I got back from a lunch meeting and there was an email in my inbox from a LookStat beta user.
Subject: I love this site
Closing Line: Fantastic! I’d be very willing to pay for this service!
We’re mildly appreciative over here.
Copyright 2008: Orange Line Media, Inc.
I just came across Andy’s blog - something tells me I should have been reading it a long time ago. Oh well, better late than never.If you’re interested at all in web design, I highly recommend adding it to your reading list.
A little taste from two of his posts:
Objectivity be Damned
Designing a website is like designing a sex chair. You can gather all the objective data you like from the most comprehensive of studies, but if you’ve not had sex in a chair – in a variety of different chairs - and fully and intuitively appreciate the various issues of, let’s say, alignment and accessibility (ahem), you’ve no business designing that chair. Put another way, if you ain’t feelin’ it, neither will anyone else.Don’t Walk; Run
I typically craft my articles to speak directly to designers, aspiring designers, or sometimes simply to the broad spectrum of design industry wonks. With this article I’m instead speaking to business owners and marketing managers who are planning to enlist the services of creative agencies for company projects. Many of you are being duped and defrauded, or are about to be, costing you time and money.
Amazon is doing a great job of highlighting relevant content on their user review pages. This is something we strived for at Judy’s Book but never quite nailed.
When there is a profileration of content, people want to know what’s most relevant. This is a natural response to information overload. On a site where there are a lot of reviews, you want to know which reviews you should pay attention to. (At this point, the great Princess Bride quote: “You truly have a dizzying intellect,” is probably coming to mind but bear with me.)
At Judy’s Book, we typically listed reviews in reverse chronological order and displayed the TrustScore of the user. This was a useful proxy but it didn’t really capture whether other people found the review helpful. It wasn’t a true content quality score. Rather, it measured the credibility of the individual posting the review. This is useful and valuable, but doesn’t really address the review. I was trusted on Judy’s Book, but I know nothing about kid-friendly restaurants. There’s no way I could have written useful reviews in that domain.
The challenge with trying to get a quality assessment is that the percentage of users that will rate something is relatively low. As a result, you need a lot of traffic to make meaningful assessments.
Amazon nails this. Their product review page does a fantastic job of summarizing what’s relevant for a potential customer.
They don’t just show the average rating, they show the distribution. This isn’t a new feature. What I love is they highlight the positive and critical reviews that users have found useful. This is awesome. It let’s you see at a glance the most relevant information and gives a user comfort that they are getting the information they need to make a decision.
I love that Amazon displays the critical review as well. This has two big benefits. First, it feels authentic - no product is perfect; seeing the good and the bad lets you evaluate whether its failings are ones that will bother you. Second, even if a customer doesn’t buy this product, they will view Amazon as a place that makes it easy for them to make a good decision. They will either buy something else this session, or they’ll come back in the future.
This is a great example of taking a long view about customer satisfaction and hats off to Amazon. I’ve blogged about them before and remain impressed. Another area where they are doing a killer job is web services, but more on that later.
Related Posts:
Matt gave Dave and I a quick demo of Blist’s software last week and I have to say I came away very impressed with what they’ve been working on. They’ve clearly thought a lot about the user experience and it shows. They’ve innovated a lot on the UI front and I saw some things I hadn’t seen before that I think will be very well received.
I’m looking forward to their launch.
Andrew Chen has a great post on his blog entitled “Why Bloggers and Press Don’t Matter for User Acquisition.” I often find myself nodding as I read his posts and this one is no exception. Press & Blogger buzz while it drives traffic, often has no connection whatsoever to driving users and user engagement.User acquisition is a critical part of any startup’s evolution and it’s surprising how often entrepreneurs can fall into the ‘build it and they will come’ mindset. I was at an event recently where a handful of startups were presenting their companies to a panel of VCs and CEOs. After one pitch, a panel asked the entrepreneur what his customer acquisition strategy was - “How are you going to get people to use your product?” The response was along the lines of - “Well, they just need to try it out and they’ll love it.” Unfortunately, he didn’t have a good answer as to how they were going to hear about it in the first place.You need a clear user acquisition strategy and Andrew has laid out a useful framework for thinking about it. He also has other great post on Viral Loops and social network monetization. Happy reading.
