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If your site / app / software does not have an “effortless” user experience, consider it a failure.  If it hasn’t failed yet, it will soon.  Now “effortless” is a subjective term and it’s got a lot of aliases out there.  Facebook likes to call it “frictionless” and Tony Hseih calls it “delivering happiness”, but it all refers back to the concept of converting a casual user into a power user by drawing them deep into a site or community [and this is the important part] without them even knowing it.

If you’ve launched it already and you’re making money, then you are lucky.  Pat yourself on the back.  Then quickly go into code red mode and keep reading, because you have a big target on your back.  The competition is gunning for you and they are actively building your app but with an effortless experience.  At the other end of the project spectrum … if you are pre-launch (beta, alpha, dev, or wireframe) and you’ve already got usability issues, you’re just plain dead in the water.  I’m involved in a couple of projects and competition analyses right now where these issues will undoubtedly kill the project before it ever goes live.  Or, if we are analyzing the competition, we know exactly how to hone UX to launch with a superior product.  Here are some flags that UX is “effort-full”:

• Unclear sign up (yes, some startups know “better” and still want to make it tough for users to pay them — entrepreneurial darwinism)
• Non-graphic workflow / too much text
• Inconsistent workflows as users hop from to different traffic paths (ex: reviewing final product before checkout has a diff interface than pulling old orders)
• Poor mobile strategy; today, users are web/app connoisseurs … you “afterthought” mobile strategy looks crayola; mobile should enhance the core app, not replace it
• If an app, no in-app purchases
• Inconsistent and random help (spotty help is worse than no help)
• Too many user types (adds $$$ to your project, too)
• Multi-screen checkout with a million options (like a two-year-old, you need to guide users down a path — give them options, they wander off)
• Irrelevant social components … if you don’t complement Facebook or Google+, you are missing the point
• Alerts — too many / not enough / inconsistent — it’s easy to annoy with these

Step back and look at your project with they eye of a skeptic.  Oh wait, you can’t do that — you are too emotionally / financially invested in your project (financial investment = emotional investment, right?).  Then hire a focus group.  If you can’t afford that, then ask all the techie jerks that you know (not your friends — they’ll only tell you what you want to hear) to use the product and don’t listen to what they say, just watch them use it.  When do they pause to talk to you? That’s the critical mass point when users are losing focus!  Remove those sticking points.  If the user completes an entire workflow without looking up, then you’re got a winner.  They can be talking the whole time, that means nothing.  It’s when a user looks away that they consider the current step “done” or annoying enough to pause.  It’s a mental comma.  By the way, when running your official or unofficial focus group, videotape them and replay later, over and over.

Usually, you need to launch with a simple Phase 1 to figure out what the Crowd needs for a real Phase 2.  Phase 2 is where the real work begins, eliminating the obstacles that get in the way of effortless user experience.

Steve Jobs was a really cool and important icon of our ultra-tech times. The press treated him quite favorably and not just because they all own Apple equipment, but because he made their easy job even easier. Tech reporters have super easy jobs already (spend an hour using some new tech toy and then write 1500 incisive words with lots of strong verbs), but the super lazy ones, like Walt Mossberg of the WSJ or MG Seigler of Techcrunch, simply parroted Jobs’ pronouncements. I swear those guys would get an inside crumb of data on some new Apple release and then stretch it into a full article. Jobs probably knew that the rabid fanboys were the plankton of the tech ecosystem and intentionally leaked this stuff. Working your way up the chain, whenever a new Apple product was released, entire pages of Engadget and issues of Wired (before they got smart) were devoted slavishly to this stuff. Anyway, fearing they might have to do real research for a living, tech writers have informally nominated Bezos to the role of Tech Don. I have never seen so many articles declaring the Kindle Fire a complete win and even an iPad killer. Seriously? I keep seeing gushing reviews of Amazon Prime when, a few months ago, it was a rare mention.
Bezos is a good guy, no doubt about it. Boil it down though, and he’s a really good businessman that can innovate. Jobs was an innovator that happened to be able to run a world-class company. Bezos isn’t all that unique (see alternate versions: Tony Hsieh, Eric Schmidt, Reed Hastings, and Arianna Huffington). Jobs was one-of-a-kind and I don’t see any real successor stepping up. Bezos being named Jobs 2.0 smacks of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize — kinda cheesy, most senseless, and, though possible, wayyyy wayyy premature. Let’s wait awhile and see what Bezos can deliver over the next 3 years before we crown him king.

