Adaptive Path Blog

I’m writing to ask you about the CRM tools that you use, so that we can make an informed decision and share some knowledge with the community. As I’m also doing some due diligence for Adaptive Path, I can also share some of what I’ve learned as an introduction to the conversation. The CRMs that I’ve looked at thus far are: Netsuite, Sage, GoldMine, Sugar, and Open Object. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been a Netsuite customer before while working at a great beverage company called Adina.

At Adaptive Path we’ve been using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool called SalesForce to manage our client relationships, and we’re considering upgrading to a higher level of subscription so we can access features like the new Content offering, and so that we might integrate e-mail fulfillment for our newsletter, and our registration database for our conferences.

One important feature of CRMs that I’ve picked up on is that there is quite a range of development models. For example, Sugar and Open Object are open source options that have development communities adding features and functionality. There are also third party development partners available to build what you need on the platform. The issue here is that development can take significant resources if what you need isn’t already out there, though the base service costs less than the proprietary options. With Sage and GoldMine you’re essentially buying a turnkey system (GoldMine is not hosted and runs on windows, Sage can be hosted online or on your own server). These two seem to be hangers on from a previous generation of CRM and it’s unclear how they’ll keep pace moving forward, though they can be less expensive if you’re just using the base service. SalesForce seems to offer the best of both worlds because they’ve opened their API to higher level subscribers, and have many third party partners who are working directly on their platform to add functionality (e-mail fulfillment, event registration, project management, accounting, etc). The challenge with SalesForce is knowing in advance if you can get what you need through their base tool plus the AppExchange. Also, while SalesForce is definitely going to be around in 5 years, some of their partners may not be. Lastly, Netsuite has gone for the kitchen sink approach. Their product is fully integrated beyond CRM to include accounting, supply chain management, e-commerce and more. They do have some partners as well, but that is happening mostly behind the scenes. While it has the highest subscription fees, the nice thing about Netsuite is that you can do everything in one place. The not nice thing is that the user experience isn’t so hot.

Actually, the user experience for all these tools is dissapointing. Because we use SalesForce currently it’s started an internal conversation about how much we’d like to improve the experience. We think there is a real opportunity for the right CRM to stand out by providing a great experience. There’s obviously lots more to say about these tools, but I really want to hear from you. If you work in client relations or marketing – and I know you’re out there – tell us: what CRM do you use?What are the challenges? How do you use it? What advice do you have some firms that are just adopting a CRM?

Thanks.              -Roland

It’s not hard to like a book on web forms that starts with the simple truth: “Forms suck.” Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks is quite a good book, filled with practical advice told in an engaging manner. I can’t imagine any serious web interaction designer not having it on her bookshelf, although it doesn’t get into much beyond basic-HTML web forms. If you want detail on complex Flash or Ajax applications, you should look elsewhere.

Wroblewski tackles head-on the age-old question “Where does the label for the input field go?” that seems to arise ever few months on every web design mailing list I’ve ever ever been on. Hopefully Web Form Design will end that discussion once and for all.

The “Best Practices” sections at the end of each chapter are a really great resource, hammering home the points of each chapter. These alone are nearly worth the price of the book.

I like too that Wroblewski devotes sections to three areas that are so often neglected: help, errors, and confirmations. Poorly done, each of these can greatly affect the overall usability of forms (and any products really).

Back when I was doing web applications that were all form-based, I would have killed for this book. If you are doing anything resembling ecommerce, registrations, and account management online, this book is for you. Recommended.

Adaptive Path is a pretty homogeneous company, technologically speaking. We’re a 100% Mac shop. Some of us fire up Parallels to create a Visio document or to play with Expressions, but this is a rarity. As a developer this limits my ability put a page design through it’s paces on disparate platforms and web browsers. Also, we only have a limited need for browser testing. Many of our projects don’t require us to deliver production-level code to a client. It doesn’t make financial sense to spend a lot of time and money setting up a lab and staffing a QA team for browser testing. This is why I love Browsershots.

