More than Numbers

Train delays and rider experience

I'm not sure if this happens on all train systems, but on the caltrain in the San Francisco area an interesting thing happens during delays. This morning there was a delay towards the beginning of the line due to some track maintenance. Total delay? About 10 minutes.

But than an interesting development was announced - that the train would be able to make up the lost time and make the other stops pretty much on schedule. So an interesting question was brought up: if the train is indeed capable of traveling faster than it normally does, why does it not do this by default and lessen everybody's commute time by a few minutes? If they were to do this, then riders would generally have a better user experience on a daily basis.

When there were delays however, these riders would have a horrible experience: being late to work, meetings, transfers, school, etc. With the time buffer in place, caltrain is able to absorb situations that are out of its control without affecting overall experience for the commuters.

In other words, this is an example of setting the bar lower so that you're always able to achieve it. Kind of a sneaky way to win but it's probably not a huge deal to most people.

Does this kind of behavior translate well to the web? I'm not so sure it does.

You can't just normally slack off on performance in order to cover yourself in dire situations that "might" happen. An added element is that of] competition on the web. Caltrain is lucky to be the only train in town. If it was typically slower than competitors, what do you think their normal ridership would be?

The key to handling bad situations without upsetting your users is proper messaging. Be transparent and explain why your site is down. Notify users well in advance of scheduled downtimes. Continually monitor performance and forecast future server capacity needs.

Google gives free voicemail to SF Homeless

The other day Google (through Project CARE) and San Francisco announced that they would be providing every homeless person in the city with a telephone number and voicemail service. I think the idea is brilliant.

One of the hardest issues facing any major urban area is that of homelessness. Once someone becomes homeless it is incredibly hard from them to break out of the cycle and improve their lives. A major roadblock has always been communication. How could anybody ever contact them for job interviews, health results, etc.?

By providing everyone a method for communication, Google is providing an avenue of hope. A doorway to a better life. Kudos to Google for doing something good for society at large.

Was Oscars viewership really lower than expected?

32 million viewers in one evening. In the scale of web analytics, getting 32 million visitors in a few hours would be amazing. In big time TV broadcasts though, it's rather disappointing. Especially if it's for the Oscars. There were evidently high hopes as ABC was selling 30 second spots at over $1.8 million.

I was one of those 32 million, but in all honesty I wasn't really paying attention. It was just kind of on in the background. There were no crazy Oscars moments that stood out this year. I even twittered my dissatisfaction with the broadcast.

Part of the reason was probably that I really didn't see many of the big nominated movies this year except for Juno and Sweeney Todd (both of which I loved). It seemed like it was really only 4 other movies that were pretty much nominated in every other category.

But still I think the main reason really lies within the writer's strike. Sure the strike is over, but I think over the last few weeks, people started to diverge their behavior slightly. With no new shows, people got bored with TV. I know I did. When at home on the computer I'm usually on the couch in front of the TV. But lately I've been there with the TV off. Instead, I opt for music or silence. TV got boring. There was no new content. And because of this, I just really wasn't ready yet to watch.

How does this relate to user experience on the web? Fresh content is necessary if you want people to return to your site. People will not consistently return to your site and engage themselves if they're looking at the same old thing time and again. Freshen the content, freshen the design. Make the experience new and exciting again. Or people might just get bored.

Short registration forms.

Designing registration forms is never anyones favorite task, especially for ad-supported social networks. For these situations, it often becomes a dramatic tug of war between interaction designers, usability folk, and ad sales. The interaction designers and usability experts obviously want as simple of a registration flow as possible in order to increase conversion but ad sales would love to add as many form fields as possible. Ad folk usually don't care about the user experience (which really doesn't make too much sense).

But wait. Isn't everyone just trying to get new users acquired?

If you asked someone in advertising they would say something like more users are OK, but what they really need are the demographics of their users in order to target better ads and get a higher click through rate.

All that being said, there are some sites that break the mold: like that of Squarespace. It'd be tough to make this form any easier. As far as blogging platforms go, it's the holy grail of usability and ease of use:

15 seconds! Compare this to any other social networking site, and you'll begin to see what I mean. Some sites even have the audacity to make you confirm your email address before you can sign up. Forget about multiple pages and an unknown number of steps-- we're talking about leaving your session and opening up your email! Why have the possibility for countless leaks in your conversion funnel? It makes no sense!

Although it might be better for advertisers, you have to draw a line between their needs and the needs and user experience of your users. As far as users are concerned, they don't see the reason for knowing what zip code they're in, how old they are, or what their gender is if all they want to do is start a free blog. Remember, happy users are loyal users. And even a smaller number of loyal users will be much more lucrative than a bunch of drop-off users. But my guess is you'll end up having a greater number of happy users if the experience is there.

Of course, what might make users WANT to fill out extra demographic fields would be some kind of incentive. Perhaps a revenue share? If users received a percentage of advertising revenue their site generated, then of course they'd want to do everything in their power to help increase revenue. Otherwise, it's all just more effort for little reward.

Don't ever say you're in a rut.

One of my pet peeves is when adults say they are in a rut. I can understand how children might be stuck in their current life situation. Powerless from their parent's whims. But adults? Give me a break.