In an interview that was widely covered on TechCrunch (and where I pulled these quotes from), Mark Zuckerberg offered some great insight into his early years in the Valley.   Say what you will about the man (I’ve never seen the movie and don’t intend to), I’ve always found him to be a direct talker.  People expect him to be Carol Bartz or Meg Whitman or even Jobs, but he’s a tremendous geek and not very smooth.  He’s more like Bill Gates than anybody else.  However, he applies the same level of transparency to his life that he expects of his userbase and for that, I do respect him.  What did Zuck do yesterday?  Look on his wall.  What did Tom from MySpace or any other corporate celebrity do yesterday?  Look at the ValleyWag rumor mill.

He had some good advice how to guide on how to handle acquisition offers, and gave interesting insight on how he kept his focus on building a lasting corporation despite a culture of “flipping companies”.

We really had one phase of this and the only reason why its’ this big story that everyone knows about us turning down a lot of money is because I messed up the process. It’s one of the biggest management mistakes I made through Facebook’s whole history. I learned a lot about the team at that time, and ended turning over a lot of that same team. I wasn’t in it for the acquisitions, and I wanted people around me who were in it for the long-term.

He also had this:

Once you have a product that you are happy with, you need to centralize things to continue growth.

So the fastest-rising (and most enduring) star of Silicon Valley tells us to focus on the long-term and build a culture of stability within your startup.  Very, very wise words.

This week, I have repeated two statements I thought I would never utter.  No, I didn’t say “hey, that’s one badass Camry you have there” — but it’s damn close.

Statement 1: HP is perceptive & brilliant.  Realizing they had made a fatal decision with their tech platform (webOS tablet), they did not opt for the dumb decision that so many US companies go for.  Usually, a company rides a bad tech decision down, like a very slowly sinking ship.  Submitted for your approval: Motorola’s RAZR which turned into the ROKR which turned into a failed division which turned into complete patent liquidation.  Yikes, failure on an epic scale and it can all be traced back to an awful tech decision.  And this is all over the place:

• Apple’s attempt at allowing 3rd parties to build Macs (upside: allowed Jobs to buy back into Apple for dirt cheap)
• Border’s stupid, junky, and expensive Kobo e-reader and now, bankruptcy
• Sirius & XM had great ideas and just couldn’t quite make the tech small or easy enough for anyone (if I can’t use it … then you’ve got a prob)
• Could Palm make a cool phone?  ever?  technological darwinism.  Too bad, because their Exchange & Outlook integration is still unparalleled
• Lotus Notes, 1-2-3, and everything else they made.  Lotus dominated in the DOS era and then just sort of sat on their butts once Windows came along.  Phhht!

Anyway, HP decided not to follow that path and dumped their tablets for $100 and scored a massive win.  WebOS is kinda ok and also kinda not (big reason is the lack of apps), but it’s just one of many low-resource OS’s out there now … iOS, Chrome OS, Android, Moblin (now MeeGo).  App developers can probably only build for 1 or 2.  So webOS is probably not one of them.  Dying platform webOS was formerly a punchline, but within a week, it’s relevant because of suddenly huge market saturation.  A major manufacturer has a $100 tablet?  Hell yeah, I’ll buy one, I don’t care what’s on it.  It’s cheaper than a baby camera or a GPS.

So HP put on a clinic on how to bail out a slowly sinking ship.  The same CEOs that I previously mocked are now acting in an impressive manner … yikes!

Statement 2: Netflix is a dying dinosaur.  My favorite company ever made a disastrous choice when they decided to increase & complicate their fees by creating one fee for streaming video and one for physical DVD rentals.  Archaic and complex billing is the domain of the most reviled of all industries — phone carriers (AT&T, Sprint, and all those vomitous pigs).  Can you decipher your phone bill?  Why do you sign up for a contract at $70/month and end up paying $90/month?  I hate them, like we all do, and yet I pay them, like we all do.  Deep loathing is the natural universal response to complex billing (loans, telephone, cable, etc.).

Netflix has proven that the honeymoon is over by unnecessarily eliminating the simplified billing.  Their service may even be worth what they are saying it is … but you can’t pull that shit and not expect an immense and immediate backlash from your client base.  If they just would have let existing customers get grandfathered in on the old billing and then apply NEW billing to NEW users, all would have been dandy.

