Readability recently released their new iOS app to lots of positive reviews and public declarations about “finally” being able to switch from Instapaper. For all I know Readability is a superior product, but I haven’t even considered moving away from Instapaper. I have no desire to investigate the new app. So either I’m crazy, or it’s indicative of a shift in how we view software - a shift towards the human connection that underlies everything we do online. Let me explain.

I’ve been using Instapaper for a long time, the last few months as a paid subscriber. But that shouldn’t actually count for anything. The switching costs for “Read Later” apps are low. It might be uncomfortable to have two distinct reading lists for a week or so, but after one list dies down and the other one picks up, everything would go back to normal. In most cases you can import your data into a new service, so you don’t have to lose any historical data. So if switching costs are low, and Readability could very well be a better app, why am I not interested?

My loyalty comes from the fact that I’m unable to separate Instapaper from its creator, Marco Arment.

Marco does something really smart that gives him a big advantage over the makers of other, similar apps: he makes himself extremely visible. But even more importantly, he does so as himself, with his own personality, as opposed to some tightly controlled and measured “social media brand engagement” thing.

His blog is required reading on all things from tech to coffee to headphones. I hear his complaints every week on the Build & Analyze podcast with Dan Benjamin. So, yes, it feels like I know Marco (don’t be creepy). Sure, I disagree with his opinion on cars, and I feel like he’s a little bit harsh on Nest. But that’s part of what makes Instapaper a unique app. Its creator is a real guy I can relate to, albeit in a sometimes frustrating way because his opinions are SO WRONG SOMETIMES.

Instapaper is one of only a few apps I can think of where I know the developer’s name, and actually know a little bit about them based on their online presence. Pinboard is another one. So is nvALT. But those are exceptions; in the majority of cases I don’t know who the developers of the apps I love and use every day are. I’ve now come to realize that it’s no coincidence that I have no intention of switching away from any of the apps I mentioned above. But if a better RSS reader than Reeder were to come along, I would most certainly investigate.

If there’s a point to this story, it’s this. We’re entering an era where software is personal. By now we’ve all gotten over the initial shock of how the Internet can remove geographical barriers and turn us into one big happy, arguing family. We’re coming to terms with the fact that the Internet is people all the way down[1]. So now we can start to figure out what that actually means. I think it means that we’re going to pay increasingly more attention to the people who make the things we use, and their personalities will become inseparable from their work. Loyalty will come from our relationships with people, not things.

Which is why I’m sticking with Instapaper.

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1. Frank Chimero in Issue #1 of The Manual ↩

Yesterday saw the Beta launch of a new Mint.com-type startup in South Africa called 22seven. They’re essentially aiming to give people better insight into the money they spend, and help them make better decisions about that. Or to put it in their own words:

We use smart information-gathering technology so our users can see all their financial stuff in one place. W’ve applied insights from behavioural economics so our users can better understand the way they think. And by employing principles of play, our users become more engaged, and more willingly engaged, with their money.

It didn’t take long for the banks to start freaking out about the security implications of giving your banking credentials to a third party, but there have also been some defenses of the safety of the service. Instead of rehashing those arguments, I’d like to make three quick comments about the new service.

An observation

I’ve been watching this unfold with fascination over the last 24 hours. Everyone who attended the launch event in Johannesburg seemed really impressed, but it didn’t take long for some (legitimate) concerns to arise as people started trying out the service:

My mom told me never to accept sweets from strangers and to give out my pin number… So… Yeah… Sorry 22seven…

”” Cathryn Reece (@CathrynR) January 26, 2012

That’s a sentiment I agree with, but things started to go downhill a bit from there as the tweets became more and more negative. We’re a finicky bunch of complainers, aren’t we! But as I caught myself just in time before getting sucked into the negativity vortex, a phrase jumped into my head: Schlep Blindess. As in - these guys don’t have it. In Paul Graham’s excellent essay he describes schlep blindness as the inability to identify hard problems to solve:

The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won’t even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That’s schlep blindness.

He ends his essay by explaining how to avoid schlep blindness:

Some ideas so obviously entail alarming schleps that anyone can see them. How do you see ideas like that? The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking “what problem should I solve?” ask “what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?”

