Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

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.

I’ve been spending more time with Facebook lately and I’m very impressed. Not only does Facebook make it incredibly easy to see which of your email correspondents are on the site, they also prompt you to upload your AIM contacts.

Viral prompts are integrated into every aspect of this site’s behavior and it works. For example, I tagged a friend in a photo and as I typed in his name, a subtle email box appeared asking if I wanted to let him know.

What’s great about this is that it’s contextual, not intrusive and feels useful as opposed to spammy. No wonder they’ve been growing like crazy.

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.”

Users need to find that your product gets more valuable to them over time or they’ll find something else that does. The more a user can invest in your product, the less likely they will be to switch. You can achieve this by adding features regularly so users find your product more and more useful or you can allow users to add data (photos/emails/friends/tags) to your product. If you can use this information to personalize their experience and give them status, it creates a powerful incentive to stay with you. This is one of the reasons a strong community is such a valuable asset to a web site.

There’s got to be a reason to have a community though and your product has to provide some inherent initial value (even before users have gotten sucked in) for users to even consider using it in the first place.

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.

Not only is this one of the most detailed, objective reviews on the iPhone I have seen to date, it’s also hilarious. If you’re in the market, I’d urge you to read this. With lines like this, you’ll be entertained while you learn all there is to know about this incredible device. (No, I don’t have one and I’m planning on waiting.)

Apple is in bed with AT&T for at least 5 years. Which circles me back to my metaphor. Signing up for the iPhone is like being tossed into a menage a trois with Angelina and Rosie O’Donnell. You want the beauty, you have to sleep with the beast.

Awesome.

PS: Thanks to Valleywag for the pointer.

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.

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.