Archives / April 2008

New feature in Gootodo: drag-and-drop sorting of the todo list. A lot of people asked for this, so we built it.

Sorting used to require noodling around with arrows, like the ones you see below (on the right)...

But now you can click and drag todos up and down the list. Just go into Your Account, then Choose Sorting Options, to make this choice:

Once you choose drag-and-drop and click Update, the arrows will disappear and you're good to go. You can drag todos up or down the list.

(iPhone users still need to use the arrows, since the dragging doesn't yet work with the iPhone browser. We're working on it.)

If you haven't tried Gootodo, sign up for a trial account to see how easy it is to use. Just forward your action-item emails to today or a day in the future (@gootodo.com) and you can then delete the emails from the inbox. It's a radically simple way to keep the inbox empty, and maintain a pruned, focused todo list.

Here's the Gel 2008 recap. Lots of good photos and comments.

Whitney Hess took excellent notes on the Friday sessions - "connect", "twist", "make", and "success" - as well as her Day 1 experiences .

Also don't miss the Gel '08 title animation.

The event went very well, I thought. Thanks to everyone - speakers, Day 1 hosts, attendees, volunteers, and staff - for making it happen.

Mercury News columnist: "e-mail is now a scourge". (should read BL)

Harvard's Daniel Gilbert on happiness and experience:

people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have “x” amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t. ...

you can spend lots of money on experiences. People think a car will last and that’s why it will bring you happiness. But it doesn’t. It gets old and decays. But experiences don’t. You’ll “always have Paris” — and that’s exactly what Bogart meant when he said it to Ingrid Bergman.

My Gel 2008 conference (Gel stands for Good Experience Live) takes place tomorrow and Friday in New York. I hope people come away with some good experiences to "always have."

(If you're attending, log in to see your itinerary.)

If you want to attend next year, you can sign up for Gel 2009.

Over at TechCrunch, yet another technology journalist admits that he can't manage his incoming bitstreams:

I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know.

He's exactly right in his diagnosis of the problem: too many bits, from too many bitstreams.

But as for the solution... if you've been following my recent posts, you know exactly what he writes next: the Technology Wish. Here it comes, the very next paragraph:

So where is the startup that is going to be my information filter? I am aware of a few companies working on this problem, but I have yet to see one that has solved it in a compelling way. Can someone please do this for me? Please? I need help. We all do.

In other words, "I have too much technology - so, please, let's create more technology!"

He should read Bit Literacy instead.

(TechCrunch is the #1 technology website in the world, or close to it... this is the voice of the technology industry - being strangled by incoming information and waiting in vain for a tool to solve the problem.)

See also:

• The journalist's Technology Wish

• A geek who can't use email

WSJ on ease-of-use in corporate software:

... more business-software firms aim to simplify their products by mimicking the look and feel of familiar Web sites. ... Employees "just don't want to be bothered" with training courses...

Online software offered by Salesforce.com Inc., which boasts 1.1 million subscribers to its sales-management service, "was basically a replica of the Amazon.com user interface," Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said.

(tx, phil)

In Battle of the e-mail bulge, the Washington Times' Mark Kellner writes today that Bit Literacy is "a bracing, hopeful read to those seeking to cope with too much digital stuff."

Khoi Vinh, design director of NYTimes.com, on bringing the newspaper experience online:

...we're trying to create something that's true to this medium, that borrows the best of what works in print and that takes advantage of the unique aspects of digital media.

This means we pay a lot of attention to how someone uses our content online. That is, not just how they read it, but how they make use of it: how they might scan the page haphazardly rather than diligently reading from top to bottom; what parts of the page they look to first and last; what they expect to change from visit to visit; which visual cues are meaningful for them and which design flourishes they find useless.

(NYTimes.com was a finalist for our recent Copernican awards.)

Motivate your work experience: peppy muzak tunes!