And that’s why I admire the creators of 22seven. They’re working on a problem we all want solved, but most of us are too scared to work on. And for doing that, they deserve enormous credit.

A complaint

Speaking of finicky complainers, can I be one of those for a minute? Ok, cool. Obviously my first instinct was to scrutinize the design of the site, and even though there’s a lot to like about it, I have to mention a couple of things that I believe are not implemented correctly from a UX Design perspective.

First, forcing someone to wait for a Flash (!!) animation/introduction to load when they click “Register” is just not a good thing. Users don’t have patience for that stuff. If I ask for a registration form, my expectation is to see a registration form immediately. But my main beef is with the registration form itself:

Here are some of the issues:

• The text has very low contrast with the background which makes it difficult to read. Come on, everyone - join the contrast rebellion!
• We know that it’s bad to use multi-column layouts in forms.
• Speaking of contrast, what stands out are the phrases “About you”, “terms of service”, and “privacy policy”, while the primary call to action (“Yes, I do”) is a grey button on a dark grey background.
• While I’m nitpicking, if the button says “Yes, I do”, shouldn’t the title be “About me”?

We just don’t have to re-invent forms any more. The hard work has been done for us - we know how forms should be designed. And I don’t want to get into the Flash debate again, but why build this thing on a waning technology when you can build a responsive HTML web app that works on all devices?

A suggestion

Lastly, I’d like to offer a suggestion. If it is indeed true that 22seven has not met with South African banks yet, that’s a situation that should be rectified soon. In fact, my suggestion is that 22seven meets with one bank and work with them on an API solution that will allow them to access users’ banking information without having to store their credentials at a 3rd party. That’s what OAuth is for. And based on everything we know about Michael Jordaan (the CEO of FNB), wouldn’t FNB be the perfect bank to partner with on this? Once they’re on board, and FNB’s handsome and smart clients start using the service, the other banks are sure to follow.

I’d like to end where I began - on a positive note. I’m truly grateful that 22seven is tackling the banking/money management problem in South Africa in a very real and committed way. I think they vastly underestimated the backlash they would get from users when they’re suddenly asked for their online banking credentials (otherwise the web site would have been littered with trust-building explanations and images). But that’s a fixable problem, and so is my UX nitpicking - they’re not difficult issues to address.

So despite my complaining, I’m extremely excited about 22seven, and I’m rooting for them to succeed. I hope you’ll join me.

In 1955 David Ogilvy wrote a fascinating letter about his habits as a copywriter. One of his points jumped out at me:

I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.

This is applicable to design projects as well. If clients (internal or external) ask us for some quick wireframes, it is our responsibility as user experience designers to push back and make sure everyone agrees on the problem and the goals of the project first - before the design cycle starts. It sounds so obvious, but I see people falling into this trap all the time.

The product discovery process can take months, weeks, or even a few hours if there are tight deadlines. But it cannot take zero hours - that’s a recipe for disaster.

Fred Wilson on what’s needed to build product in the early stages of a startup, in The Management Team While Building Product:

Building product is not about having a large team to manage. It is about having a small team with the right people on it. You need product, design, and software engineering skills on the team. And you need to be focused, committed, and driven. Management at this point is all about small team dynamics; everyone on board, working together, and getting stuff done. Strong individual contributors are key in this stage. Management skills are not a requirement. In fact they may even be a hindrance.

Startup teams always have software engineering skills on board from the very beginning - as they should. But too often you see marketing and business development skills being added before you see product/design skills. This leads down a dangerous path that too often ends in a catastrophic lack of product/market fit.

This is a great post by Anil Dash. There’s so much to learn from the Foursquare story, but my favorite part is the last paragraph. In Foursquare: Today’s best-executing startup he writes:

But perhaps most importantly, I think we need more stories that celebrate the success of what seem like small, iterative product launches, but actually reflect triumphs in unsung disciplines such as systems operations, design process, business development and product management. There are lots of loud, pointless headlines about companies getting money from venture capitalists or angel investors. What I’d love to see more of in 2012 (and beyond!) is headlines about how a few small successes with users are a demonstration of a small company outperforming and out-innovating the biggest companies in the tech industry by being focused and disciplined in their execution.

