Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

I enjoy spotting unusual bumper stickers and spotted this on a Mazda RX-8 parked outside my apartment this weekend.

Awesome.

Last Friday, we had an important release at Judy’s Book which included several new features. Some visible to consumers, others more in the back end, but all of which should lead to higher quality deals on site.

The primary elements of this release were:

• Deal Approval Queue
• User Posted Local Deals (supported by Local Editors in select geographies)
• Map Improvements
• Fall Promotion Support 

You can see some of the results of this work in Seattle, New York, Atlanta and Chicago.

The entire team came together and cranked to make this happen in a very short period of time and I’m really excited by how things turned out.

For those of you who are interested in the gory details:

Deal Approval Queue

The intent here was to provide a way to support UGC but to enforce quality standards. User contributed deals are of no value if they are spammy, irrelevant, miscategorized etc. The approval queue allows us to solicit content from users but provides a mechanism for us to ensure that only high quality deals make it onto the site. All user posted deals go into the Deal Appproval Queue and remain there until they are explicitly approved. The system also stores the history of approved and rejected deals so we can use it to train spam detection systems.

Content quality is a critical part of the user experience (something Erin & Chris have pounded into me - thanks guys) and you need to be very focused on keeping it high.

User Posted Local Deals

To this point, we had supported adding online deals to the system but we didn’t have a public way for users to contribute local deals. One aspect of the local deal post process that creates complexity is the fact that you have to provide a way for users to add business listings without creating duplicates in your data. In addition, no one wants to type in a complete address, so you have to facilitate search. Oh and by the way, you need to prevent people from spamming your listing database. (Dave has a great post on some of the fun things that happen in local listing spam.)

The Deal Approval Queue was the strategy we came up with to control the flow of data into the system. Because we had a mechanism for screening content, we wanted to make it as easy as possible to participate. This led to us to move from a model where posting was for Judy’s Book members only to a model where all you needed was an email address. If at some point in the future, you sign up for membership, all your deals will be available in your profile.

In addition to supporting user generated content, we’ve been actively recruiting local editors in select geographies to ensure a high quality base of local content. Erin’s written about this on the Judy’s Book blog and I’d touched on the subject earlier in a more generic way in my post on aggregation and UGC.

Map Improvements

The map now displays stores with the most popular local deals in any given category. In addition, you can pan and drag the map and it will continually update in order to provide you with a list of the best local stores that it can.

Fall Promotion Support

We’re currently running a daily giveaway where users can win a $25 gift certificate to a local boutique of their choice and there’s a $1,000 grand prize at the end of the promotion. We needed to put in a significant amount of work to support the marketing efforts around this promotion. The goal was to provide very prominent placement without being intrusive or degrading the user experience for those who weren’t interested in the promotion.

I think the team did a great job coming up with an implementation that works. If you come to the site looking for the promotion, or click on a promotion call out, we use javascript to grey out the screen and present you with an overlay that provides a streamlined way to participate. In addition to signing up with your email address, if you post high quality local deals, you gain additional entries into the giveaway.

The user flow around the promotion is quick and easy when you step through it (as it should be). Features that are easy to use, however, are typically features that required a great deal of thought and effort. This implementation was no exception. In order for something to feel easy for a user, a lot of people put a lot of work in behind the scenes.

Measuring consumer behavior and watching consumers interact with your site are the best ways to find out what works and what doesn’t. There’s a great post on Signal vs. Noise about some of the things behind Amazon’s success. Two paragraphs that jumped out at me:

Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from the bad. I’ve been to several presentations by ex-Amazoners and this is the aspect of Amazon that strikes me as uniquely different and interesting from other companies. Their deep seated ethic is to expose real customers to a choice and see which one works best and to make decisions based on those tests…

…This is done with techniques like A/B testing and Web Analytics. If you have a question about what you should do code it up, let people use it, and see which alternative gives you the results you want.

This data driven approach is especially valuable for a company in Amazon’s position where small changes in things like the click-to-sale rate could have a massive dollar impact. Even if you’re not in a position to do testing at this scale (or don’t have the traffic to make it meaningful), watching individual users is still incredibly valuable.

In an ideal world, you’d be able to do both - measure the aggregate and observe the individual.

P.S. If you find this mythical ‘ideal world’ tell me how to get there.

Related Posts:

• Designing and releasing a good product is hard
• How Amazon does A/B Testing
• How to Make Your Site Better
• User Engagement - Measuring the Right Things
• Iteration Speed vs. Iteration Quality (via Coding Horror)
• Usability isn’t as Hard as You Think

The decision to release a new feature or say that you support a new geography is ultimately driven by the answer to one question. “Can I deliver a good user experience if I do this?”

You have to be honest with yourself when you answer this question. If the answer is yes, then expose the feature to users or add the location. If the answer is no, wait. By waiting, you’ll ensure that people either have a good experience, or they have no experience at all. This is far better than some people having a good experience and others coming away saying “well, neat idea but they didn’t really have anything there I cared about.”

It may feel like you’re moving too slowly or not addressing a large enough segment, but exceeding expectations for a few is by far the better path to go down. Also, if you’re smart, you’ll find a way to get permission to email users who came but weren’t supported and invite them back when you’re ready.

Alex Iskold has a great post on Read/Write Web about Google’s Custom Search Engine and how it shifts the value in vertical search from infrastructure such as crawling and search relevance to UI and site selection.

I completely agree that Google CSE is a net positive for the vertical search space. However, it’s important to keep in mind that it only allows you to focus on finding web pages restricted to a specific slice. Having the crawling and search relevance components freely available is a huge boon to new entrants. That stuff is really hard. However, Google CSE doesn’t help you when you’re search for domain specific items that aren’t web pages e.g. products, flight information, resumes etc.

For example, take Couponlooker, which is focused on helping people find online coupon codes. If you search for “amazon coupon codes” on couponlooker, you’ll get back actual discount codes with expiry dates.

If you do the same search on a Google CSE, you’ll get back pages with coupons on them. A subtle difference to be sure, but it’s extra distance between the user and their goal.

Google’s Custom Search is a pretty incredible product, but you’re limited by the underlying infrastructure and search semantics. This is not a bad thing - the guts of the system are incredible and for web search haven’t been beaten yet. If you’re looking to do something different though, you’ll probably need another approach.

Seeing real time collaboration in action is super cool. Some friends and I were coordinating schedules via a spreadsheet and I logged in to Google Docs to update my piece. When I did so, I noticed two of my friends online and was able to watch them editing the document in real time. Each person’s input box was color-coded to their login name. Everyone who was online could also chat in a window off to the side. Super cool.

I’m a huge fan of Excel and but connectivity and collaboration could be game-changers for Google.

Sorry for the recent rash of local deals posts, I’m just excited about the direction we’re going in. I was just checking out the Seattle Deals page today and came across information on a sale at Ian, a clothing boutique in my neighborhood. I had no idea this was taking place. It’s really cool to benefit from the value proposition we’re trying to deliver for our users.