(thanks, bb)

Randall Stross at the New York Times wrote yesterday that "e-mail has become the bane of some people’s professional lives" - including his own, since "the sight of two dozen messages awaiting individual responses makes me perspire." Ack. Yet another techie who hasn't yet learned the easy, common-sense, and permanent solution to email overload.

The rest of the article is an entertaining look at prolific letter-writers from the past, like Mencken and Edison, and how they managed the vast numbers of incoming communications.

But after stating his problem of email overload, Stross writes what techie columnists always seem to say: the Technology Wish. Which is, the tools will save us. As Randall put it...

Eventually, someone will come up with software that greatly eases the burden of managing a high volume of e-mail.

Or as celebrity tech blogger Michael Arrington put it - as I quoted him recently in A geek who can't use email:

The long term answer to all of this isn't that people need to try harder to respond to communication requests. The long term answer is that someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.

In other words: When, oh when, will the tools save us? Anything to let us keep our bad habits (and to give us a new gadget to write about).

A radically new material requires a new way of working. It happened with gunpowder, with steel, with paper - and it's happening again with bits. People need to change how they work to adapt to this new material. The old ways (of letting things pile up, and then complaining about it) don't apply.

Yes, tools are essential, and some tools are better than others - but the tech journalists are still missing the boat. They bear the responsibility for solving their problem. And it is possible, since email overload has already been solved. It's all in Bit Literacy.

Iris Bell sends in this cameraphone pic from a Sheraton lobby in New York.

See anything wrong with the lobby furniture?

The designers probably didn't have this use in mind... but by observing customers directly, it's pretty obvious how to improve the design.

Nice of Jay to include my game Go Robot in his list of design competition runners-up.

Play Go Robot here.

I just launched two new features in my todo list app, Gootodo: recurring todos and alpha sort. Thanks to everyone who sent in feedback - these features are a direct result of your requests!

Recurring Todos

This was the number one most-requested Gootodo feature. Within "Your Account", users can click "Create Recurring Todo" to create a todo that occurs once a day, once a weekday, once a week, or once a month - up to 50 todos at once. The page is pretty self-explanatory:

Alphabetical Sorting

Users can now view todos alphabetically by name. In "Your Account", click "Change Sorting Options", and you'll see this high-tech interface:

Whenever you want, you can switch back to priority sorting, using the up-and-down arrows.

Alphabetical sorting allows you to organize your todo list by category or context - something a LOT of people asked for. Just name the todo with the category at the beginning of the name, and the alpha sort takes care of the rest.

For example, if you want to see all your "home" todos displayed together, name them as such:

home - do laundry
home - make dentist appt
home - prepare shopping list

If you want a category to appear at the bottom of the list, just start the name with "z", as in "z home - do laundry".

You can also start todo names with numbers, and they'll go to the top of the list. "0 walk the dog" would be at the top, followed by "1 cook breakfast", followed by todos with names - "address book update" - and so on.

Of course, if you prefer to sort your todos with the arrows, that's fine, too - whatever makes you most productive!

- - -

Finally, a note on the philosophy: As I write in my book Bit Literacy, it's essential to have all your todos on one list, not divided among several lists, thereby forcing you to wonder which list you should be looking at. On your one list - today's list in Gootodo - I think it's a fine idea to organize todos by context.

If you're not using it already, try it out: Gootodo.com.

Here's a graph from a NYT story about affluence and happiness, based on a Wharton study:

(see full-sized)

The graph appears to invite two main conclusions:

• The more affluent a country's citizens, the happier they are with life. (This seems reasonable, almost stating the obvious.)

• The more affluent they are, the more satisfied the higher-income earners, relative to lower-income earners.

It's the second conclusion that I have trouble with. There's a piece of data missing: the size of the income gap in each country, between high and low earners. The larger the gap, the higher I'd expect the "satisfaction" of the high earners.

Notice that Denmark and Japan have flat lines: the higher-incomes are nearly equally happy as the lower-incomes. I'd guess that the income gap is fairly small there. Hungary, Portugal, Germany, the US, where the lines are steeper, I'd guess have much broader gaps.