This is why I hope all the cynics are wrong when they publicly wonder when Facebook will buy Path’s design team. I’m done with Path because I couldn’t find a use for it, but some people have found a place for it. I’d much rather see Path succeed as a small, niche social network that continues to push the design envelope, than have them be gobbled up as a “talent acquisition” move.

When we design for the web we often find ourselves balancing the use of established UI patterns with trying out new ways to solve existing problems. Facebook Timeline is tilted towards the former, while Path bet heavily on the latter. Yet both approaches are important. If we’re going to move the web forward we can’t get stuck in the existing ways of doing things without also experimenting with possible better ways. If we shine a bigger spotlight on those small companies that “outperform and out-innovate the biggest companies”, then maybe we can maintain this necessary balance between design status quo and new ideas indefinitely.

When I arrived at kalahari.com in December 2010 the site hasn’t seen any significant UI improvements during the 10+ years of its existence. My job description was pretty straightforward: do something about that.

In this post I’d like to talk about the work our team did over the past 12 months to get where we are today. When I look at the site now I still see so much wrong with it - there are way too many things that we still need to fix. So this isn’t an attempt to hold up our work as some kind of standard. I’m doing this in the interest of sharing our methods and lessons learned with the larger design community. I’ve learned so much from others who have shared their stories that it seems only fair that I do the same. So here’s our journey so far.

Making sense of the landscape

Here’s what kalahari.com looked like on December 1, 2010:

If you stepped through the site back then you probably would have felt as overwhelmed as I did. Where do we start? What order should we do things in? After the first few days of having too much coffee and talking to people all over the organization I realized that we had two primary challenges:

• No formal prioritization or product development process. It was the same situation I’ve seen many times before. Requirements went straight from “The Business” to developers. That kicked off an endless back and forth about what was needed, with only a cursory nod to Design. The “First In First Out” approach to prioritization was also quite common. The result was, well, not ideal. We needed to fix this.
• No formal user experience design. This was no surprise, and it was the reason I took the job in the first place. There was no user research, no content strategy, no interaction design, and no visual design beyond marketing and merchandizing materials. This is the part that really excited me: the opportunity to introduce User Experience Design into an organization that was (to their enormous credit) hungry for it but didn’t know where to start.

So we immediately got to work on both those problems.

Hello, I’m a Product Manager

Introducing a Product Management layer into an organization that’s used to working without it is tricky. If you do it wrong it can become a political nightmare and end up ruining your chances of shipping anything good. You might have the best of intentions, but there is always the danger that the only thing people will think when they look at a Product Manager is, “Hey, I used to be responsible for that, jackass!”

We certainly didn’t make this transition perfectly, but I believe the key is to make sure that you talk to as many people as possible about what their organizational issues are, and how they think it can be done better. You have to take the time to explain the benefits of having a Product Team that takes responsible for strategy, vision, and execution of a product (and takes the fall if it fails). And then, most importantly, you have to make the development process fair[1].

We now have a team of Product Managers who are responsible for delivering measurable business results through product solutions that meet both market needs and company goals. They work closely with their teams to develop the strategy and vision for their products. They ensure that designers and developers are included throughout the process. And most importantly: they make sure we ship.

The Intergalactic Product Force

One concept we introduced that I think is worth talking about is the Product Council[2] - a formalized way to deal with prioritization.

The Product Council is made up of the heads (VPs) of every department in the organization: Engineering, Marketing, Support, Category, etc. We have a weekly meeting where we discuss the current product roadmap and priorities. We ask ourselves, Are we still working on the most important things? If something more important comes up, we prioritize it higher in the roadmap, and something else shifts down. If w’re happy with the direction, we do nothing. If a new opportunity arises we ask ourselves, Is this more important than what w’re working on right now? Or is this something we should work on next? If so, what moves down in the priority list?

