to the point of tears.

Dear Uptight Seattleite,

Why can’t you people fucking drive? News flash: Your tires are made of high-tech rubber. A little drizzle isn’t going to make them slide off the road. I learned to drive while negotiating tractor trailers, grandma-driven Chryslers, UPS vans, and BMW yuppies, all of them cutting each other off on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and to me it’s like your roads are clogged with impossibly slow, dumb animals. I could go on, but I recognize your time is valuable, and I’m sure you have a new package from Netflix to attend to.

Brooklyn Babe

A snippet from the response since most of you won’t click through:

To achieve a greater harmony with Seattle traffic—and isn’t that what you really want?—I suggest you first take a deep, calming breath before you turn the key in the ignition. When you’ve slowed down your mind, you’ll see it’s perfectly OK to drive 5 miles an hour and hesitate at each intersection while trying to decide whether or not to turn. You’re actually doing the drivers behind you a favor by enforcing a more meditative and sensible pace.

Does rain necessitate driving even more slowly? Well, maybe there are undiscovered properties of rain that make it highly dangerous. Can you prove that there aren’t? No, you can’t. Isn’t it then sort of close-minded of you to criticize? Much better instead to surrender to the rhythms of our content, slow-moving herd.

In my mind, good product design cannot exist without constraints. If you have infinite time, money and developers and you develop a great product, so what? You’re were expected to do that. Coming up with a great product when you have 2 months, a small team and limited degrees of freedom, that’s something I really admire.

At a startup, you are, by definition, in a resource-constrained, time-sensitive environment. If you’re not, you’re over-funded, not paranoid enough and you’re likely going to be overtaken by someone hungrier and scrappier than you.

Define the dream product

At the start of the design phase, you still have to sit down and think about your ideal end state. The question you have to answer is, what do I need to build to delight my chosen audience. How can I make a product they will love to use and talk about.

Werner Vogels has a great post about Amazon’s approach:

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we’ll need at launch (the press release and the faq) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

The Working Backwards product definition process is all about is fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build.

In this phase, you shouldn’t close yourself off. Seek input, talk to current and prospective users, talk to people within your company. Having said that, advance your vision, don’t design to achieve consensus. To quote a friend of mine, “that’s how crappy products get built.”

Face facts

Once you’ve designed that ideal state, you need to face reality. The basic questions:

• How long will the ideal state take to build?
• What is the minimum functionality needed?
• Are there intermediate steps that can be taken en route to your final goal?
• Are there features for which the cost/benefit equation does not make sense?

Decide where to compromise

What you’ll find is that your development team will tell you that the 3-d DHTML spinning picture cube will require a fundamental change in image handling and they’ll ask you whether users absolutely have to have this. If so, why? In some cases you’ll need to go ahead and build it anyway, in others, you’ll accept that perhaps this feature can wait.

S ome of the hardest design tradeoffs come when deciding between features that payoff in the short term versus features that pay off in the long term. For example, when designing a deals site, creating better deal pages clearly pays off for the business immediately but making it easier for users to post deals only pays off in the longer term.

Deciding how to balance long term versus short term payoff is one of the hardest elements of product design. It’s human nature to look for the quick hits but if you constantly borrow from the future to fund the present, you’re going to end up in a place you don’t like.

There will be pain and that’s a good thing

As your design progresses from an idealized version to the product you can actually get released, there will be pain. Designers will cringe as functionality is cut down and developers will be unhappy because they are being pushed to do things that are hard. I think this is healthy. If you don’t have tension between product management/design and development, you’re not making good choices.

Build it and release it

The most important thing to do here is pick a date and start trying to hit it. You may learn things as you get into development that force you to adjust your date, but that’s ok. Until you are confronted with the harsh clarity provided by a deadline, things just don’t happen quickly enough. There’s a lot of talk and hand waving, but the real issues don’t get surfaced. People will complain - management will tell you it’s taking too long and developers will tell you there’s not enough time. Welcome to product management. This is normal and healthy.

While you’re developing the product, don’t forget about things like messaging and managing user transition. It will bite you in the ass if you release a new product and don’t tell people where the old product went. We experienced this first hand with our initial home page change as we transitioned from reviews to deals. A flurry of angry user emails and blog posts greeting us within 30 minutes of release. We ultimately gave legacy users their old home page back but showed new users the deals home. Trust me, this is not fun. Avoid it if you can.

You’re not done. Measure & Iterate. Do it Quickly.

While we are all convinced that our initial designs are great, chances are, they will need to evolve. Early in our deals history, we released what we thought was a store page updgrade and watched as our on-page conversion to click was cut in half. In today’s world with tools like Google Analytics it is criminal to not measure where users are coming from, what they are doing and where they are going. As an organization, we haven’t been great at this. We’re getting better, but need to keep pushing ourselves to do more.

Unless you’re measuring how your product is performing, you’re not going to learn what to change. Once you know that, you then have to have the discpline to iterate quickly. This is hard because you probably didn’t release everything you wanted in the first place and need to add in features you left out while at the same time improving what’s already out there and dealing with user issues and bug fixes.

It’s supposed to be hard

Clearly, you’re sensing a theme here. Product design and development requires tough choices and it requires you to be flexible. This stuff is not supposed to be easy - we’re trying to create value here. Dave and I were having a conversation last night in which I was talking about some of these choices and Dave simply said, “There are always going to be tradeoffs, you’ve got to figure that out.” Dave is almost always right.

Constraints force you to be creative, to make good decisions and to work hard. If you do it right, you creat value for users and ultimately, that’s what you have to make happen if you want to be successful.