As noted in the NYT piece, past behavioral studies have shown that relative wealth is more important to many people than absolute wealth. But the graph above, even as it purports to disprove those studies, misses that piece. Without normalizing for the size of the income gap, it's impossible to tell whether the chart is accurate. And one source of perceived happiness for many people, unfortunately, isn't what money can buy - it's the "satisfaction" of doing better than one's neighbor.

(via kevin)

Congratulations to Apple, Zappos, and Zipcar - winners of the 2008 Copernican Awards, based on the votes of Council members. We announced the winners at a ceremony in New York last night.

(See all the nominees and descriptions.)

Ze Frank's army of fans is posting side-by-side pictures of themselves years ago, and today.

Part of Ze's Color Wars 2008, an interesting multiplayer game.

This is my annual list of companies that are "doing it right" by investing in the unassailable competitive advantage of a good customer experience.

Every year, the members of the Councils (a cross-industry, peer-learning network run by my consulting firm, Creative Good) nominate, then vote on, companies they think best exemplify the main idea of customer-centered business: the organization revolves around the customer, not the other way around. (See more about the Councils.)

Winners of the vote get the appropriately named Copernican Award, for "companies that put the customer at the center of their business universe."

This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list (especially since many outstanding companies have been spotlighted in previous years), but rather a set of just a few exemplary companies that Council members have noticed in the past year.

Winners will be announced tomorrow in New York City, but for the moment, here are the finalists of the 2008 Copernican Awards:

2008 Copernican Award Finalists

LARGE category finalists (a billion or more in revenue):

• Apple: Succeeding with user-friendly products: Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, the Apple Store (both online and the wildly successful retail locations), and iTunes.

• Carmax: Yes, a good experience in used-car buying. No-haggle pricing, fixed commissions, competing financing, and a quality guarantee.

• The New York Times: The #1 newspaper website invests in the user experience - the 30+ person UX team is constantly testing and refining the site.

...

MEDIUM category (a hundred million or more in revenue):

• Facebook: The popular social utility connects more than 63 million active users and is served by a UX and Design team.

• Fresh Direct: Online grocer with home delivery has one of the best ecommerce sites around, a Voice of the Customer role, and almost a quarter billion in sales.

• kayak.com: This award-winning travel search engine displays listings with objectivity, then links travelers directly to suppliers, avoiding high service fees.

• Zappos: A leader in online shoe and handbag sales, it boasts a Customer Loyalty Team of over a thousand specially trained people.

...

SMALL category (less than a hundred million in revenue):

• SurveyMonkey.com: Easy-to-setup surveys, now used by 80% of the Fortune 100, with an organizational focus on customer feedback.

• Violet.com: Online gift store sells "meaningful gifts" organized by taste, traits, and life events.

• Zipcar.com: Rent cars by the hour or day in 25 North American states and provinces. Greener alternative to car ownership.

...

These are all companies that are succeeding by focusing on the customer experience. Next time you need an example or two to show someone "who's doing it right," check out these, and past years', Copernican finalists (see 2007, 2006, and 2005 winners).

Finally, a question. Who would you have voted for? Post a comment below.

Enthusiasts of Bit Literacy often tell me that I need to spread the message into schools, since kids can and should form good information-management habits while they're young. I always answer that I don't know how to get the word out. How do you teach a generation a new kind of literacy?

Then I saw this Economist article about "financial literacy" and various efforts, public and private, to teach it to schoolkids.

One of the main challenges of teaching financial literacy is, unfortunately, familiar...

At present only three American states require that students take a course in personal finance. Another 15 insist that it be incorporated in other courses. Beyond that, it is a case of persuading schools one at a time. “Personal-finance education is not a hard sell conceptually,” says Ms Levine, “but only when it comes to getting it prioritised.” School principals will usually agree that financial literacy is worth teaching, but they are reluctant to give it time and resources.

