One of the questions that really interests me is why certain digital products succeed and others fail — even if they look great and are easy to use. What can we learn from the failures to ensure that there are less of them? Is there a process that can help increase the likelihood of success?

The answer to these questions is the focus of my first article for A List Apart, entitled Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery. From the intro:

All around us we see beautiful, empty monuments erected not for their users, but for the people who built them—and the VCs who are scouting them. Even sites and apps that go beyond beauty to usability often fail because they can’t find a big enough market.

Why can’t some interactive products find enough users to be sustainable? Why are there so many failed startups, despite a renewed focus on design? Most importantly, what can we do about it?

It was an absolute pleasure to work with the ALA team. I especially want to thank Sara Boettcher for being such a tough, gracious, and encouraging editor. I learned so much through this process — lessons I’ll take with me in my all my writing going forward.

So if these are questions you struggle with as well, have a look at the article. My hope is that we’ll see more businesses trying out the Product Discovery process as a way to build products that people love.

Cap Watkins says goodbye to getting stuff for free — and celebrates a better way — in Death of the Free Web:

As a result, the web is becoming more localized, more niche. And what startups are beginning to realize is that they don’t need to be the next Facebook or Twitter or Google to achieve success and to grow a large, sustainable business. What they need to do is create products that connect with these small, but passionate groups of like-minded people. Instead of passionate users making up the minority of a product’s customers, the new goal is to make them the majority from the start. Because those passionate customers, it turns out, create even more passionate customers.

Cap gives some good examples as well. His post argues for a similar approach to what I discussed in Imagining a future without traditional marketing.

(link via @bokardo)

I’m trying very hard to understand Samsung’s argument that losing the patent case with Apple is “a loss for the American consumer” and “will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices”. It just doesn’t make sense. Jim Dalrymple states the obvious fallacy of this line of thinking in The innovation argument:

If Samsung is forced to stop copying Apple, there is only one option left — innovate. Instead of sitting back and making their phones and tablets look exactly like the iPhone and iPad, Samsung will now have to do some work. The hardware and software will have to be different, unique and innovative.

Marco Arment phrased it slightly differently:

What’s really going to disrupt the iPhone is going to be something completely different, not something that tries so hard to clone the iPhone that it hits Apple’s patents.

Unoriginal manufacturers will need to pay for their unoriginality. The most reasonable course of action, therefore, is to truly innovate and design products that aren’t such close copies.

Apple’s patent victory is a good thing for consumers. We don’t need companies that try to be Apple. But we do need more companies that solve difficult problems in elegant ways.

Kyle Baxter wrote a moving tribute to Neil Armstrong. From One Giant Leap:

Let’s lay awake at night, dreaming up great things, things that could only be dreams now, and let’s build them. It need not be related to space; it could be related to an important advancement with renewable energy, or even with something as comparably small as re-creating education for this new century. But it must be something truly new, groundbreaking and meaningful, something that leaves you with the sheer joy of childhood excitement. Something that will make us better as a people. Let’s dream it, and let’s build it.

We’re going to see a lot of tribute pieces over the next few days. Don’t skip this one.

Hannah Donovan wrote a great article for A List Apart proposing some solutions to the problems of real-time communication feeds. From Everything in its Right Pace:

We struggle not only to keep up with each other’s data trails, but more importantly, to know which crumbs in those trails are worth picking up, as well as how to find them again later—like when you want to relax on the sofa after a hectic week and you know there must have been a bunch of cool things to listen to or watch that flew by on Twitter, but gosh, where are they now?

Once you’ve read Hannah’s article, also read Michael Angeles’s follow up called Pace, in which he explores how the Slow Movement impacts designers:

I have mostly stopped consuming from the firehose, and seek out the products that deliver a signal that I get more value from, more satisfaction, or that fulfil my basic needs with less fluff and noise. The decision to work with a product and team that follows those ideals is important to me as well. […] The Slow Movement is not just a lifestyle choice, but as designers, we can choose to have an impact on the world based on these ideals.

Last night I joked on Twitter:

Sometimes I want to break up with the Internet, but I just don’t have the guts to ask for my records and Phil Collins t-shirts back.

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) August 25, 2012

It’s only a half-joke though. I don’t want to break up completely with the Internet, but we definitely have a codependent relationship that might require some better pace so we can sort out our issues.

I like Mike Rundle’s take on the Apple v Samsung case. From his post On Design Theft:

I really don’t care about patents or trademarks or trade dress or any of that. To me, a designer, it’s just about honor. Deciding to use someone else’s pixels as your own is not just lazy, but it’s dishonest. It’s a slap in the face. And that’s why I’m glad Samsung owes Apple over a billion dollars, because so much design theft happens in the world, it’s about time someone or some company got knocked down a few pegs because of it. This victory isn’t just a victory for Apple, it’s a victory for every designer who has been ripped off by people who didn’t care or thought they could get away with it. Tonight it’s clear that sometimes they can’t.

It also reminded me of a great post by Matt Gemmell called Copycats:

The lesson of the technology industry in the past five years is that really successful products dare to NOT copy. They’re pure, in that they’re actually designed from first principles - they’re based on the problem and the constraints, without being viewed through the lens of someone’s existing attempt. You know, the kind of thing you actually wanted to work on when you got your degree and were still unsullied by the lazy, corporate machine.

