Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

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.

I noticed the ad below in Gmail today.

This may seem unremarkable until I tell you that my office is on Eastlake Avenue in Seattle. Wow.

From Google’s perspective, the best part of this is that because the ad in unobtrusive and relevant, it’s actually a positive experience for me.

The best way to figure out what works and doesn’t work in your product is to watch a member of your target audience using it. Prior to our recent release we conducted a number of simple focus groups at Judy’s Book where we had people come into the office for individual 30 minute sessions with our site.

One point to note here: don’t ask users what they want. Observe them doing the actions they want to do. This will tell you far more. Also, while individual sessions may seem inefficient, they avoid group think, so you get an honest opinion from each person rather than one collective opinion.

The Process:

The sessions had the following format:

• Initial impressions with no guidance - we just put the site up on a screen and asked for their reactions.
  • What do you think?
  • Who do you think this site is for?
  • What catches your eye?
  • What’s the first thing you would click on?

• Targeted Questions
  • How would you find deals in your city?
  • What does that heading mean to you?
  • If you click on that link, where do you think it would take you?
  • What do you think of the store logos on the right of the page?

• Observing Simple Tasks
  • If you were looking for a digital camera deal, how would you go about doing it?
  • If you wanted to find deals from Amazon, how would you start?
  • If you were looking to see if a store offered free shipping, how would you go about it?

What we learned:

Putting even a handful of users through this exercise is incredibly instructive, and humbling. No matter how well you think your site works, watching someone new try to use it makes you cringe from time to time. When you’re closely involved with something it’s hard to see all its flaws but three 30 minute sessions with new users will bring them all out into sharp relief.

We learned a lot from these sessions but in this post, I’m going to focus on the challenge of displaying online and local deals on the same site. Prior to this release at Judy’s Book, our site showed users online only deals by default and then after clicking on a link labeled “View Local Results” you would be shown the local deals that were relevant. This seemed logical enough until we asked a user to see if there were any local deals she cared about. She didn’t have a clue how to proceed.

Once we showed her, we then asked her to find a deal from Amazon and she started trying to find it in the
Seattle store directory. After seeing a couple of users proceed in this way, it became clear that the distinction between online and local deals was meaningless to users. They just wanted to see the deals relevant to them.

From the user’s perspective, it became clear that they wanted to see the deals they could access in one place. Sitting in Seattle, I can buy from my local Target, but I can also buy from Amazon.com. The distinction between online and local isn’t relevant when I’m browsing deals - it only becomes relevant when I try and act on what I see.

What we did:

This insight led to a fundamental change to the site. Instead of creating silos of online and local content, we blended the two. As a result, users see all deals that are relevant to them, whether online or local. Using filters in the left nav, they can narrow the list if they want.

As a result, on our Seattle Deals page, a user now sees our best local and online deals blended together. This is a much more logical and natural experience. You don’t have to toggle between “Online” and “Local” to find Amazon.com versus your local Target. In hindsight, we probably should have thought of this earlier, but watching a real user wrestle with this issue in person really hammered the point home.

Going Forward:

It’s hard to find the time to invite people in and have them use your site but at the end of the day, it’s a very cost-effective way of improving things. Even though it can be hard at times, and it inevitably leads to changes which can also be problematic, simple usability testing like this is critical. The payoff in terms of feedback, for what is at the end of the day, a very small amount of time and money, is staggering.

Seth’s post on follow through and caring about the last inch is a must-read if you haven’t read it already.

Obsessing about the last inch of follow through ensures that the important parts of what you do get just as much (if not more) commitment.

You can’t afford to stop caring about the little things. The equivalent argument when it comes to web sites is: “Well, so few people see that page, we can leave it looking crappy.”

This is incredibly dangerous thinking. The truth is that sometimes you have to cut corners to get something released, but you can’t accept leaving things in a shitty state and you better make sure you come back around and fix it. (By the way, the reverse, obsessing about the little things, is often how great products get built.)

If something isn’t worth doing right, don’t do it, or kill the feature. Otherwise, if it’s up and viewable to your users, then make sure it’s your best work.