I've occasionally seen the same issue when taking bit literacy into corporations. People are enthusiastic for the concept, but when it comes down to it - investing an hour or two to solve their information overload - some people say, "I can't make the meeting - I'm too busy."

Also interesting is the suggestion to decrease the complexity of financial products...

Instead, policymakers should “focus on making the world easier”, he argues in a new book, “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness”, written with Cass Sunstein, a law professor (and an adviser to Barack Obama). By this he means defining more carefully and simply the financial choices that people have to make, and building “sensible default options” into the design of financial products, so that the do-nothing option is “financially literate”. Today, the best choice typically requires some working out and an active decision.

Sound familiar? Bit Literacy also argues for simpler tools and better default settings for the majority of users. I never thought money management and information management would be similarly hard to teach!

(And if anyone has suggestions for how to get bit literacy into schools, drop a line...)

Broken: Emergency signs in NYC subway cars.

(via MUG)

Two essential features for a bit-literate email program:

1. Measuring the lowest inbox count at any point during each 24-hour calendar day.

2. Measuring the average amount of time any email spends in the inbox (before being deleted, archived/filed, or forwarded onto a todo list and then deleted).

These would show up as graphs stretching back days, weeks, months. The goal for #1 would be to see an (absolute) zero measurement every day; goal for #2 would be to stay relatively low (whatever the standard of that particular user is - everyone will vary since people get different volumes of email).

See also: Bit Literacy

Philip Greenspun argues for including random tourists in travel photographs.

If you're trying to communicate the experience of being in a place, aren't those mobs of tourists part of the experience? The more despoiled by tourism a place has become, the more important it is to capture a big tour group clogging a passageway.

Several side-by-side comparisons of a typical photo (famous sight only) and a photo including nearby tourists. Which is more authentic to the experience? Do we want authenticity when we record our travels?

David Pogue shares a description of a failed effort to create a dirt-simple competitor to feature-packed Quicken software. Skeptical product managers gave two main reasons why it wouldn't work:

First, the product manager would never meet her employer’s aggressive financial objectives selling shrink-wrapped software priced at $15 a copy. Second, everyone on the client team assured me that it would be impossible to receive a positive review of a dirt-simple $15 software product from someone like you. “Imagine the product comparison grid on the back of the box: our product has to have more check marks against more features than Quicken. Even if they never get used…”

The equation is much the same today... except instead of impressing a few print journalists, a product has to impress many techie bloggers. The latest and greatest acronyms and features are usually a plus (even if they're not important to most users).

Apologies for the lack of entries - I'm battling what I hope is the end of a long-lasting, grade-A nasty head cold. Back soon. Meantime: the jobs board, games list, and Gel videos all have things to explore!

Charlie Todd and ImprovEverywhere continue to rock. They just improved a Little League game in southern California by wrangling fans, mascots, snack vendors, NBC Sports, a Jumbotron, and the Goodyear blimp all to show up to make it a major league experience for the players. Great job.

Testimonial time. Dave Evans read, and put into practice, just the first few pages of Bit Literacy and got his inbox from 2,734 messages down to 19... and then wrote me:

The difference is huge. I can actually see who I am supposed to be responding to. The more I got into Bit Literacy the more I realized how clueless I was when it came to time management and task prioritization.

Some people stop when they get to just a few messages; after all, 19 is a much better number than 2,734. But Dave went the distance and got to zero. So I asked Dave if there was any difference in seeing the empty inbox, once he went from 19 to 0. His reply:

Yes, definitely. It is either zero or it is not -- as you say in your book, it's not enough to be "close to zero." The whole point -- and what I was obvioulsy missing -- is that managing your inbox means finishing that job, each day. That means that everything has been closed, and by definition that means "zero."

If you've never seen an empty inbox, you owe it to yourself to see what it feels like.

Architects claim they have designed a house that "stimulates the immune system" and staves off death. Where does the architecture get its magical power? By being as user-unfriendly as possible, of course:

The house is off-limits to children, and adults are asked to sign a waiver when they enter. The main concern is the concrete floor, which rises and falls like the surface of a vast, bumpy chocolate chip cookie. ...

