Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

With last night’s release, as Dave mentioned, there were a bunch of changes to Judy’s Book and I’ll be writing more about those next week as we shake out some of the outstanding issues. One feature that I’d like to mention in the near term is Deal Alerts. In the left nav on every page, you’ll see a box that allows you to sign up for a Deal Alert for the page that you’re viewing.

The signup process is streamlined and after you confirm your email address we’ll send you new deals that match the criteria you select. So, for example, you could sign up for “Seattle’s Best Shoe Deals” and receive that regularly via email. In keeping with the notion that you should control the communication you get, you can manage all your alerts from your profile. Membership is not required to sign up but if you do become a member, we bring all your preferences forward.

Like any new feature, perfecting this will take work, but I’m thrilled to have this released. In general, in spite of some issues we need to work out, last night’s release was a big one for us.

When you’re evaluating whether or not your site is meeting its user engagement goals, it’s important to look at the right metrics. What’s right for a social network is not right for a search engine. By the way, if you’re not measuring things like visits, page views/visit, time on site, etc you should start immediately. (We use Google Analytics at Judy’s Book.)

In my notes from the Facebook Seattle Garage, I mentioned that the FB team was talking a lot about page views/user, time on site etc. These metrics make a ton of sense for them. Their product is all about user’s spending most of their online time adding to their data on Facebook, acquiring new friends, downloading new apps, etc.

If you take Couponlooker, these metrics don’t make a ton of sense. Our goal with couponlooker is to have users come to the site, find the coupon code they are looking for in 1-2 pages and then leave. If we see page views/user and time on site start to spike, it could mean that users just love searching for coupon codes, or more likely, it means that there’s something wrong with our search relevance. In Couponlooker’s case, we’re looking for 2-3 page views/user (1-2 pages of search results and a click) and we’re looking for a relatively short time on site. Our goal is to satisfy a user’s need quickly and have them return in the future. Naturally, repeat visits and direct traffic (users who typed in or bookmarked your site) are the life blood of any site.

At the end of the day, you’ve got to measure your performance to see how you’re doing and to improve. Just make sure you measure the right things. Figure out the optimal user behavior and the metrics should be easy to figure out.

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.

Most affiliate sites are designed to get users to discover the site, find what they are looking for and then click through onto the target merchant site to complete a purchase. Some sites take this a step further and try to close the loop. I was trying to book a flight on Kayak and clicked through on a JetBlue flight link. I then ended up not completing my transaction and clicked the back button. Kayak presented me with this screen:

My original search was in the background underneath this dialog box. I think this is fantastic. I didn’t complete my transaction - it’s a great opportunity for them to attempt to salvage me as a customer. The options to check for my flight or to be alerted for other flights going to NYC (my destination) make a ton of sense. By doing the extra work to personalize my options, they make me far more likely to engage with one of these secondary calls-to-action.

This is something we don’t do at Judy’s Book today but we are working on adding. Ultimately, our goal is to help the user succeed in what they were trying to do. If they don’t succeed with their initial path, trying to find out why and presenting an alternate path is a far better thing to do than to just say “oh well.”

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.

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.

At Judy’s Book, we get a significant fraction of our traffic to our deal and tag pages. In the site tree structure, these are leaf pages. Odds are that a visitor that lands on a deal page is not going to click on an ‘About’ link or click to the home page to see what the site is about.

This means that you have to think of every page as though it’s your site home page. It needs to do whatever job it’s expected to do (in the case of a deal page, it needs to describe a deal and drive a user to convert) but it also needs to tell a story that allows the user to determine what your site is all about.

Any website that’s focused on delivering content to users has pockets where users won’t find exactly what they are looking for. For example, if someone were searching for a rhinestone ipod case that attached to the outside of their jacket and you didn’t have any deals for that particular item, you could return a polite “Sorry, we didn’t find any deals for you” message. Or you could do better. You could construct URLs for the user using their query which would conduct a search on Amazon or another site that would be likely to return something that could keep their flow going. At Judy’s Book, we need to do a better job with this. Currently, we operate in the “we don’t have that” mode and we need to be in the “well, we don’t have that at the moment, but you might find something useful through one of our partners; let us help you get there.”

It isn’t always easy to find an appropriate transition, but then again it’s not easy for users either. Doing work so users don’t have to is generally a good lens with which to look at every page on your site.

Mark has a great post (read it - good info in the comments too) about building for the long term interest of the user. Couldn’t agree more:

In other words: a strategic focus on creating a good customer experience - that is, acting in the long-term best interest of the customer - is the most effective investment any team or company can make.

The benefit of a customer experience strategy, by the way, is made stronger by the relative lack of companies that use such an approach. Many companies - most of one’s competitors, in other words - still chase after short-term numbers by latching onto buzzwords, trends, and anything shiny.

At Judy’s Book, on-site customer experience has two main dimensions*. One is the quality of the site, how easy it is to navigate, how well it serves the user’s need, and the second is the content quality. If users are on beautifully designed pages that are easy to navigate, the content still has to be high quality. Managing content quality isn’t glamorous, but it has to be done. If anything, success only raises the burden here.

Improving the site flow and focusing on value to users requires keeping it simple, but not dumbing it down. One approach mentioned in the comments on Mark’s blog is essentially layering - keep the functionality, hide it from inexperienced users, but allow people to discover it over time. I agree with this approach - having a product that doesn’t do anything isn’t useful, but you can’t overwhelm new users with features. Also, keep out the things that aren’t relevant to the user problem you’re trying to solve.

As Mark suggests, focusing on improving customer experience with your product (and your company) is hard and requires persistent effort. I do think the rewards are worth it. I just wish the long term would get here sooner.

*I realize Customer experience isn’t just a function of the product, but also of how you interact with the customer on support emails, phone calls, complaints, etc. In this post however, I’m only addressing the product piece. Ultimately, every interaction someone has with your company adds up to define their perception of you overall.