One of the real-time lessons we learned at Judy’s Book is that while UGC is great, without vigilant moderation of that content, you’re going to get a lot of noise in the system, which is not great. When we were aggressively seeking reviews, we relied exclusively on the community to flag posts and then reviewed those posts for compliance with our terms of use. This approach is ok, but doesn’t go far enough. We should have looked at every review and only approved content that was of value for review readers.
When we transitioned to deals, we adopted the same - anything goes, we’ll deal with spam - approach but quickly found that deal posters were flooding the system with deals that from our perspective were questionable. The problem was compounded by the fact that with deals, there is a financial incentive to posters - the more of their links they publish, the more likely they are to get paid. Initially, we tried to combat the problem with algorithms that gave higher preference to known posters, and more aggressive deal removal tactics. This helped, but we constantly felt like we were behind the curve.
The solution was a simple re-framing of the problem. Rather than let anything onto the site and then remove bad deals, we decided to only allow good deals onto the site. The way we did this was by creating a moderation queue. Anybody could post anything, but before anything came onto the site, it would have to be approved by a member of the JB staff. This simple decision completely eliminated our spam problem. A simple, streamlined interface made it quick and efficient to review deals and we saved ourselves a great deal of frustration dealing with bad deals on the site’s primary pages.
If you’re thinking about incorporating UGC into your site, I’d strongly urge you to consider a moderation queue approach. While you do sacrifice content velocity and incur a certain amount of overhead due to the review process, you gain a great deal in terms of content quality and less policing of the site’s content pages. While I can envision a few scenarios where quantity should come before quality, they are rare. When in doubt, err on the side of what will generate the higher quality user experience.
I noticed a small menu called “Search Shortcuts” in Yahoo Mail a couple of days ago. This is a great example of a simple feature addition that has a huge payoff.
People send photos around all the time and having one-click access to all photos in your email account is awesome. If you click on the link, you’re presented with a thumbnail view of the photos in your email which you can sort/slice etc. In addition, in the left nav you get a list of filters that allow you to narrow the list by person, by file type or by time. You can select multiple images and save them all to disk, or you can forward photos with one click.
I think this is absolutely awesome. They could have achieved the same thing with just the ?My Attachments” link, but instead, they thought about the primary use case and made it easily accessible. Features don’t always have to be complicated to deliver a lot of value.
This is definitely one of those ‘duh’ ideas. DecentURL was inspired by a reddit comment. Basically, take any URL, drop it in and you can create a pretty url that redirects to it.
So you can replace the following:
With:
http://decenturl.com/maps.google/google-maps-jb-office
Awesome.
I consistently get “Nudges” from Erin over IM and since I use Pidgin (freeware multi-platform IM client that is lighting fast to load/connect), I’m never able to nudge her back. In case you’re not aware, nudges are like sounding a gong in your IM window, complete with vibration-conveying visual effects. Great stuff.
After getting three of these nudges in a 31 second interval, I decided to download and install the actual messenger client so I could retaliate. I downloaded the installer, double-clicked on it and got this helpful screen.
Here I thought I was just downloading and IM client, but instead I could get all these cool things at once. Lucky me. I understand some of the business thinking that led to the decision to include these elements but to have them opted in by default is crappy. Needless to say, they were all unchecked and after nudging my colleague back a few times, I un-installed Messenger as quickly as possible. I have no doubt that their strategy drives installs, but I’m not sure that doing it at the expense of user goodwill is sensible in the long term.
This isn’t new but I recently realized how cool this is. If you get an invitation to connect on LinkedIn, they display it on your home screen. In the past, you had to click on the invite to go to a page where you could act on it. Recently however, they started providing a “Take Action” link. If you click on this it overlays a small menu on the page where you can decide how to deal with the invitation.
This is simple but thoughtful - they are making life easier for the user and accepting fewer page views for the action of responding to an invitation. In the long run, a better user experience will translate to a better business. It’s nice to see a company doing this. All too often, user experience gets sacrificed for page view inflation. Don’t do this.