Browsershots is a automated service that will take screenshots of your site on various browsers. You start a request by feeding the site a URL. That request is distributed amongst a network of volunteer computers each of which is running one or more operating system and browser combination. Sit back and wait for your job to move it’s way through the queue and return your screenshots. I submitted the uxweek.com homepage to 55 browsers and it took about 1 hour to return all of them.

What did I find out? Well, I have a little bit of tweaking if I want IE 5.5 on Windows 2000 to look perfect and something called ELinks on FreeBSD doesn’t like the site at all:

As if the FREE service was great enough on it’s own, the software that powers Browsershots is open source so you can create your own distributed testing environment. Why would you go through the effort? Maybe you have super-secret content that you’d like to keep behind a corporate firewall. Maybe you have the expertise and demand for your own dedicated testing lab. Whatever the rationale, it’s great that the site author was willing to release the source code.

What’s Browsershots NOT good for? Because of the queue nature of the service, it doesn’t work well for real-time trial and error. You would need enormous patience to make a one-line change in your CSS and wait to get a screenshot back only to find that the change didn’t have the effect desired. For the same reason, you won’t want to count on Browsershots for testing pages right after they go live. It just takes to long. Use the service for the occasional testing of your design on an enormous number of platforms when you have the time to wait.

Who’s using Browsershots right now? Take a look at their recent screenshots page.

For a recent project, we analyzed strategies used by sites that thrive on user engagement to encourage people to sign up and get established. We presented our findings, including design and usage guidelines, in this visually-rich report. I’m excited to be able to share it with you, for reference and inspiration!

You can enjoy the preview below (click it for larger version) and download the full report here (FREE to Newsletter subscribers).

As the year comes to a close, the web becomes filled with lists – Top 10-this, Top 100-that. I love these lists and wanted to throw one into the mix. Below is a list of software and web services that we use here at Adaptive Path. If you haven’t made use of these, take a peek:

Software

Adobe InDesign – All our proposals, project narratives and a good chunk of our deliverables are done in InDesign. It’s an amazing page layout tool that allows you to assemble all your models, charts, visual designs and wireframes into consistently designed deliverables for your clients.

Adobe Illustrator – Many of us use Illustrator for drawing models, graphs, wireframes and design comps.

Adobe Photoshop – We honestly don’t use Photoshop to any large degree. But for tweaking images, cropping, minor editing, etc., you can’t find a better tool.

Adobe Acrobat Professional – PDFs are our deliverable blood. So, making the most of Acrobat is important. Often, we’ll use the sticky note features to provide feedback on designs or ideas. We’ll convert our presentations to PDF for release to the public after events as well.

Adobe Flash – We use Flash for creating prototypes of interfaces and applications. Thermo looks promising for this, but we’ll have to wait.

Keynote – One of our most favorite applications. Keynote is not only used for our presentations for events, but also for deliverables to clients. When you absolutely need a fast, powerful and simple application to convey your ideas, Keynote is the one.

OmniGraffle – Graffle is a great tool for creating wireframes and other diagrams. It’s faster to get started in Graffle than Illustrator sometimes and it’s made for wireframes. Many of us use this on every project.

OmniOutliner – Another fine tool, especially for taking notes that later need to be translated into a presentation, narration or deliverable.

Coda – This is a great little app for code editing and FTP services. The guys at Panic make awesome software.

SubEthaEdit – We use this during client meetings and sales calls. The Bonjour enabled document editing makes it so easy for all of us to take notes on one page. This saves time combining notes later and allows us to make corrections on the fly.

Microsoft Office – We use this a lot less than we did a year ago. We’ve stopped using Word for our proposals and communication. But we still use Excel for accounting purposes.

OS X – Of course, we’re a Mac house, so OS X is our most favorite “app” of all!

Web Services

Twitter – Twitter is great service that allow us to maintain connections with each other and with the community. Not only do most of us have our own accounts, Adaptive Path has an account where people could follow our office antics.