From here, I communicate any changes to the Product Team, and we discuss this to make sure no one missed anything. But then — and this is important — the Product Manager has complete autonomy and ownership over the implementation of his or her roadmap. The Product Council sets the priorities (with input from all parts of the organization), but the Product Managers work with their development teams (and others) to set the timeline, the implementation details, the design, everything.

Ther’s more to it, but in the interest of brevity I’ll stop there. This process has three main advantages:

• It gives the management team complete transparency into what the Product team is working on, and it allows for anyone to make the case for a change in priorities. Why this kind of transparency is so essential is a subject for a different blog post, but in short, it takes away a vast majority of the politics you see in many organizations, and it frees up the teams to do what they do best — execute.
• It prevents scope creep. Nothing can go on the roadmap without something else moving out or down. As anyone who ever worked at a large organization knows, this is an absolutely critical part of a successful development cycle.
• It gives the Product Manager and their teams what they need to be successful: direction and autonomy. As Jocelyn Glei says: “Give your team members what they need to thrive, and then get out of the way.”

Hello, I’m a User Experience Designer

I knew that we needed to build a great team if we were going to follow a user-centered approach to identifying and addressing the main issues on the kalahari.com site. But building a team takes time and money, and it’s hard to justify a large headcount request before you’ve proven that you can have a real impact on the business.

So we started small. I fulfilled the UX Design role, and we hired one visual designer since that was the primary need at that stage. Then we got stuck in. On a site of this size, and with the pressure we had to make improvements quickly, we decided on a dual approach:

• Make some initial and obvious changes to the visual design to improve hierarchy and the general aesthetic.
• At the same time, work on a long-term UX strategy to address some of the more fundamental user experience issues on the site.

The goal was to show quickly that we know what we are doing, and then use those successes to build out the team further and attack the areas where we can have the biggest effect on conversion rates.

Building a roadmap

We started this process with a small team of three Product Managers and two Designers, so we didn’t initially have the luxury of user research and a long period of product discovery to build out a roadmap. Instead, we went offsite for a day and built a customer experience map for our different user journeys. It was a great way to focus on what the core experience is that we need to improve.

We also went a bit further. Based on a heuristic evaluation of the site we annotated each of the steps in the user journey with obvious improvements we could make. This gave us a flexible framework for the year, and guided our roadmap throughout.

We decided early on to realign, not redesign. Our approach was to make relentless incremental progress as opposed to doing a 6-9 month project with a big bang release[3]. Our goal was to release every 3-4 weeks, depending on the size of the project.

In our first two releases we took care of some basics. I won’t bore you with the whole list, but here are the highlights:

• Released a new header and footer.
• Shifted from heavy reliance on orange to a more muted color scheme that allows products to draw more attention.
• Removed several links in the header and footer that didn’t get much use.
• Increased the visual hierarchy of Search.
• Decreased the visual hierarchy of several non-important features.
• Introduced a formal button strategy (primary=orange, secondary=silver).
• Moved from liquid width to a 960px 16-column fixed width design (including the ability to do single-column or two-column designs - every page used to be three columns).
• Started to separate CSS from HTML (better late than never, right?).
• Started to build a UI component library.

These changes had exactly the desired effect. User response was immediate and universally positive. In combination with some good specials, traffic started to increase. And most importantly: we were able to start growing our team to add designers, a researcher, and a front-end developer. Game on.

We spent the rest of the year systematically working through our customer experience map, starting with the most important areas where improved UX can have the biggest effects (Registration, Checkout, Product Details Page, etc.). Our process grew organically and ended up hitting a good stride towards the middle of the year:

• Define the area we’re working on, and define what success looks like (what are the metrics we’re trying to improve?).
• Work in small teams of PM’s, Designers, and Developers to sketch out new flows and develop wireframes.
• Test wireframes with users, utilizing the RITE method so that the outcome is improved designs, not PowerPoint decks with recommendations.
• Refine the designs as they evolve into high-fidelity visual designs (with more user testing as required), and deliver high quality HTML and CSS as the final output.