The downward slide began there and now Starz (who provides Netflix with rights to stream new movies from Disney and Sony) is bailing out on Netflix.  I bet 30% of streaming video is kid’s stuff and 99% of THAT is Disney.  When you are in line at Costco and your 3-year-old begins getting that shifty frown that means “tantrum ahead”, you’re five finger taps away from getting her Cinderella fix from Netflix. You might even deal with that crappy billing system to have a surefire meltdown-stopper at your fingertips.  Oh, but not anymore.

Why did Starz do it?  It cannot be coincidence that Netflix made a hugely backhanded and crappy maneuver with its userbase.  Perhaps, Starz is savvy enough to realize that the unsinkable behemoth has momentarily exposed a weak side.  Now is the time to strike or, with all of the recent expensive infrastructure and asset acquisition, Netflix is over-extended.  I would never characterize Netflix as a particularly vulnerable company, but due to a series of poor decisions, they might have just given themselves the ultimate smackdown.  They can’t afford to battle a large competitor … SOOOOO Starz may be angling to launch their own streaming service, after realizing just what a monster pile of internet gold they are sitting on.  Might they be prepping to feast cheaply on the corpse of Netflix’s streaming infrastructure.

As Radiohead sang in “Just”, “You do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts.”

Directly on the coattails of my previous post, I am ready to call out another common failure point for entrepreneurs.  Major mistake #2 is approaching your web developer / partners / bank / focus group with baseless (or undetermined) pricing.

As a web developer with loads of startup experience, it is my job to give entrepreneurs direction with their web presence, but I am still amazed at how many people ask me “how much should I charge? or should it be free?” at the beginning of the project.  Don’t get me wrong, I very much enjoy the process of helping people derive a dollar value for their service based on their expenses.  It’s actually quite fun and gives me unparalleled insight into how their biz will operate both logically and financially.  I rarely build two web apps that operate in a similar manner or industry and, so, I hardly ever have “all the answers” at the point when I initially engage with a client.  Therefore, that process is necessary.

But the part of this process that is silly is why am I the one that is instigating it?  When entrepreneurs are deciding whether their idea is financially viable, the core part of the exercise should be computing operating expenses (especially marketing — which everyone neglects — e.g. “I’ll send out emails to all my friends” … ugh).  Weigh cost of operations against startup capital to see how long you can last in the negative.  Now you know if you need a primary revenue stream (advertising, for example) and whether you can afford to offer a free service.  Generally, after about 15 minutes of work, entrepreneurs see that they cannot support a free model.  And even better, it’s pretty clear how much needs to be pulled in each month.  Divide that by the number of users you are going to have.  Now divide that by 10 because that is the REAL number of users you are going to have.

I don’t expect enterpreneurs to come to me saying, “We need to bill $3.14 every three weeks”.  I expect lots of gray area.  However, sharp entrepreneurs should really be asking me the questions that allow them to refine their costs.  Like, how much is hosting?  How many servers do I need and what will they cost and can that be amortized over X months?  These questions indicate to me that the entrepreneur has determined that his model is at least somewhat financially viable.

Worse than this, however, is the client who tells me that pricing should be $9.99 per month “because it sounds good”.  I’ve heard it way more than two or three times.  To this day, I still can’t prevent my jaw from dropping when a prospect says this.  Next time, I should probably tell them that their project will cost a flat $69,500 … and when they ask why … wait for it … oh, hell, you complete the joke yourself.

Anyway, fon’t be a tool; run through this process and be hugely conservative when it comes to the number of advertisers, users, and revenue streams you’ll have.

I’m starting a new series of blog posts cataloging enormous or classic blunders that I’ve witnessed firsthand.  These are the mistakes that entrepreneurs made in their ventures that unequivocally caused a project to fail.  But this isn’t me just sitting on the sidelines calling fouls.  These really happened.

Now I know I am going to catch flack for the in-your-face title, so I’ll give a brief explanation.  If you are an entrepreneur and you can’t check your ego and absolutely inhale all of the data that is out there (mostly bad, some good), then you don’t belong in this game.  That MBA from Wharton isn’t going to get your site launched, real life lessons will.  Every biz-related datapoint that you run across needs to be weighed and you need to make a case as to why it doesn’t apply to you.  Don’t put up a wall and claim that you are immune from idiocy and failure.  Wholeheartedly accept that failure is your project’s most likely end point and move forward keeping that very real prospect on your short-list of outcomes.

