1. Make posting easier. Take advantage of microblogging techniques and mobile software to make quick posts possible from anywhere.
2. Make my “read-later” list public. Things I find interesting enough to mark for later perusal might be of interest to others. Tagging might be useful in this data set.
3. Do some sprints. Choose a topic and make short daily posts about that topic for a specified period of time, maybe 30 days or 90 days. Possibilities include “Today’s UX winner and loser,” “Would be better if…,” “GenX grows up,” etc. These topics could have different visual designs, although I’ve done a lot of visual design wheel-spinning in the past.
4. Open up the topics. Hinted at above. It doesn’t have to be 100% design or user experience.
5. Loosen the filter. Even half-formed thoughts are fair game, if reasonably presented in an effort to engage.

My goal is to reinvigorate my blog by allowing shorter posts and a broader range of posts. My wish is that this will foster discussion, get some things out of my head where I can refer to them later, and help me be a better observer of my surroundings and influences. What do you think? Does this seem like a good approach? Any tips or ideas?

Trapped on Palm?

My Twitter question about money management alternatives for iPhone hasn’t exactly borne fruit, but there are buds on the tree. I’ve been a loyal but increasingly less-satisfied Palm user since the Palm III launched in 1998. All that is preventing me from ditching Palm OS and getting an iPhone is my personal finance workflow.

Maybe I’m a weirdo

I have enjoyed accounts that always balance, zero surprises, and an enhanced ability to understand and plan the movements of my money since I started using Ultrasoft Money and Microsoft Money together in mid-2000. I could (and can!) enter bank, ATM, credit card, even cash transactions into the Palm as they happen, syncing to Microsoft Money later. This works well enough that I tolerate a relatively cumbersome process to preserve this work flow even now that I am on a Mac at home. I open Missing Sync, turn off syncing, fire up Parallels, press the sync button on my cradle, then reverse the steps to sync my calendar, etc. Seven steps where one button press used to do.

Sure, there’s Quicken for Mac and Pocket Quicken, but everyone I know who has used Quicken on the Mac says that it is a festering pile, and each subsequent version is a higher pile with more festering than the previous. No thanks.

If only…

There are a number of up-and-coming personal finance packages for Mac, including Cha-Ching , Liquid Ledger (sold as packaged software at Apple stores), MoneyDance , iCash , Checkbook , and others. None of them support the entry of records on a mobile device.

This leaves a web-based solution. Names that get bandied about here include Mint , Wesabe , and the online banking offerings of Citi, Wells Fargo, WaMu, and Back of America. But none of these allows you to enter transactions as they happen.

Wesabe to the rescue…someday?

Actually, that isn’t strictly true. If you can find the "Create a Cash Account" button buried somewhere in Wesabe’s "upload" pages, you can create a cash account that will accept your input. That’s a start. This last bit of info was pointed out to me by Marc Hedlund, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Wesabe (@ wesabe on Twitter). Marc heard my call for an iPhone-capable money management option, and mentioned that "Wesabe does that." An enlightening email conversation ensued wherein he revealed:

• They plan to make it easier to find the cash account setup functionality.
• They are working on the capability to enter transactions against other accounts.
• Auto-upload of account information gleaned from your bank is about to get a lot better, with essentially automatic support even for accounts that don’t currently support auto-update. The timeline for this was "in about a month," and we were exchanging email on new year’s day, so mid-February is probably realistic.
• They are working on making the setup of their desktop uploaders even easier. The OS X uploader needs to be manually invoked or put in your list of login items, too high a hurdle for consumer-level goods.

This looks very promising. None of the above list has launched, of course, so it isn’t real. Yet. I made some additional suggestions and complaints:

• Offering a cash account by default, and having the capability to add transactions to other accounts on by default, would require no configuration by the user (they wouldn’t have to find the spot where you turn these features on) and would seem internally consistent.
• A way to suppress an account without losing its transactions from history would be worthwhile.
• The information hierarchy around transactions is a bit messy; social content (related to the tags you give merchants and individual transactions?) is mixed right in with data about the transaction, and needs a bit of separation, for example.

Yes, but what do I really need?