The outcome is a site that is drastically different from where we were a year ago, with real improvements in the success metrics we set for ourselves (% conversion on registration, checkout, and other flows). The changes include not just the main site, but also a brand new mobile-optimized version, as well as some significant changes to our Marketplace for 3rd party sellers. Here’s just one sample of our Checkout redesign, including one of the initial wireframes[4].

Old Checkout:

New Checkout:

Initial wireframe:

Final design:

Three more things

My biggest regret about this year is that we couldn’t do more. We made some great improvements to the site, but it is still so far from where it needs to be. And I know everyone on the team feels this way. We set out to build a culture of quality above all else, and it physically hurts when you have to make compromises and do something that’s counter to that culture. Before you jump in and say that there’s never an excuse to compromise, let me remind you of something Erin Kissane said in What I Learned About the Web in 2011:

If a single idea has followed me around this year, from politics to art and work to friendships, it’s been this one: “it’s more complicated than that.”

It’s centrally important to seek simplicity, and especially to avoid making things hard to use or understand. But if we want to make things that are usefully simple without being truncated or simplistic, we have to recognize and respect complexity — both in the design problems we address, and in the way we do our work.

So, yes, I agree with you - you should never compromise on quality. But it’s complicated. You sometimes run into technical and business complexities that force you to say, “We’ll have to do this later.” It sucks, but that’s life.

I’m exiting this year with three major takeaways - lessons learned and re-learned through our successes and failures:

• Love your developers. Too many companies see their developers as “resources” whose only reason for existence is to make The Codes. When you pull developers into product planning and design, everything changes. You build better products, and everyone has more fun.
• User Experience Design is a real thing. I saw way too many dismissive comments about UX this year. If you do it right, it will improve conversion rates and/or make more money. If you don’t believe me, come sign an NDA and I’ll show you our metrics.
• Culture is everything. In one story out of the Steve Jobs biography, Bud Tribble (one of the Macintosh team members) is quoted as saying, “Hey, if w’re going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.” You need a team that has a relentless focus on quality. A team that cares enough to fight for moving that button 3px to the left. It’s the only way to find real meaning in your work.

We have a lot of work to do on our site (sorry, did I mention that already?). But I’m happy that we’ve been able to introduce a fair and effective product development process into the organization. We made user experience an intricate part of how we build product. And we now have a 14-person team of brilliant and dedicated Product Managers and User Experience Designers who care deeply about the product.

It was a good year.

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1. I wrote more about this in The most important characteristic of a good Product Manager  â†©
2. No one liked my “Intergalactic Product Force” suggestion â†©
3. I wrote more about this for Smashing Magazine in The Data-Pixel Approach To Improving User Experience  â†©
4. I’ll spend some time over the break putting together some more before-and-after shots, including stories about the process we followed (if anyone is interested) ↩

I love opening the App Store to see what updates are available for my iOS apps. Sometimes I forget to go there for a week or so and as the loading spinner comes up I play a little guessing game - will there be four updates? Seven? Double figures!?

Yes, I know I need to get out more. But I do believe my irrational excitement about something so inane points to an underutilized product marketing opportunity: Software version numbers as part of a delightful customer experience.

Before SaaS and the ease of over-the-air updates, version numbers made sense. In most cases v2.0 came after v1.0, and it was followed by v3.0, or maybe v2.1 for a non-significant update. Companies like Microsoft went a little more granular, but that was usually the exception. 1985-1992 saw the release of Windows 1.01 through 3.1, with only a few point releases in between[1].

These days, with updates and releases coming with much more frequency than it used to, it’s not uncommon to see an update screen like this one:

Since there is no common standard for version numbers, it’s not easy to tell which of these updates are significant without going into the release notes for each one. I can guess that Google+ 1.0.4.2326 and Skype 3.5.84 are bug fix releases, but I can’t tell for sure. I have a feeling that Wordpress 2.9 is a fairly big release, but is it in the same order of magnitude as Feeddler 1.11? No idea. Especially since sometimes a seemingly big point release turns out to be pretty unexciting:

Jeff Atwood is full of praise for the virtues of continuous software updates, and I agree with him. In The Infinite Version he explains how he stopped caring about version numbers after an experience with Google Chrome:

Chrome’s version number has been changing so rapidly lately that every time someone opens a Chrome bug on a Stack Exchange site, I have to check my version against theirs just to make sure we’re still talking about the same software. And once - I swear I am not making this up - the version incremented while I was checking the version.