In addition to the floor, which threatens to send the un-sure-footed hurtling into the sunken kitchen at the center of the house, the design features walls painted, somewhat disorientingly, in about 40 colors; multiple levels meant to induce the sensation of being in two spaces at once; windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets; and an open flow of traffic, unhindered by interior doors or their adjunct, privacy.

I know this sounds like The Onion, but it was really in the New York Times. For me the intriguing question is whether the architects actually believe their pitch.

A friend of mine runs a company whose site sells a wide range of products, all sharing a particular attribute. For the sake of example, let's say his site sells organic fruit only - bananas, pears, oranges, apples, and so on - all healthy and extra-tasty.

My friend knew his company's site could use some improvement. Maybe the navigation could be better organized, or the checkout process could be streamlined, or perhaps the product pages could have a better layout. So he decided to run some customer research.

Most companies at this stage sign on for usability tests, which typically involve a facilitator reading from a prepared script, and asking the user to complete several tasks. "Find a group of eight bananas for under a dollar." "Add to the shopping cart some Anjou pears, and then some Fuji apples."

These tasks can be helpful to zoom in on a known, tactical problem. But they're not very good at revealing problems that the company isn't already aware of. Users are forced to do the facilitator's bidding, and that's that.

To my friend's credit, he decided against task-oriented usability tests and instead ran "listening labs," the non-directed research that my company Creative Good has used, and evangelized, for a number of years. In a listening lab, the facilitator's job is to invite the customer to demonstrate their own actual customer experience with the site. Rather than concocting an arbitrary set of tasks, the listening lab allows customers to use the site "for real," as they would at home or work.

How do you get a customer to use a site naturally? Don't give them arbitrary, pre-written tasks; instead, talk to them first, then build the tasks around their context.

For example: Before using an organic fruit site, the facilitator might ask the customer how they usually buy fruit, online or offline; what their favorite or common purchases are; whether and how the Web plays a part in their purchases; and then ask the customer to use the site to place a common purchase.

As I said, my friend went into the listening labs hoping to get some feedback on his navigation, or checkout, or other tactical elements of the site. And yes, he got some of that.

But what he really learned surprised him. It was something much more basic, and much bigger, than any tactical improvement.

Here's what he told me when I saw him after the labs:

"The customers didn't even realize that we only sell organic! That's the whole point of our site, and they missed it! It totally transformed how we're thinking about our redesign."

This was something he never would have thought to ask in a pre-written question, since he wasn't aware of the issue customers were having. What do you call it when you're made aware of something you didn't know before? I call it LEARNING - and that's what customers bring about, when they're allowed to show the way.

Customer research can be surprising, if the labs are run in the right way. I'd even say that it should be surprising. After all, being customer-centric means being open to learning something from customers that you don't already know.

- - -

See also:

• Four Words to Improve User Research

• Tips on Moderating Listening Labs

• New Yorker on focus groups

Falling Fruit recently interviewed me on productivity and bit literacy.

Fortune reports on iPhone customer satisfaction:

Apple iPhone satisfaction is at near-record levels. RIM is hovering over 50%. And Palm has fallen to the bottom of the heap, below even Sony and Motorola.

The graphic says it all...

See also:

• Uncle Mark 2008, recommending the iPhone

• Cell phones are not (just) fashion

Google and Virgin have just announced the biggest project in their history: Project Virgle, which intends to build the first human settlement on Mars.

Google founders Larry and Sergey describe the project.

That's right, announced just today on April 1st. Ahem.

P.S. My favorite part of the pitch:

Sure, the work will be hard, the broadband rates low, the commodes decidedly open source, and yes, your life might be extinguished in a fiery instant of catastrophic technological malfunction. But your enriched descendants will appreciate your sacrifice, which should render worthwhile your choice to spend the rest of your (perhaps radically foreshortened) life in deprivation and uncertainty.