After reading my extended complaining (this is hard to find, this is odd, your homepage has no background color), Marc asked the critical question: "Other than upcoming transactions, are you missing anything in what we provide today, in order to drop what you’re using now?" Ah, good. I had to think about it a bit. What parts of Microsoft Money and Ultrasoft Money did I depend on, and what could I discard? This required some thought. My list:

• Reconciliation. With updates coming rapidly from the banks, etc., this is really just a way to answer questions like: What showed up that I didn’t know about? Did I enter something in the wrong account? Why is my balance not what I expect? Am I current as of this statement?
• Recurring transactions. I make heavy use of these in Money; they’re great for paychecks, subscriptions, rent, etc. With the caveat that if a payment requires my action (such as sending a check), I need a reminder, not an auto-entry.
• Offline capability (maybe).

Those are the must-haves. I have made use of, but can live without, the next tier of features:

• Splits. Paychecks especially go into a lot of different buckets (taxes, insurance, HCRA, some to savings, some to checking, etc.). I suppose I could fake that with little constellations of recurring transactions.
• Reminders for scheduled transactions.
• Loan accounts.
• 401(k), IRA, and other investment accounts.
• Debt reduction and other planning features. The math for debt reduction planning is so simple that this could be a bit of content rather than a tool. Allowing creation of recurring transactions/reminders from such a plan would be a great feature, if the recurring transaction interface is solid.

My bad

It turns out that they do splits with a clever modification to tags; you can add a dollar amount to a tag for a particular transaction. This is easier to use than the split interfaces in Money or Quicken. They have a demo video for this feature that shows it off nicely.

As this all wound down, I told Marc I would relate my ideas about transaction view. I had better get on that (in an upcoming post). Also, the unmentioned player here is Quicken Online and their recently-announced iPhone-capable mobile version. Watch this space.

Our little slice of Los Angeles is grocery-starved, so Thursday’s hotly anticipated opening was well-attended. When we visited on Sunday we found that the produce and well-hyped prepared food shelves were nearly bare. The store was only moderately busy, so we plowed ahead in search of a few staples and to check out the selection.

Afterward, my wife claimed she sort of wished she had a blog because she felt like writing about how disappointed she was. I felt similarly; it seemed that the store lived up to little of its advanced billing.

• One row of produce with all produce wrapped in plastic.
• Many rows of the usual packaged goods (cereal, toothpaste, etc.) but with surprisingly limited selection in each category.
• Low shelves to create an open feeling but with rows ending too close to the edges of the store, creating congestion at the endcaps.
• Dairy and other products paired with organic equivalents, but with excessive price premiums for organic, and par or higher prices for the standard.
• 100% self-scan checkout, but with none of the visual or geographic cues that would help patrons unfamiliar with the store (as all are at this point) queue up efficiently or navigate the checkout system quickly. People were so confused just trying to choose a line that staff were stepping in to ring people up just to create a sense of order.
• The offer of “$5 off your first order of $20 or more” was marred by a (common) alcohol restriction and a (surprising) dairy sctrictre, making our $32 tab (how did we spend over $12 on dairy?) ineligible for the discount.
• And the “free reusable shopping bag, replaced for life?” A common medium-gauge plastic bag with thin handles, little better than the usual grocery-store plastic bag we hope to displace with reusable bags.

Truly forgettable.

What does this have to do with software design? Your product has to do what it says on the box.

The top claims your product makes are those captured in the name of the product. Fresh & Easy needs to be thoroughly both. If it is Fresh-ish and sort of Easy, you lose. In Fresh & Easy’s case, the produce was fresh, but this freshness was masked and made uncertain by overpackaging. The environmental message was further diminished by this overpackaging. And there was little ease navigating the poorly-laid out transverse aisles or the unfamiliar checkout. Never mind that customers take longer to check out when self-scanning, and feel personally responsible for system errors while scanning, both facts further diminishing any sense of ease.

The secondary claims made in advance of a sale are also important; it is with these claims that you hope to position your product, align it with the wishes of the customer. Follow-through is essential. The non-environmentally-friendly and frankly quite substandard “reusable bag,” the high prices, the narrow selection (you can have Yoplait or the store brand of yogurt, for example), and the complete lack of pleasant retail surprises all fly in the face of claims made on the Fresh & Easy website and the several direct mail pieces they sent to neighborhood residents in advance of the opening.

