Adaptive Path Blog

Recently I attended Startup School, a one day event put on by venture firm Y Combinator at Stanford University. Speakers included Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, and a bevy of other Valley heavies. Videos of their presentations here. If you only want to watch one, make sure you check out David Heinemeier Hansson’s (funny!) presentation on how to make money. Easily the best and most entertaining of the group.

Generally, they day went much as expected; which is to say “how do we cash out as quickly as possible?!” What startled me more than anything else was the lazy lip service given to listening to users given in almost every presentation. Apparently mentioning listening to users is all you have to do. Term sheets? Check. Sustainable unfair advantage? Check. Iterate rapidly? Check. Listen to users? Check. I can haz fundz now?

Perhaps the only person who really got it was Paul Graham of Y Combinator, who told the audience “make something people want.” And in that company, that’s pretty sad.

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In 1998, the Internet bubble was growing by leaps and bounds, foosball and Red Bull were the drugs of choice and Flash (looky here! things can move!) was the new girl in school.

Interactive marketing departments and agencies rode the wave and launched an endlessly creative and exhaustive set of irritating, pointless Flash site intros that showcased their brands, showed off their knowledge of the newest tools, and revealed their utter contempt for people who wanted easy, quick access to information. Remember folks…the 14.4k modem was still in play. Companies seemed to think it was okay to force-feed people animated marketing fluff as the cost of entry to a Web site.

The hack Skip Intro was the perfect commentary on Flash madness. Set to an oh-so-current musical score and using all the best of Flash’s moving and shaking features, Skip Intro danced itself into user experience fame by throwing back the curtain on the true perceptions of the Flash site intro.

A few years after it made the Internet meme rounds, Skip Intro disappeared. Now I’m happy to discover that it’s back online, thanks to creator Yacco Vijn cleaning out his digital attic.

It’s 10 years later, it still has the power to amaze and delight. View the madness at www.skipintros.com. You get double points if you saw this the first time around.

Happy birthday, Skip Intro. So glad you’re back.

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Two years after it launched, the New York Times pulls the plug on TimesSelect. Their rationale?

“Since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly. Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism.”

I’m happy to see the Times reconsider its poor decision making. It’s refreshing to see an older, more established organization begin to question fundamental assumptions about its business and brand. What continues to mystify me is that it took two years to see the writing on the wall.

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The New York Times on Experience Design Usability:

Sometimes there is a huge disconnect between the people who make a product and the people who use it. The creator of a Web site may assume too much knowledge on the part of users, leading to confusion. Software designers may not anticipate user behavior that can unintentionally destroy an entire database. Manufacturers can make equipment that inadvertently increases the likelihood of repetitive stress injuries.

Enter the usability professional, whose work has recently developed into a solid career track, driven mostly by advancements in technology.

This isn’t an article from 1997. It’s from July 8, 2007. Another groaner from the article, which I am hoping is just a typo:

Harvinder Singh, president of Bestica, which is based in San Antonio, says that there is a shortage of people to fill usability jobs.

“We’re working with companies like Microsoft and Yahoo and having a lot of trouble finding user-experienced people,” he said.

Sigh. Has the design profession really made such little progress?

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First it was the Audrey Hepburn debacle. Now it is the boyfriend trouser campaign set to Ethel Merman songs? My wife’s response: “Eww, who wants to wear their boyfriend’s pants?” The tagline “khakis with attitude” is equally absurd. Khakis don’t have attitude, people! This will not stop ten quarters of declining sales.

At least they have finally figured out which parking space is theirs. (Gap owns the building next to Adaptive Path.)

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Jeff Veen has posted about the nifty race tracker that Adobe has developed for the Tour of California bicycle race. Its worth a look. Its also worth noting that Quokka Sports tried this kind of stuff back at the height of the boom, and failed spectacularly. We’ll see how it goes this time around.

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First, for all you Window users out there I need to tell you of something that we should all concede that the Windows OS is superior at: calendaring. MS Exchange certainly has a few issues, but it pales in comparison to what we on the Mac OS have to suffer through, the iCal application. I’m not usually one to blog complaints, but this just keeps gnawing at me. So how does iCal suck? Let me count the ways:

1. It sucks that I hate to even open iCal. The struggles of time management are made even worse when you abhor the tools.
2. It sucks that I have a helper app to work around iCal. I bought MenuCalendarClock just so I wouldn’t have to open iCal to see my calendar. Why can this little app access the iCal data instantaneously, when iCal takes decades?
3. It sucks that I wait and wait. When I do have to open iCal, I can go make a sandwich, eat the sandwich, then come back and it might be ready (see point 4).
4. It sucks that it’s such a tease. Even when you think iCal’s ready, it’ll throw up the wait cursor whenever you want to enter text, change a time, or say, use it.
5. It sucks that I have to trick iCal into working. Let’s say I invite someone to a meeting and they decline. I move the time of the meeting, but their “decline” notifications stick with the event. I have to delete the old meeting and create a new one to send out a new invite. Crazy workaround for a way-too-common workflow.
6. It sucks that calendar sharing is broken. I’m sure it technically works just fine, but I find that most people’s published calendars aren’t published as regularly as they think they are and the synching usually errors out anyway. The whole reason of being on a common calendar platform is to have these complexities of scheduling smoothly resolved. Oh well.