AIM – Instant messaging is still king for instant fast communication. Since we’ve grown to use two floors in our building, we rely on AIM for quick intra-office check-ins.

Harvest – Rather than doing traditional punch-in timecards, or submitting our project hours via email, we’ve switched to Harvest. It’s a great online service that makes it easy for the practitioners and the project managers.

Basecamp – Couldn’t run projects as effectively without it. Though it’s basic in many respects, it does 80% of what we need and our clients love the ability to communicate with us in such a simple and direct manner.

Wordpress – Our blog is powered by Wordpress and we’re happy with it’s ease of use, configurability and industrial strength.

MediaWiki – Instead of an intranet, we maintain a wiki. All the office and personnel stuff goes here. Everyone can edit it and we use it daily.

We’ve also experimented with using Google Docs and Spreadsheets with clients. We’ve tried countless online file storage delivery services. Most of us are on LinkedIn and Flickr.

Software and web services are crucial to doing our jobs, but face-to-face interaction and clear communication skills are the best tools you can have in your arsenal.

I did an interview with Bill Scott and Karon Weber a couple weeks ago discussing the content for their upcoming session at UX Week. It should be an intriguing session and I’m looking forward to hearing more about their experience. On a selfish note, as I’m doing a session on prototyping at UX Week as well, I was interested to see how critical having a working prototype was to their process and the success they achieved with their project.

I’m a big fan of prototyping. Over the last couple of years, I’ve accumulated more and reasons for this attitude. I’ve generated wireframes, I’ve developed from wireframes and I’ve developed from large specifications documents. Increasingly, the frustrations around these approaches have caught up with me. They have felt more and more like a set of old clothes that no longer quite fit. Assuming you are fortunate enough to have a process that allows some sort of iteration and collaboration between developers and designers, trying to collaborate with designers by passing wireframes back and forth is loaded with hidden costs. I like to think I can visualize with the best of them, but often the results of IxD or IA decisions don’t really become apparent until I am actually confronted with them in an interactive fashion. Even focusing purely on development concerns, there’s an entire class of problems that you never see until you’re halfway down the road to implementation. Prototypes, by pushing some form of implementation early, can help avoid unpleasant surprises late in your product development cycle.

Fortunately, it’s getting easier and easier. As Ajax settles in and becomes more common place, and as the front end developer talent pool deepens, it becomes easier to find people that can use a library of interaction scripts to mock up much more interactive html/css/javascript than before. There are open source frameworks that allow developers to build out entire applications in a fraction of the time it use to take. While these applications may not be suitable for a public launch, they are an excellent method for exploring the problem at hand in a way that all the interested stakeholders can immediately apprehend. There are also more and more 3rd party tools designed addressing this niche with varying degrees of robustness and effectiveness.

We’re on the rising curve of this trend. There are are plenty of contexts where wireframes themselves seem to be an adventurous leap of faith. Still, this is going to be an interesting area for growth both as we get better at creating prototypes and better at using processes that can take advantage of them.

I’ve been thinking about this all weekend (as I am sure many others are). If Mac OS X Dashboard widgets are simply HTML, Javascript and CSS, AND you can test them in Safari, wouldn’t you be able to host these widgets on a web server and access them from your iPhone as an online application?

I read through Apple’s documentation and there are some hurdles. It looks like the JS for the widgets is coded to look to the Dashboard server. I am not a coder, so I’ll seek guidance from others for help with that. But, I was able to successfully “port” one widget.

I took the Tile game, copied out all the package contents and put them in a directory on my server. It’s only a test, but it worked.

See here. (Seems to require Safari web browser.)

Screenshot

Video

This is simply a test. It works, but there is a lot of code in the other widgets that may prevent this from being any kind of viable solution. But, if widget developers could develop 90% of the same code for both a widget and an iPhone app, it would be pretty cool.