To my wife, this lack of breadth, of depth, and of the human touch smacks of cynicism befitting Fresh & Easy’s parent company, UK retail giant Tesco. We were prepared to give Fresh ‘n Easy the benefit of the doubt, but we have already tagged the store as “emergencies only.” And we’re already calling it “Fresh and Sleazy.”

Strike one: lack of context. The HTML email message was pretty, but nearly information-free: it contained the sender’s name, the name of the event, and a smattering of descriptive text (that the sender deliberately kept short). No location, no time, no date; for those I would have to click through to eVite.com.

Without at least the date I couldn’t assess the urgency of the message. Is it something I need to deal with right away? Can it wait until I get home and put my daughter to bed? Can it wait for a few days, maybe until the weekend? The most important information an invitation ordinarily carries is actually hidden! Furthermore, not all of the invite graphic is clickable; a faiir portion of it is not. Obligingly, I found a clickable portion and clicked through.

Strike two: poor prioritization. The most prominent elements in the page at eVite.com are the ones I care about the least. In order of apparent priority (what draws the eye first):

1. The main graphic for the invite
2. “Guest Options” links (mostly useless or out-of-place)
3. eVite logo and tabs
4. Two ads from the University of Phoenix
5. The guest list
6. “Reply here” box
7. A “New! Send to Phone” button
8. “Plan your next event”
9. “Free eVite Cards”
10. Footer navigation and administrivia
11. Information about the event, including venue, time, date, and blurb.

That’s right, the very reason I came to the page is the LEAST prominent segment of the page. For a moment there I didn’t even see it, and was ready to accuse eVite of completely fouling things up. As it is, they’ve taken the part of the experience that I care about the most, and shown that THEY care about it the least. This is backward.

Des Traynor points out that a quick way to evaluate the user-centeredness of a page is to grey out the portions that the user doesn’t care about, and see what you have left. Rather than do that, I’ll desaturate the page and highlight the parts I DO care about with big yellow boxes.

(I’ve obscured parts of the image that identify other folks.) There’s a lot there that I don’t need, and most of it is high on eVite’s priority list. The meat of the page, the main event, the reason this page exists at all accounts for (charitably) 28% of the real estate and much of it is de-emphasized.

Strike three: poor organization. eVite’s difficulties with the prioritization if the invite page probably mask other usability and appeal problems that appear there, mostly due to the “I give up” “Guest Options” box of links that appears to the left of the Guest List. Guest Options contains a jumble of links related to disparate user tasks and far-flung parts of the interface. “Invite more people” and “Remove me from guest list” are strongly conceptually associated with the Guest List, while “Send a free Evite eCard” and “Go to Carpool Page” are not (and are heralded elsewhere). None of these are “guest options” so much as additional or alternate functionality, and they should be treated in context with the content they seek to modify or operate on.

It will be difficult to put these functions in their proper places until the prioritization is fixed, but here are a few additional suggestions:

• “Send to Phone” and “Add to my Outlook Calendar” are most strongly related to the “When” portion of the invite. “Add to Calendar” is really only useful if I plan to attend or am a “maybe,” so making these options part of the reply form is another option.
• “Email me when Guests Reply” (what’s with The Bizarre capitalization?) appears as a link in “Guest Options” and as a check box on the reply form. The check box should be sufficient, although eVite has bloated this functionality by allowing you to further choose to watch only specific invitees.
• If we believe in direct manipulation, “Remove me from Guest List” probably should go with my entry on the guest list.
• “Go to Carpool Page” is a problem; it suggests that I’ll be taken away from the invite. Maybe I’ll lose my place? Already I am disinclined to click the link, although it may prove useful.

Strike four: print. The parts of the invite I am likely to want to print include the title, venue/date/time/blurb, host name and contact information, and (perhaps) the guest list. Using the “Print Page” just fires window.print(); , printing the entire page including the (useless on paper) tabs, “Guest Options” links, “send to phone” button, footer, ad banners, and reply form, with nary a print style sheet in sight. Easy to implement, sure, but NOT USEFUL. And a lightly-populated eVite prints on two pages with all of that needless content because the footer bloated with “partner sites.”