I think Elizabeth Barrett Browning topped it off with 6 ways, so I will too (even though I’m sure I’ve omitted several of your favorites). I’ll just leave it with a final plea: Apple, please fix iCal… please! Else, you may need to beware the resentful customer (PDF) who may flock somewhere else.

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Pete Mortenson’s post about Steve Ballmer’s reaction to to iPhone got me thinking about the intersection between user experience, quality and pricing. Ballmer’s negative response focused on pricing and the iPhone’s unsuitability for business customers. The business customer argument doesn’t hold much water, mainly because Apple isn’t targeting the business audience with this product. So much for that argument.

According to BallmerMicrosoft’s “strategy” in this case is pretty clear. Devices that run Windows Mobile like the Motorola Q are “very capable… it’ll do music, it’ll do Internet, it’ll do email, it’ll do instant messaging. So I look at that and I say I like our strategy, I like it a lot.” The only issue with this is that those aren’t strategies, those are features that are easily copied and improved upon.

The criticism of Apple’s iPhone pricing has gotten some traction though. Expensive? Certainly. But taken from the classic, Michael E. Porter perspective, the iPhone’s pricing, and the strategy behind it is dead on.

Here’s why:

Trade-offs are essential to strategy and price/quality is the granddaddy of trade-offs. Quality, in the iPhone’s case, is the phone’s user experience. A touch screen, motion sensors that tilt the display automatically, a fantastic form factor. How these features work together in concert is the difference. Great user experience doesn’t come cheap. It costs money for design, engineering, prototyping and testing, something that we know Apple does compulsively. And in doing so, they create products and software that deliver a great user experience. Apple’s Q1 numbers back that up.

Here we have the CEO of the world’s largest software company calling feature parity a strategy and making the most superficial of price/quality arguments. What Ballmer and much of Microsoft don’t understand, and what is borne out by many of their products, is that there is a legitimate trade-off between cost and user experience. Apple understands that although good user experiences are expensive, they deliver value. That’s why they can charge an arm and a leg for a phone. Consumers understand the value of a good user experience.

Too bad for Microsoft Steve Ballmer doesn’t.

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It’s no secret that I love Tivo. I frequently point to it as an example of good interaction design. But over the last six weeks or so, doing so has meant that I have to grit my teeth. In an OS upgrade, Tivo introduced a bug into the system which causes the service to occasionally not change the channel — even though it thinks it has. Thus, it records whatever is on the channel you were last watching instead of switching the channel if it needs to. This doesn’t happen all the time — probably only half the time. But this has the effect of angering users and making them paranoid. Users like me have to attend to the Tivo service, making sure the box is on the correct channel to record what is ever next on the To Do list, instead of just enjoying their shows. Some users have had this bug for months.

This bug, since it obviously breaks the value proposition of Tivo (record shows and watch them later), is a major flaw. And yet there is no mention of this bug anywhere on the Tivo site, except in the user forums. Since Tivo’s marketing budget seems to be approximately zero, it relies heavily on word-of-mouth to sell the service. Who is going to recommend an erratic service? Simply saying publicly, on the forums, on their website, in their monthly newsletter, anywhere really: “Hey, some of you have this bug, we’re working on it” would have gone a long way to make me (and probably many others) feel better and hang in there longer.

Reportedly, Tivo has put out a patch yesterday to fix this, but again, no official word, just a user noticing that the system software had changed. More transparency would have gone a long way here. Keeping users — your product’s evangelists — in the dark both about problems and solutions is a fast way to lose those users.

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One of the things we always look for when conducting field research is how people use products in unorthodox ways. These are the situations that clearly aren’t intended by the designers, covered in the instructions or in the manufacturer’s warranty, but still make sense. Some of the best that I have seen include:

• The use of MS Access to store a few addresses
• Taking an extremely non-portable home stereo on vacation because nothing else sounded quite as good
• The willingness of ultralight backpackers to try just about anything to lighten their loads

The military’s use of Silly String to detect tripwires takes the cake though.

What unexpected adaptations have you seen?

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