Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

I’m off to Alaska for a week and will be disconnecting. Hope everyone has a great start to the summer. I’ll be blogging again when I get back.

This was taken at 12:30am in Anchorage. Can’t wait.

If you’re trying to put something great together, at some point, you have to get a little obsessive. This means you have to pay attention to little details that matter to users that aren’t quite right and highlight them again and again until they get taken care of. In the ideal scenario, you do all this obsessing before you product sees the light of day, but in the real world, it typically doesn’t happen on your first release - you have to come back to it and fix it.

This sounds like a stating-the-bloody-obvious comment, but it’s not that simple. Things are always messy. There are dates people are trying to hit, competing priorities, there’s a new feature that users are asking for. In the midst of this fray, you have to find a way to allocate resources to sanding the rough edges off the feature you released two weeks ago that a lot of people aren’t using. Good times. Still, this is the way things are. You’ve got to find a way to push through.

Two quotes on the importance of obsession that rang true with me:

1. The Startup Game: In an interview with the founders of Zenter:

When your product is 80% done, that means you have another 80% to go. “To get something pretty close is easy, but you need to concentration on the little things. That’s what will set you apart from the competition,” says Crosby. “You can have the best algorithm in the world and the fastest process, but at the end if the day, if the user struggles to find out how to click a box or delete something, then you don’t succeed.”

2. Jonathan Ive (SVP Design, Apple - responsible for the iPod, iMac & iPhone)

Q. What is it that distinguishes the products that your team develops?

A. Perhaps the decisive factor is fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff: the obsessive attention to details that are often overlooked, like cables and power adaptors.

We’re not all going to design the best products in the world, but we can all make sure we do the best we can do for our users.

Two or three times over the past week, different developers have paused and shifted direction to make something better for the user even though it meant more work for them. It’s hard for me to describe how good that makes me feel. Just knowing that everyone at the company is focusing on making things better for our users gives me the warm fuzzies. It’s one of the best things about a startup - everybody cares.

As goal-oriented people, it’s really easy to just try and get things done for the sake of checking them off a list. It’s much harder to step back and ask yourself if you’re really doing the best you can or whether you need to put in more effort to make things right.

We just released a couple of cool enhancements to Judy’s Book this week. The first is an enhancement to the user tags feature I wrote about last week. Based on deals users save or post, we infer their favorite stores and categories. This provides another lens on what people are interested in. I’m a big believer trying to figure out what users care without having to ask them to tell us what they like. In this case, we gave users tools to post and save deals. Their usage of these tools allows us to surface interesting information. This is a rich area you’ll be seeing more from us on this over the next few months.

Another simple, but cool addition is the JB Newsletter Archive. Here you can browse the current and past Judy’s Book Deals newsletters and check out some great handpicked & often JB-exclusive offers.

Stay tuned on JB - there’s a ton more coming over the next few weeks.

I was pointed to Waterfall 2006 (a parody of the software development process) by an interesting post called “Process as a substitute for competence” on Kill the Meeting. The home page for Waterfall 2006 lists some great titles of research papers. My favorite was on user experience:

“User Interaction: It Was Hard to Build, It Should Be Hard to Use by Jeff Patton”

There are some other great ones too like:

“Crossword Puzzles as Requirements Documents: Make them Work for It”

“User Feedback: Eliminating the Main Cause of Project Overruns”

Brilliant.

I was at the Apple store in the U-district last week and had picked up the Sims 2 Pets Expansion pack (a great gift for the Sims addict in your life) and was waiting in line to pay. As usual, it was impossible to leave without playing with the iPods and lusting after the Macbook Pro, but my favorite part of the experience was being approached by a sales rep with a wireless credit card reader who came to the back of the line, asked if anyone was waiting to pay with a credit card. 2 minutes later, I was on my way out of the store.

Hats off to Apple for caring enough about the customer experience in their stores to make sure that you didn’t wait in line if you didn’t have to. I’m not surprised they have better sales per square foot than Tiffany’s.

But here’s a little-known fact: Apple’s chic stores don’t just sell more per square foot than even Best Buy, they beat some of the best in the luxury retail world silly, according to a report released Tuesday by Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi.

Apple’s stores have hauled in annual sales per square foot of $4,032, compared with Best Buy’s $930, Neiman Marcus’ $611, and luxury store Tiffany & Co.’s $2,666, according to Bernstein.

As Mark Hurst has said (and I paraphrase), customer experience is the sum total of interactions that a consumer has with your brand. On that front, at least for me, Apple has done a phenomenal job.

Over the past few weeks, we released and iterated upon a number of features on Judy’s Book aimed at user convenience and making it easier to get and track deals you care about.

Deal Bookmarking and Tagging

This features allows a user to save deals with notes and tags and then review them at their leisure. Saved deals can be marked private and by using tags, users can also generate shopping lists. We roll up people’s aggregate activity to provide a snapshot of the deals/categories and stores that people are saving. This is a small step along the road to providing a personalized lens into our database of deals. As users tag and bookmark deals, we build a list of their favorite stores and categories and we’ll use these in the near future to present more relevant deals to the user.

One of the coolest things for me over the past few weeks was seeing this set of features evolve from a ‘quick and dirty, let’s get it out implementation’ to something much more polished. A great example of this is the User Tags page. The initial version was just a text based list of tags which did the job but wasn’t super exciting:

The current version is a much more interesting, visual way to explore a user’s tags.

Mousing over a thumbnail gives you the deal title, clicking on a tag provides a more detailed view of the deals associated with that tag and the alpha bar and right nav strip allow you to quickly navigate a user’s tags. User favorite stores and categories will be coming very soon. Big round of thanks to everyone that worked on this. It was definitely a collaborative effort and I’m really happy with the end result. Favorite stores and categories (inferred as opposed to reported) will be coming soon.