But wait, there is more.

1. The “Yes/No/Maybe” radio buttons in the reply form have unintended consequences. Selecting anything other than “Yes” disables the “I’m interested in carpooling” check box. But what if I am a “maybe” until I can get a ride? Trying to fake out the system by checking the box and THEN selecting “maybe” fires an annoying alert(); complaining that “You cannot participate in carpool if you select no or maybe.” Umm, thanks. Watch me! I’ll get a ride with someone, and we’ll point and laugh at the eVite carpool cops when they come to arrest me.
2. Out of curiosity I click on the “more info” link next to the “I’m interested in carpooling” checkbox. The page grows to include a little text telling me that I should continue clicking to learn more. isn’t that why I clicked “more info” in the first place? Weird.
3. Some of the ancillary functionality fires popups, and some of it takes me away from the invite. There seems to be no standard; “Invite More People” navigates away from the invite, and therefore away from the context I might need to choose people to invite (such as the Guest List, yeah?), while “Email me when Guests Reply” fires a popup that contains the guest list. I’ve given up trying to guess the reasoning behind these decisions.
4. “Add to my Outlook Calendar” fires the download of a VCS file. What if I use iCal? Google Calendar? Notes? Can I get an ICS, anyone?
5. It turns out that the “Go to Carpool Page” does take me away from the invite; it shows me a pretty map and has ABSOLUTELY NO CALL TO ACTION whatsoever until I notice that at the top there is a tiny message claiming that “You must reply ‘Yes’ to this invitation to join a carpool.” Thanks so much for your help.

Make no mistake, eVite is trying to do a lot on this page. But it does not appear that they have chosen carefully which of these things to emphasize and streamline for their users, nor have they chosen any particular facet of the experience to do particularly well. The overall flavor is that of an organization attempting to compete on the length of its feature list rather than the usefulness of any one core combination of those features.

I haven’t replied to the eVite yet, nor have I sent one of my own. If this episode is typical of the eVite experience, I’ll have more to write very soon.

They don’t plan to. Not in the traditional sense, by hiring. What’s important here is that they have oriented their business, and especially their products, to succeed without requiring additional head count. This means:

• fostering self-service to minimize personnel required to do routine account service (billing, signup, cancellation, etc.),
• improving usability and intelligibility to minimize personnel required to perform technical support,
• measuring their ability to keep customer support workload down even as enrollment grows.

I happen to work for a major medical device manufacturer, and I don’t think I am revealing any secrets when I say that while we talk a good game about fostering self-service and making our products easier to use and just plain figure out, we’ve nearly doubled our sales force and our customer service head count has grown significantly. It is nice to “show commitment to customer service,” but this is an expensive way to do it. I suspect we and other manufacturers (and our customers) would be much better served by an orientation similar to that of the 37signals folks.

I suspect that the groups that conceive of, design, develop, and build our products do not work toward metrics that encourage the reduction of customer service load, except when it comes to specific problematic features of already-released products. As Joel Spolsky once put it, “you get what you measure.” We are getting a product every 18 months (metric: schedule) that does more than its predecessor (metric: can we sell it) and is more reliable (metric: returns per thousand units shipped), but isn’t necessarily easier to use, more appealing, more pleasurable to use, or requiring of less support.

Here’s where the story gets interesting. Were we to add the missing metrics and do nothing else, suddenly these products (which dominate their market) would be scoring very poorly internally. There would be great pressure to stop using the new, bad metrics, because they wouldn’t seem to have a relationship to revenue, which would probably remain high. But adding metrics such as total cost of support per thousand units shipped would solve the second problem : you can’t solve a problem (the first problem, the real problem) until you measure it, which is a form of admitting that it exists at all.

Were we to add the missing metrics and suffer a while with unhappy numbers, sooner or later people would start asking what could be done about them, and one or more of three basic responses would emerge:

1. Distort the system
2. Distort the numbers
3. Improve the system

Distortion of the system might occur were we to outsource a component of our support functions to lower its cost. Such a move would result in lower total support costs for any product shipped thereafter, but not because the product improved. Something to watch out for.