If you don't think you're making enough money at your current job, ask for it. Or leave. If you don't think you're saving enough, then save more. If you aren't getting satisfaction out of your social activities then change them. Take the lead, and don't be a follower. If you don't feel like you have enough skills to get ahead, then learn them! If you don't have friends, make them.

I don't have to be the first to say that life is short so make the most of it. I think we all know this yet we don't always live this way. People are natural procrastinators. I've been guilty of it just like anybody else. I'll start exercising tomorrow. The examples go on and on.

There is really no better time to begin any change than right now. This very instant. What are you waiting for? You're in control of your life situation. This might seem like obvious advice, but this change in perception can make a big difference. You are in control so do something about it. Don't just be a spectator in your own life.

If there are some common elements among successful people I've met it is a hard work ethic, a strong will to succeed, and never taking no for an answer when it is something you believe in. You have to consistently take a step forward, even when there are obstacles in the way. There is no obstacle that can't be overcome.

Why not a blogger's strike?

After thinking about the recently ended Writers Guild of America strike, it got me thinking that some of the reasons behind the strike were in actuality similar to the situation that many bloggers face.

Part of the strike was about being compensated for material delivered via new media, mainly the Internet.

At a high level, there are two types of blogging platforms where revenue is concerned. Paid subscription or license, and free ad-supported. In the paid group, there are sites like Flickr (where you can pay for a pro membership), Livejournal, and TypePad. Under the free group are sites like Vox, digg, Myspace, Facebook, etc. Actually pretty much every social network is included in this group.

It is the free group of sites that I do see a problem with. These sites are made up almost entirely of user generated content. It is really the content that fuels traffic to these properties and not functionality. This fact explains how MySpace, which is usually broken functionally, manages to surge in traffic. As said many times before, "Content is King" when it comes to social media.

As the number of active users increases, so do page views to the site. For these ad-supported models, we can also assume that revenue increases at a correlational rate to traffic. How is this fair for users?

Take Vox for example. It has come to a point where the amount of ads being thrown at you is ridiculous. Snap is even used to monetize every link you have within your blog post. Vox profits more and more as it's user's content becomes more interesting. Good business plan for Vox, bad business plan for users.

I'm not saying that people only blog for money-- that would be completely untrue. And I'm not saying users should get 100% of the ad revenue they generate either. That would also be unfair. There are obviously development, hosting, and overhead costs to run a site. But it does make sense for ad-supported sites to be able to share their revenue with the content creators. If revenue is not shared, the site is taking too much credit for content it had nothing to do with.

Pay services are better. You might pay for the amount of bandwidth you wish to use. You might get additional functionality at higher tiers. But the big difference is that users are not punished for having popular content like they are with ad-supported models.

A few weeks ago, YouTube broke ground by announcing a revenue sharing plan for content creators. I feel that this really needs to be the direction that many of the other popular sites have to begin to take. Don't let those "free" sites take advantage of your amazing content.

I think we need to call a blogger's strike if that's what it's going to take to get them to listen.

Data Mining Certificate

I just noticed that UCSD Extension offers a Data Mining Certificate. A nice bonus is that every class can be taken online. I'm contemplating going through the program, which only consists of 5 or 6 classes. It'd be nice to get some formal education in data mining techniques and learning is never a bad thing. Seems like a quick and easy win.

Double bagging.

It seems like some grocery stories love to always double bag their items no matter what. I understand how certain heavier items might require two bags but from my observation it seems like things always get double bagged whether they require it or not.

I'm a little baffled by this behavior, especially seeing it happen at places like Trader Joe's. For one, it is wasteful for both the environment as well as financially for the company. And second, assuming that everything really did require the strength of two bags would it not just make sense to produce thicker (or stronger) bags? This would at least have the benefit of saving time to place one bag into another.

It should be noted that I am a huge supporter of reusable grocery bags.

Awesome wireframe stencils

While looking for some great Wireframe stencils recently, I stumbled upon Michael Angeles' templates available on his website. The stencil set is wonderful and really makes creating wireframes quick and "easy" in Omnigraffle Pro.

Talking of wireframes, I remember a time when I didn't think they were necessary for smaller projects. Although this might be true, it's definitely not the path that I recommend. During any design process you're bound to make many changes. It's much easier to make these changes while in the design phase than after you started coding. You'll end up with a more streamlined result if you don't rush through the design phase.

You need to think about the user experience before any design elements are in place. Think of the flow. Does it make sense? Think about the intent of each and every page before you type your first line of code.

You can't just sum anything.

In many organizations, weekly dashboards get rolled up to monthly, quarterly, or even annual reports. This is a relatively simple exercise in addition for most metrics like page views, visits, and various other events that occur at the session or page view level.

Not all metrics are quite this simple though.

When talking about unique visitors, you must always keep in mind the time period you are currently looking at. For example, if you're looking at a week's time period, it only makes sense to look at weekly uniques. This concept is simple enough but I've previously seen many people add weekly uniques together to understand how many visitors a site had in a given month. This simply does not work. What if a user visited both in week 1 and week 3? They'd be counted multiple times. You really need to re-run your unique visitor counts for the given time period.

Calculated metrics like conversion rate are another example of items you simply can't sum together. Odds are the elements that make up the calculated metric can be summed (with the exception of visitors) so it is simply a matter of recalculating the metric on a different time dimension. In other words, you can sum visits and orders so you simply must recalculate the conversion on a monthly basis.