From a software development perspective frequent software updates are great - you’re able to iterate rapidly and respond to bugs quickly. However, I think this continuing disregard for sensible version numbers is a mistake. We are missing out on an important part of the customer experience: that excited feeling that goes along with getting something new. For paid apps especially, giving users new features “for free” has the potential to delight them and build long-term loyalty. But how will they easily know that they’re getting something new without the visual cues of well-defined version numbers?

There is probably no easy fix for this. We can’t just send the Internet a memo that this is now how we’re doing things. But I hope that software developers will at least start seeing version numbers as part of their product marketing efforts. It would also be helpful to adopt a simple, rough guide to version numbers:

• x.0 for major redesigns or a re-imagining of the application (such as Path 2.0 and Instapaper 4.0)
• x.y for the addition of significant new features
• x.y.z for bug fixes and minor improvements

If we don’t go deeper than three levels (even if z is a four-digit number) and all developers adopt this basic taxonomy, users will eventually start recognizing the pattern. This will give them the necessary cues to understand and appreciate app updates. They’ll know to click through and read the release notes for x.0 and x.y release, but that it’s probably not necessary to bother with x.y.z releases.

This naturally leads into a discussion about the importance of writing good release notes to go along with a consistent version number strategy, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. I’ll just leave you with an example of an app that sees release notes as part of their”¦ um”¦ “brand experience”?

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1. Of course, after 1995 all hell broke loose. Wikipedia lists monstrosities such as Windows 95 USB Supplement to OSR2, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and Windows Server 2008 R2 for Itanium-based Systems. ↩

Marty Cagan argues that splitting the Product Manager and Product Ownership roles into two positions is a mistake:

This approach has two common negative consequences.  The first is that there is no clear owner (neither person takes responsibility for the product), and the second is a common lack of respect or understanding between the two (the “product manager” doesn’t appreciate the technical complexities, and the “product owner” doesn’t appreciate the customer’s pain).

I agree, and I would actually go one step further. I view Product Ownership activities (representing the voice of the customer, interacting with the development team, managing the backlog, etc.) as a subset of the overall strategic Product Management position (product planning, execution, and marketing). I’ve resisted calling my team Product Owners, and prefer to say that they are Product Managers who fulfill a Product Ownership role on Agile projects.

The problem is that splitting these roles into distinct job titles also splits their goals. It’s easy for one to become all about the market, and the other to become all about internal development tasks. Instead, a Product Manager should ultimately take end-to-end responsibility for the development of product solutions that meet user goals and business needs. That’s the job. Managing the backlog and working with developers on specifications are just part of that overall function, not a thing on its own.

Jared Spool in The Value of Appl’s Knowledge Navigator: Gruber Has It Partially Right:

When teams don’t have a vision [”¦], each person is walking around with a different understanding of what the end of the journey should look like. When ther’s no common understanding on what that end point looks like, each decisions is evaluated on a different criteria and the resulting products end up looking like crap.

This is why I believe that product roadmaps are not evil. As I’ve written before, at our company we are very clear that the product roadmap is a flexible guideline that can (and must) change frequently as needed. But it gives the teams (and the management team) something to work towards. It’s a common vision, a sense of direction that’s more than just fluffy language - it’s concrete evidence that w’re headed somewhere good, and we know how to get there.

Aaron Swartz in a great piece called Steve Jobs and the Founder’s Pain:

Something that’s perfect just feels much, much better than something that’s almost right. When I’m doing something myself, I can just sit there and work at it until it’s exactly right. It’s embarrassing to launch a product with a bug in it! It physically hurts when I realize that’s what I’ve done. But as projects and companies grow, there are more and more people in between me and those tiny details. And then I face a choice: do I keep complaining until something’s perfect or do I just let go and consider it somebody els’s problem?

The people who are not content to make it somebody else’s problem are the ones who end up changing the world.

(link via @vhata)