Doing away with the “faulty” metrics would be an extreme form of distorting the numbers. A more likely form would be to adjust what costs make it into total cost of support, or narrowing the timeframe over which that total is recorded and/or projected. Perhaps initial training costs wouldn’t be included, or only support costs in the second, third, and fourth years (once the less certain users shake out) might be tallied. In either case, we’d be back to denying the problem rather than measuring it.

Improve the system? Lets, please.

1. Technical Support : Customer support is an area of great expense for most companies. If you have a technical support or customer service staff, you have a rich source of customer complaints and difficulties. Most technical support groups keep track of how many calls they get about a particular issue so that they can decide what to focus on. Commonly, these groups are also aware of trends in customer concerns. Too often, this information is not adequately employed by the rest of the company to actually make improvements in products. Find out what the top issues are. They might be complaints, or they might be “educational calls,” questions users commonly have about how to use the product. Also ask how much such a call costs the company. If you can make a fix to the product (or its documentation) that reduces call volume, and you multiply that reduction by the cost per call, you’ll know how much savings that fix can the company. if that fix reduces the number of products returned, or reduces abandonment of your service, etc. then it has even greater power.
2. Training and Education : If your company provides training or education to its users, the trainers will know what parts of the product users have difficulty learning. Improving usability and intelligibility in these areas will improve customer satisfaction and make the trainer’s job easier. In addition, the trainers will be able to point out features that are difficult to explain. A feature that is hard to explain often hides a usability problem. Trainers will primarily be concerned with features and processes that the user employs during adoption, while they are setting up and getting to know a product. This is when most returns happen. Returns are costlier to the company than a failure to sell the product in the first place, so initiatives that lead to a reduction in returns have a direct impact on the bottom line.
3. Technical Writers : The folks who write your product’s documentation will also be able to point out features that are difficult to explain or procedures that seem needlessly complicated. Asking a technical writer “what about this product is hard to write about” is not likely to receive a good response (tech writers are a proud bunch), so an approach that focuses on their impressions of the product and the amount of time they spent investigating one or another feature is more likely to be successful.
4. Product Documentation : If this fails, read the documentation yourself. You may be able to detect passages that treat parts of the product too lightly, dive into excessive detail, or rely on convoluted explanations. Pay special attention to the “troubleshooting” section, if any. What would benefit from clarification in the interface, reduced user decision-making, improved information design, etc.? Are there troubleshooting operations that the system should be able to perform? Are there troubleshooting situations that arise from otherwise well-intentioned user action?
5. Field Sales Staff : Outside salespeople have a unique view of the customer. Their job is to uncover customer needs and match those needs to a product, ideally one that your company sells. They are extremely competitive and may know more about your products and the competition’s products than anyone else in the company. They are intimately familiar with customer needs, especially those that potential customers ask about. And they have a knack for collecting pre- and post-sales feedback on a product. Their assessment of customer need is largely based on what the customer says rather than what the customer does , so be careful. But getting to know the salespeople can also shorten your path to customers; the sales staff will be happy that you re taking an interest, they will probably think that customer will also be happy that you are taking an interest. There’s a strong chance that a salesperson will see getting you in front of a customer as a triple win: the salesperson can use you as an excuse to visit the customer and show the customer that the company is interested in them and their feedback; the customer gets an opportunity to explain their unique situation and feel that the company is hearing them and valuing their input; and you get direct insight into both a individual customer and the sales process.
6. In-House Sales Staff : Inside salespeople have another perspective on the customer; these folks are shepherding the most interested potential customers through the process of making a purchase. In addition to gathering all of the requisite customer and payment information, they must overcome last-minute nervousness and concerns raised by the buyer. The most common of these reveal product deficiencies, competitive weaknesses, or negative emotional components of the product experience.
7. Try It Yourself : Whether or not you have ready access to users you should become one, even temporarily. Give the product a thorough tire-kicking, making special note of things that seem odd or are not well-explained, operations that seem complicated, places where you don’t have all of the information you need to make a decision. Trying it yourself will give you direct insight into the situations your users face and help you smooth the rough edges of interactive and informational design.

A simple adjustment made all of the difference. I began to preface my comments with one of three phrases:.

