Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

Google has been innovating like crazy lately and it’s awesome and humbling to see how quickly they increase the depth and breadth of their offerings. One of their products I like a lot is Google Alerts. Essentially, you enter a search you’re interested in using any search operator and you get emailed at a frequency of your choice.

A simple feature well executed that I was able to look at and start using right away. We should all be striving for that. One point to note - the whole feature is irrelevant if they can’t deliver good results. Don’t forget about the content. Assuming that’s a given, it’s worth looking at the feature in more detail.

The Google Alerts Homepage

You don’t need to have a Google account to create an alert. You only need it to manage them all from one place. This prevents signing up for an account from being a barrier to deriving value from the feature while still providing a reason to sign up for active alerts users.

• Google Account holders who aren’t signed in also create alerts from this interface.
• Non account holders can sign up for 10 alerts at a time. If they confirm their alerts, they can sign up for more.
  • One point to note: if you sign up for multiple alerts, you’ll get multiple emails.
• Search terms can contain anything you can type into Google
• Type can be
  • News
  • Blogs
  • Web
  • Groups
  • Comprehensive
• Frequency
  • Once a day
  • As it happens
  • Once a week

Confirmation Email

• People without a Google account and account-holders who aren’t signed in all get a confirmation email. This enables positive confirmation which is important for email deliverability.

• In addition, while it may seem like an obstacle to adoption, the fact is that alerts are ‘pull’ features. People choose to use them. As a result, a simple, 1-page, clear email like this makes it likely that the drop-off rate of people who signed up but didn’t confirm their email is low.

• Another benefit that I got to experience firsthand is that if someone signs you up for alerts without your knowledge, you only get one email. A good friend signed me up for all of Daily Candy’s email alerts without my knowledge. When I returned from vacation with 200+ emails, I really understood the value of the confirm step.

Alert Email

• Once you start getting alerts, the emails are sparse and to the point.
• The word “Google” is mentioned four times in a five line email, so they’re not shy about branding.
• The alert reminds you of its settings
  • “Google Blog Alert for: judysbook”
  • “This as-it-happens alert…”
• Another great thing about this is that the email doesn’t make you scroll.
• I really like the Remove/Create/Manage links at the bottom of the message.

Managing Alerts

Google’s Alert management interface is clean, simple and efficient. It’s not the most visually stunning piece of work, but it does the job and gets out of your way. You need a Google account to access this interface. If you choose not to sign up for one, your email management options are limited to the links at the bottom of each alert email you receive.

• One line per alert is great and the column structure, while it’s not pretty, gets the point across
• Delete & New are separated by the full width of the screen
• Edit and New Alert controls are clustered together
• They provide checkboxes for multi-alert delete (which seems obvious, but is forgotten a lot. Even the iPhone requires you to delete messages one by one.)

Creating an Alert from the Management Interface

• The new alert process is also straightforward and alerts are created inline.
• This is efficient and also keeps your other alerts handy so you can keep those settings in mind as you create your new alert.
• There’s an assumption baked into here that you will want all your alerts to be of the same format
• No support for sending alerts to email addresses other than the one associated with your Google account.

Editing Alerts from the Management Interface

• Editing also takes place inline
• They provide a cancel button which often gets omitted
• I like the use to yellow highlighting to make the alert you’re editing stand out.
  • This isn’t needed when creating an alert because you’re working on a new line which provides the visual separation

Manage Alerts - The Empty State

One of the most often forgotten aspects of design is dealing with the empty state. We don’t do a good job of it at Judy’s Book. Basically, what you do display on the user’s very first interaction with a feature. This doesn’t need to be a fancy sound-playing-animation-heavy flash demo, just a simple text cue and call to action is sufficient.

If you find yourself solving a problem with one band-aid after another, but each time what you get is not quite what you expected, odds are you need to step back and re-think your approach. There’s something fundamental that’s not quite lining up. It’s also all too easy to become tied to the strategy that you started out with and to focus on optimizing that when sometimes, what you really need is to approach the situation in a completely different way.

A friend of mine has a great story about luggage that he learned in a systems engineering class.

People hate waiting for luggage. You can spend a shit load of money figuring out how to move baggage faster in order to minimize wait time. Or, you can step back and observe that the real problem is the waiting, not the absolute amount of time the luggage takes. A lot of airports increase the walking distance between the gate and the baggage belt. People walk more, but wait less.

Re-defining the problem and focusing on the core of the issue often enables another approach to work.

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.

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…)

Adver-menus rock! Actually, they are bloody awful. I understand there’s a trend towards turning usability cues into advertising with companies like Google and Amazon joining the fun, but this is ridiculous. The entire fly out menu is covered with a giant ad. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the ‘adver-menu.’

The only logical endpoint to this is a company offering to raise your child for free as long as they can put digital mesh across his eyeballs so they can show him contextual advertising as he goes about his daily life. Given the escalating costs of education, this might not be as far-fetched as it might seem at first. Think about it.

One of Brad’s posts led me to The Winery Website Report Blog which so far has been fantastic. The initial post was about “failing to address a point of pain” in talking about the ‘hiatus’ of the Winery Report. It led me to a post titled “What should you put on your home page?” In it, there’s a link to a presentation (pdf - 2Mb) at eMetrics 2004 about Amazon and how they use automation and A/B testing to decide what goes on the home page. One of the coolest things about this is that it goes through some of their iterations and shows how data is often counter to intuition.

The bottom line - measure, measure, measure and let the best performing idea win. It’s hard to commit to this concept because designers, executives, product managers, all have their own ideas about what will and won’t work. The beauty of a consumer website is that if you’re willing to put yourself in a position to iterate efficiently, you can quickly find strategies that work.

Related Posts:

Adam Duvander - Simplicity Rules - Data Rules Amazon - Simpler Home Page Design Leads to Drop in Orders

Greg - Linden - Geeking with Greg - Talk on Amazon A/B Testing

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.