When Google acquired Measure Map from Adaptive Path last year, we were sad to see our team go, but we were excited about what they might be able to do with Google’s ever-growing portfolio of interesting products.

It took some time, but it was worth the wait: Our team’s thorough rethinking of Google Analytics has finally launched — check out the demo of their new design. Congratulations to the Measure Map team, and we look forward to seeing what you’ll do to top this one!

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
–Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

This quote speaks directly to one of the things I love about many web applications that have appeared over the last several years. These applications directly address problems that were considered ‘solved’ or markets that had such clear leaders it seemed ridiculous to enter. If you had asked me a couple years ago if it was wise to build a personal finance application to compete with Quicken I would have said no. But Wesabe, an online personal finance application, has come up with a compelling new offering by rethinking what people really want from their personal accounting system.

I received an early beta account for Wesabe and, in a common new application life cycle for me, played around with it some, was interested, then got distracted and let it languish. I picked it up again a month ago. In that time Wesabe has gone through a public launch and incorporated many feature upgrades that have changed it from an application that is merely interesting to a service that I find very useful.

One of the things I like is that it inspired me to reconsider my approach to money. Long long ago, driven by a need to budget, I started using Quicken. The goal back then was simply to determine where my money was actually going. I was quickly turned off by the yearly death march of Quicken upgrades providing more and more features I had no interest in. However, despite hopping off that bandwagon, I remained on autopilot. I balanced statements every month and was more or less rigorous about entering detailed information, muttering under my breath all the while about how tedious the whole process was.

But why? At the end of all that care and feeding, what was I really getting out of the process other than a handful of reporting numbers and a vague feeling that I was being ‘responsible’ about money? After a month of steady use, Wesabe has made me rethink the things I actually want to do. And fortunately, the things I actually care about are things that Wesabe makes easy to do. Getting information in: easy. Assigning transactions to categories I care about: mostly automatic. Reporting to the level that I care about: easy. There’s the added bonus of the community aspect of Wesabe. Based on categories and tags, there’s links to various hints, tips, business recommendations or warnings, and goals. In other words, a whole other area of functionality is now available that is impossible in a stand alone desktop app. So Wesabe is now replacing my 5 year old version of Quicken and that area of my life not only requires less effort, but the results are more useful.

Wesabe for personal finance, Flickr for photo sharing, Basecamp for project management — these are clear indications that there is plenty of room for new ideas. Everything that can be invented has not yet been invented. Better yet, many things that have already been invented are still wide open for re-invention.

At the workshop I spoke at today, “Web 2.0: The Human Web,” I was asked what I thought were the major trends I’ve seen in the last few years. My response wasn’t exhaustive (a lot has been going on), but these three things were the first ones that came to mind, and I thought worth sharing:

1. The web is moving away from big “sites” with lots of “pages,” and towards applications with interfaces.
This might be an artifact of the kind of work we’re doing, but we at Adaptive Path have been increasingly working on projects that don’t resemble web sites of old. The closest we get is our work with media (where the page metaphor makes sense), but even those are getting more dynamic and application-y.

2. Speaking of media, media websites are scared.
We’ve had a lot of work with media companies over the last couple of years, and much of it is driven by the fear that media has in grappling with what some call Web 2.0. The decentralized, emergent, user-generated reality of the current web frightens media companies used to controlling what was published, and used to being the source of information for the public. Watching this space evolve has been fascinating.

3. Web user experience broadens to incorporate a whole customer experience.
I’ve gone on a lot about this on this blog, and we’re starting to see companies approach it directly. Those companies that lead the way with Web customer experience are now realizing that it is multi-channel… and that their web teams are ideally suited to evolve there.

Those were the ones that came to immediate mind. Thinking about it a little more, I would add not user-generated content (we’ve had that since we’ve had the Web), but the utility of social networks in bringing people together online (MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, even what we’re seeing with Twitter). People are increasingly comfortable participating online.

Nothing earth-shattering here, but I thought it was interesting what came to mind immediately.