RSS Feeds Galore

Any page you can generate on our site can be turned into an RSS feed that will update anytime new deals meeting that criteria exist. For example, you can get a feed for Restaurant Deals in Seattle, or for Electronics deals with free shipping and add those to your feed reader. Our goal is for users to be able to obtain deals in any form that’s convenient to them and RSS is an important part of that. Being able to customize the feed to obtain the slice of our data that’s right for you is something I’m really happy that we can deliver on.

Back End Improvements

In addition to user facing features, there have been and will continue to be a number of back end improvements which affect things like expired & spam deal removal and surfacing the best deals. The impact of these changes is less visible in any one go, but add up to a significantly better user experience over time. We’re constantly working on this area of the site and the goal here is to display great deals to the user no matter which page of the site they interact with.

There’s a lot more coming over the next few weeks and while the amount of work ahead of us can feel a little daunting at times, I’m really excited about where we’re headed.

We released some significant new functionality on couponlooker today. (We also put out some new features on Judy’s Book which I’m really excited about but more on that tomorrow.) Kurt and Dave (Ops and Test) deserve a special thank you for great work in helping us iron out the kinks in this release and making sure the site is up and running.

The biggest user-facing improvements on couponlooker are the inclusion of ‘% off’ filters and related merchant filters to help users navigate search results.

The reason I’m excited about the filters is that they add significantly to user value. If you do a search for ‘digital camera’ on couponlooker, you are presented with a set of results for digital camera coupons (naturally enough) and at the bottom of the page, we present a set of links that allow you to refine your search:

If you click on say the 50% link, you are shown digital camera coupons for 40-50% off.

This is a simple change, but goes a long way to helping users navigate the search results. The merchant filters serve a similar purpose. They also help normalize data across coupon sites so “Dell Home” and “Dell Home, Inc.” aren’t treated as separate sites.

We also released an early version of a sponsored listing system that allows sites to promote specific coupons. These are clearly marked as sponsored listings and clearly distinguishable from the main search results.

As before, we continue to de-dupe coupons found on different sites in order to help users find the unique offers out there that are available to them.

Alex has a good post that goes into some detail about how we implemented the above features and it’s well worth a read if you’re interested.

With couponlooker, our goal is to drive traffic to the best coupon sites on the web. We’re also continually adding sites to our index. If you have a favorite coupon site, let me know and we’ll get it into the system.

These aren’t radical changes, but we’ve got to keep getting better at the basics in order to deliver value. There just aren’t any shortcuts.

According to this Comscore report, (thanks for the pointer to this Garth) Ebay is the largest SEM marketer on the web with 800+MM exposures and which represented 4.1% of the total (March 2007 data). It makes sense that their decision to pull advertising on Google made Google blink.

In March, paid search activity in the U.S. generated nearly 20 billion total sponsored link exposures. The top ten paid search advertisers, generating 16 percent of all sponsored links, were all retail or comparison shopping sites. eBay.com led with 802 million sponsored link exposures (4.1 percent), followed by Smarter.com with 366 million (1.9 percent), and Shopping.com with 357 million (1.8 percent).

Ebay also owns Shopping.com which is also an SEM Monster.

At Calvin’s recommendation I downloaded and tried out TabMixPlus (a Firefox extension) and it’s awesome. It allows me to configure the tab open behavior to the model that I want which means I’m not going to be opening IE7 as often.

The program has a wealth of options and allows you to control just about every aspect of the tab browsing experience. Thanks for the pointer!

PS: On an unrelated note, the new Google Analytics interface has added hourly intraday data back in, which rocks.

I know I’m going to hate myself in the morning for saying this, but IE7’s implementation of tabbed browsing has one tiny detail in it that Firefox doesn’t and it’s driving me nuts.

The issue is a small one (like most things that influence usability) - when you open a new tab in IE7, it opens the tab in the background immediately to the right of the tab that’s active.

Firefox opens a new tab in the rightmost position. Also, IE’s tab scroll controls are on the ends of the tab bar while Firefox’s are clustered on the right side.

If you’re like me, you frequently have more tabs open that will fit on the screen. This means that in Firefox the tab you just opened is floating somewhere off to the right and you have to scroll to the right until you can see the tab you wanted.

A typical flow for me:

• Find interesting blog post
• Start reading, come across 2-3 interesting references in the post
• Open references in tabs (so I can get to them after I finish the main post)

I often have more tabs open than will fit in the application window and I often find the idea of localized access applies to my reading. In IE7, my flow is uninterrupted - as I open new tabs, they are clustered around the one I’m reading. When I move from one to the other, my clicking is localized and I don’t have to search the tab bar for the pages I just opened.

In Firefox, I find myself constantly having to stop what I’m doing to find the pages I just opened. The tab I just opened is floating somewhere to the right and I have to click on the right scroll arrow to find it. Now, if I want to reference the original post, my eye has glanced to the left, I’ve noted it’s off screen to the left, but then I have to go back over to the right because the left and right controls are clustered together. In IE7, the left control is where my eye ended up - on the left side of the window.

This is a minor, niggly, nit-picky issue, but it annoys me constantly. It makes me notice the browser instead of having it fade into the background. On balance, I still strongly prefer Firefox, but this issue annoys me enough that I’ll open up IE multiple times/day.

Details matter.

PS: If I’m missing an obvious Firefox config setting or a Greasemonkey script, please enlighten me - I’ll be eternally grateful. (Ok, maybe eternally is slightly overstating the point - you know what I mean though…)