Give me the Nokia/Microsoft mobile experience over Samsung/Android any day. At least they’re trying to do something different.

Farhad Manjoo discusses what he believes is “a terrible problem for the Web marketing business” in The uncanny valley of Internet advertising:

Today’s Web ads don’t know enough about you to avoid pitching you stuff that you’d never, ever buy. They do know just enough about you, though, to clue you in on the fact that they’re watching everything you do.

Farhas also shares some very interesting examples of the issue. Great article.

(link via @karenmcgrane)

I recently tweeted that I’m fairly convinced that the most valuable (and most difficult) metric to grow in online publishing is RSS subscribers. I’d like to explore that idea a bit further.

The RSS publishing experience

Over the past few days I’ve done quite a bit of investigation to see if my hunch about the value of RSS subscribers is correct — at least on my own site. Apart from just typing in the URL, there are currently three ways to subscribe to updates on my blog: Twitter, a weekly email, and RSS. I’d like to share some metrics on each of those methods.

Since Twitter doesn’t have analytics on t.co links yet, I had to look at the bitly links on my main Twitter account as a proxy. On average, the clickthrough rate on links I post on bitly is between 2% and 3%. That’s really low. It’s also worth noting that bitly did some analysis that showed that the mean half life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours. That is an extremely short time before whatever you tweet pretty much disappears forever.

The weekly email performs a bit better. The open rate on that email hovers just under 20%, on average. That’s pretty decent, I think — certainly much better than posting links on Twitter.

On the RSS feed, the average reach (the total number of people who have viewed or clicked on the content in the feed) is 28%. This is by far the most engaged group of the three methods I provide to get updates on the site’s content.

From a publishing perspective, RSS subscribers are like magazine subscribers. When they invite you into their reader it means that they place some value on the content you create. They are also the people who share your content, and care enough to give constructive feedback when you suck. So if you have to look at metrics for your site or online publication, that’s where I think you should look for a reflection of its quality.

The RSS reading experience

I also want to make a few points about the RSS reading experience, and why I think it’s superior to other methods. There’s no way to keep up with all the links that come across my Twitter feed every day. But whenever I read something I like, I always go to the site’s home page to read some other posts. If I like the general theme I subscribe to the RSS feed and relax, because I don’t have to worry about accidentally missing a new post. RSS is a very “Slow Web” way of keeping up with content you don’t want to miss.

The other reason I’m such a fan of RSS is that it is a completely open platform (not Android “open” — real open). There are a multitude of ways to publish and consume feeds, and there is no lock-in whatsoever. This is why RSS has remained so strong. Dave Winer sums it up best, of course, in Protocols don’t mean much:

RSS won not because of its great design, but because there was a significant amount of valuable content flowing through it. Formats and protocols by themselves are meaningless. That’s what I say about specs. Show me content I can get at through the protocol, and I’ll say something.

Towards on open social network

I do see one big problem with RSS: there is no way to build a community around the people who subscribe to your feed. Feedburner tells me how many people are subscribed, and there is some basic aggregated demographic information, but that’s it. I’d love for RSS to give users the option to reveal their names and/or email addresses when they subscribe to a feed. This might sound creepy, but if it’s an optional setting (with an ethical default as private), I think this could be really powerful.

There are many sites that I subscribe to that I won’t mind if they know who I am. Publishers could use this information to kick off forums or email discussions around certain topics, organise local meetups, or any number of community interaction initiatives. For all this talk about “open” social networks, the idea of loose connections around an open protocol seems pretty appealing to me.

Or am I crazy?

I can’t quite figure out why, but I really like this photo I took in our office earlier this week. I just think it’s such a great summary of everything I love about doing user experience work.

I spent the afternoon sitting on the floor, surrounded by sticky notes, drawing out insights that are based on data we collected from in-person usability testing and customer interviews. And I got to do it while listening to stuff like this.

I guess I’m just really grateful that we get to be in the business of understanding human behavior, and using those insights to make things that people care about. We might not always succeed, but the journey sure is gratifying.

Happy Friday, everyone.

(If you’re wondering, those are Sennheiser HD 380 headphones. Highly recommended.)

I’m intrigued by the idea of a shutdown routine to end the day’s work:

At the end of the work day, I would look over my calendar and tasks. I would then check in on where I stood on my major projects (which, at this point, meant my thesis). After taking in all this information, I would come up with a smart plan for the remainder of the week. […]

The shutdown, however, was not enough by itself. The ruminating part of my mind would still fire up and propose worries about broken proofs and knife fights. This brings me to the second part of the ritual. Whenever I began ruminating on my work schedule after my shutdown, I wouldn’t engage the specifics of the rumination, but instead respond to myself with some variant of the following: “I completed my schedule shutdown ritual today. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to complete the process if I didn’t trust that my plan makes sense. Therefore, I’m not worried.”

I’ve been trying out a version of this for the past few days, and I like it so far. Before leaving the office I take out my notebook and write down everything I’m worried about, and how I plan to deal with it tomorrow. And then I close the notebook and my laptop and go home. So far I haven’t been able to switch off completely, but I think it’s helping a little bit. Try it out, maybe it works for you.

(link via @retinart)