That said, if you can’t make the case against a datapoint, then you indeed have that problem.  Don’t fight it.  However, that isn’t what makes you so foolish, sir.  It’s your inability to accept and adapt your strategy.  Once again, check the ego.

Many years ago, a friend pointed out that I had no backup for my lead programmer in my development workflow.  I railed against that concept of single point of failure, claiming it was not a valid concern so why should I invest time in training senior coders to be architects.  Care to guess what happened?  I lost my lead, nobody could take her place, the client lost faith and walked a short time later.  Single points of failure nearly caused the doors to close back in 2005.  The lesson: I was a fool with an ego.

Alright, so now that we have a level playing field, mistake #1 is trying to launch a project without a recurring revenue stream.  Google will not buy you.  Google buys about 10 to 15 companies in a really big year. I launch about 30 sites a year and I am one small developer.  Seriously, you have no chance if this is your strategy.  You have to have some incredible, patented tech to even catch their eye at all, much less get purchased.  Profitable operations is one sign that a technology is solid (when the crowd opens their wallets, that heralds mainstream acceptance).  That last sentence there, THAT is your datapoint.

Yesterday at the Google I/O Conference, the big boys announced that they were giving the finger to the RIAA and building a music download service in the cloud.  This is pretty enormous because nobody other than a giant like all-seeing giant like Google  has the legal muscle (and tech acumen) to go against the record labels.  Google also gets the big picture on these things.  They are looking at the music industry in 20 years when published music is extremely cheap or free, instantly available, and tailored to your preferences.  Some of this works now, but it is not effortless.  Say what you want about iTunes and Genius, but it is neither an effortless nor a pleasant process (for a non-techie, especially) to get the music you like on all your devices.  The difference with Google is that they aren’t going to charge for the music … they are starting with user uploads.  However, they are capping your uploads at 20,000 songs.  This is like 60 gigs.  Free.

The beauty of this is that Google doesn’t charge for any aspect of it.  They are going to pull the bottom out of the RIAA’s argument that music download services contribute to piracy (and they do, but only because a CD is $14 … if CDs were under $5, and downloaded tracks were 20 cents, nobody would bother with piracy … duh).  The RIAA can’t sue Google for much if Google gives it all away and therefore doesn’t generate revenue.  I’m sure the RIAA will desperately cling to some argument along the lines of “this service promotes illegal activity”, but seriously, who will buy this?  The RIAA is a dinosaur and Google is the meteor in that shall cause the dinosaur’s extinction (bad metaphor, I know, but this is stream of consciousness stuff).

An unintended casualty of this battle will probably be Amazon’s fledgling mp3 service.  It’s really solid, but it limits you to 5 Gigs of music.  This seemed completely adequate a few weeks ago when that service launched (with RIAA approval), but now it seems a paltry size.  Amazon has loads of storage — hard drives are cheap, after all — with their cloud-based S3 storage system.  So expect them to up that size, but I still feel that they’ve picked the path of pandering to the RIAA.  Perhaps they lack the funds to fight such a massive war.  Even Apple is toeing the party line, but iTunes is a little dystopic microcosm of Apple hysteria anyway.  Don’t look for innovation from the Cupertino crowd.  Their slavelike fanbase doesn’t care.  They’ll buy the next little shiny product from them no matter what.  Apple makes their money and stays in their sheltered closed-source phony world.  Amazon may just walk away rather than take on the entertainment giants.  After all, in the lawsuit against Google, the RIAA need only add a line that says something like “and Amazon was a jerk, too” and they’re on the line for billions.

If you are the early adopter type, then check out Google’s new adventure by requesting  an invite here.  If you have an Android, go download Google Music Beta from the market now .  Currently, you only get the ability to play music but I bet in a few weeks, you’ll be able to upload your music collection.