No one is going to be on your site all the time. Using features like email and phone-based messages is a great way to maintain mind-share and to drive repeat visits. For example:

• Email/Phone Alerts
• Newsletters & General updates
• Stats updates - profile views etc

Retailers have embraced this in a big way - every single one I’ve purchased from in the past 6 months sends me a newsletter with ‘exclusive savings.’ While this was great at first, when you start getting three emails a week from Target it starts to get a bit much. While it’s easy enough to turn these off, it would be great to be able to control the frequency with which I received canned information. I’d love to be able to say “I’d like a general newsletter once a month at most, but if you ever have a great deal on Mountain Hardwear Jackets, send me a text message.”

You’ve got to strike a balance between keeping the user informed and being annoying. Ideally, you’d get to the point where you were keeping in touch regularly enough to be meeting business goals but with enough of an interval that user’s would still be looking forward to hearing from you.

If you can put users in control of the type of content they get and how often they get it, I bet you could get more people to give you their email address. If users feel like they control the interaction, they’re more likely to interact with you in the first place.

I mentioned in an earlier post about how Kayak provided alternatives for people who clicked off their site and then came back without finding what they were looking for. This is great in my opinion but shouldn’t be limited to off-site actions. Within your site, users should never hit a dead end.

This means, for example, if they conduct a search that returns no results, you should be telling them that, but then also providing other results or content that might be of interest. If you don’t have any other content of interest, you could even provide links off site that would run their searches on other sites. By the way, another great option in the specific instance of an unresolved search is providing the option to sign up for an alert when you do have matching content.

They key thing is to enable the user to continue to make progress towards his or her goal. If you can’t deliver on the user’s immediate need but can provide suggestions that will help them do so, you are still able to create a positive impression in the user’s mind.

If there’s a feature on your site that’s not constantly improving, you need to bury it. This is really hard to do because current users of the feature don’t want you to take it away and internally, you’ve probably got a lot invested in it. Common things that come up:

• “What about people who are using it today?”
• “Let’s just leave it up there.”
• “We have more important things to worry about.”

The bottom line is that if something isn’t improving, then it’s becoming obsolete. The best thing you can do is tell users you’re sorry, it didn’t work out with that feature, you’ll be de-commissioning it in 4 weeks and then take it down. People will be unhappy but it’s far better to take your medicine early than live with a gradual decline into stagnation.

I was trying to get some information on using a Cingular Blackberry in India and I decided to post a question in LinkedIn’s Q&A section (login required). Within 24 hours, I got some great responses, information about flight training and a strong sense of appreciation for what LinkedIn is doing at the moment. My best answer is posted below.

If EDGE/GPRS, connectivity should not be an issue as long as you have international permissions provisioned on your account. It will definitely be charged at roaming rates (x cost per MB). Local rates may be less expensive (requiring a different sim). However, the BlackBerry only downloads 8-10kb of data intially (usually the text portion of the email). The large attachment resides on the server until you “retrieve” it. So if you stay away from the attachment download, it is a very inexpensive method to get email.

You will also want to check your carrier’s website for international coverage and roaming agreements in the particular area you are traveling to.

LinkedIn’s workflow is pretty good. They enable closing a question, replying to responders and selecting a response as the best response. This allows you to have a dialog and ask follow up questions and also to provide kudos to thoughtful answers. Email notification is used to inform you of the evolution of your Q&A session. They also found a way to monetize these pages with sponsorship banners across the top of the page. Overall, nicely done.

We had a similar feature on Judy’s Book called Expert Shopper that we launched but chose not to invest in. Sticking up a Q&A feature isn’t sufficient - you need to work to ensure that questions get answered quickly. If a user floats for longer than a day without any responses, they lose faith in the feature. On the flip side, if you can guarantee a response, you have an opportunity to create significant positive impact.

Q&A is a powerful addition to a site but it requires an active community or alternatively, a small but dedicated staff who are responsible for answering questions as they arise.

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 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.