• ” You need to know… ” I’m letting you know of a future situation that might come up, or the status of a project, or something else that you need to know about but doesn’t require intervention.
• ” I need your advice. ” Please help me think about this problem so I may handle it well on my own.
• ” I need your help. ” There’s a conflict, blockage, or other difficulty that requires the services of a manager, please help.

This sort of thing is supposed to be common sense, but isn’t all that common.

Naturally, I made a poster: Managerial Phrenology (pdf) .

I suspect not, on both counts. If anything, releasing Safari on Windows will make it that much easier for PC-using (or even PC-centric) developers to begin to support Safari on OS X. (Ironically, these developers will no longer have to buy Macs to do so.) In addition, he mentioned that to make an app for the iPhone, you make an app for Safari. Since there will be no SDK released for the iPhone, at least in the near future, the way to develop for the iPhone will be to leverage the Safari framework in the iPhone by making an AJAXy Web2.0 insert-buzzword-here Safari-compatible app that works on the phone’s small screen. Releasing Safari on Windows accomplishes the aim of making iPhone development available to PC-using developers, a much larger set of developers overall than the Mac crowd.

I was a presenter at the conference, and have had significant contact with salespeople in Southern California. Even so, I was surprised by the obvious differences between the people I met there and the folks I work with and near back at the home office.

1. The salespeople measure. They have measurements for every milestone on the way to a sale, every result that signifies progress toward revenue. They are evaluated on how often they reach these milestones AND their effectiveness in converting this into revenue. Both activity and results are measured and compared, and the statistics are kept, visibly, daily or weekly (depending on the stat). Each measurement has a target, and rewards increase as targets are exceeded. meanwhile, I am sure that most of the people I work with do not have at hand such measurements with which they can evaluate the effectiveness of their work, certainly not metrics that can be updated weekly or daily. I don’t, so I’m going to make some.
2. The salespeople strive to be completely competent and look completely competent in all that they do. If something is not well-explained, well-presented, and logically sound, our salespeople notice. “That’s an F,” they say. They recognize that the appearance of correctness and confidence that they strive to project must be backed by logic and facts, and they stand for nothing less. It is not clear to me that everyone else in my division behaves with the same attention to detail, and I am sometimes embarrassed by how we represent ourselves to the public because of this.
3. The salespeople plan, rehearse, execute, and follow-up. They have a four-step approach to just about any customer-facing activity (where customer is quite broadly defined): they plan what they are going to do based on their goals for the interaction. They practice the skills necessary to effect that plan. They take a deep breath and go and do what they planned to do. Once this is done, they take a moment to objectively evaluate what happened, how they did, what they did well and what they should do differently. This seems like a no-brainer, but it is evident from the way some projects are run that the same mistakes are repeated again and again because this basic plan/prep/do/think is less common than it ought to be. It should be a matter of personal practice, of project team practice, and of corporate cross-functional practice at all levels, and it is clearly not.
4. The salespeople have a photobook. A photobook helps you identify other employees and can be a boon when you need to find or meet with someone you don’t know. The tiny uptick in recognizability can make a huge difference in that first moment. Many HR departments frown on photobooks, and it seems unlikely that a department- or division-wide photobook could be produced without strong objections. but the sales staff has leapt that barrier because of how much help it can be for them to know their fellows.
5. The salespeople are exceedingly competitive. Enough said.
6. The salespeople exact some sort of commitment, every time. Even in conversation with a potential customer who won’t buy, the salesperson tries to gently guide them to agree to something, be it a trial, later contact, acceptance of a brochure, something that keeps the relationship going. One salesman joked that he dated well in college because even if a woman told him no, he get them to agree that he could ask again the following week. Too often I’ve been to meetings where action items are not produced or are not assigned, where responsibility is not placed with a named individual, where complaints are made about the behavior or absence of a department rather than a person. This is the opposite of exacting a commitment.

While the slickness and jocularity of the sales staff sometimes bothers me, they are the most entrepreneurial and businesslike members of our division, and there is much to emulate. I’m going to start by measuring my activity and thinking about its effect of revenue, and by ensuring that I exact some commitment from every business interaction, be it from myself or others.