An article in today’s ReadWriteWeb prompted me to consider the possibility that all media which we consume could follow a service model like Netflix.  What if Amazon decided to charge a monthly flat fee for a certain number of books?  $10 for 4 books per month or something.  Audible does this with audio books.  It’s prohibitively expensive with Audible ($20/month for 1 book, I think), but they have to pay publishers and authors AND voice talent and production.  Give an author a bottle of scotch and a $400 advance and they’ll write you a masterpiece (ref: Charles Bukowski).  Audio books have a lot bigger food chain so they are more expensive by nature.  Anyway, Audible is irrelevant for this (you can read a book a lot faster than listen to it).  The real advantage that elevates Amazon above the competition is their amazingly broad distribution channel, which puts them in a nice position to offer services really cheap.  If I’m an author and I can make $5 on each of 10,000 sold books or $1 off 100,000 sold books, I’m going to pick #2.  Now imagine I can completely circumvent publishers because I distribute electronically only.  I sell less, but make more … now I make $12 on each of 10,000 sold books.  Amazon has the kind of reach to allow an author that sort of opportunity.

I’m sure Amazon considered this and then threw it out the window … but with a few recently successful service launches, the dynamic has changed.  Amazon could combine their streaming movies, cloud drive (for storing music), android app store, and excellent mp3 store — many of which have just been released to the world.  All of Amazon’s services are very solid, so along with books, they could just offer a flat monthly fee for the whole thing.  Essentially, “media as a commodity”.

I’d pay $50/month for books, streamed movies, music, and 5 apps.  And if the delivery systems were as seamless as the mp3 store OR the ebook to the kindle, they’d have an exceptional system.  Amazon is already a primary destination for product purchases, so it amazes me that they have not yet made the leap to service provider.  An author will make less per sale, but they are selling more units.  If I am paying $50/month for any number of books, I am going to read (and toss) tons of them.  Same with movies and music.

One of the most mind-numbing tasks when putting together content for a site is building your Terms of Use page.  Do you shell out $500 and pay an attorney to put something together?  Do you rip off somebody else’s document and swap out their company name for yours?  Or do you hunker down and spend 4 hours of your life writing a page that nobody will ever look at?  Now there is a fourth option … the automated Privacy Policy and Terms of Use generator.  Hop over to this site, enter your company name, your state, and it will churn out a beautiful document that you can cut & paste right into your site.  They even generate an HTML version.  Very slick stuff.

Link provided here, again, just for good measure.

Here’s a quickie …

Today, Nielsen released stats for the the mobile phone market.  From November of 2010 to January of 2011, Android represents 29% of market share with Apple and Blackberry each at 27% .  However, without time constraint, total market share for Android compared to all smartphones is at 19%.  That’s fairly rapid adoption.

Blatant opionion:  I don’t think any iPhone users are jumping ship to go to Android.  Former Blackberry users and first-time smartphone buyers are snapping up Androids (probably due to cheap price … and the fact that you aren’t forced into a draconian contract with AT&T’s sub-par service).  Windows Mobile will always have its little sliver of the market.

Blatant opinion 2:  If you’re considering building an iPhone app, you need to consider an Android version as well.

A client of ours for the last year or so, CubeCheck, just got profiled on the The Street’s biz news site, MainStreet.com.

Read the article here.
CubeCheck is a service that allows users to rate current or former employers. I imagine that occasionally somebody will enter a positive review … but we all know that this is a great avenue to vent on what a lamebrain your old boss was. And, no, topLingo is not on there (we programmed in a filter to auto-remove and posts with the word “topLingo” in them, of course <– joking!). Anyway, users can enter these reviews either anonymously or — if they are especially brave — as verified, non-anonymous users. In the profile, CubeCheck is described as Yelp for your employers.  It’s super easy to use … a stellar example of usability.

Go ahead, see if your company is in there … http://www.cubecheck.com

Way more complex than you need

Ok, so you’re tacking a blog onto your site to (1) quickly get breaking news about your products and company online and (2) boost SEO.  We all know that (2) is the REAL reason you’re adding that blog onto your corporate site.  You want to get on the first page of Google for certain search terms.  Good plan!  In fact, it’s such a great plan that EVERYONE else on the internet is doing the same thing.So what can you do to get in front of your competition?

First off you can use the latest version WordPress.  WordPress does optimized URI rewriting and about a hundred other little things that rocket it to the front on the long list of blog platforms.  Next, you should automate site map submission to Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo, and 5 or 10 minor players plus the new challengers that pop up weekly (and get shot down almost as quickly — anybody remember that massive market changer, Cuil?).  You can line up your Twitter feed to stream to the main page of the blog.

In short, simple layouts rule.  Make your blog  as visually simple as possible.  Any fancy tricks (like the java tag cloud over there on the right which we are in love with) are just going to slow down your blog and MAY prevent it from getting indexed.

That leads me to my next point.  Get it live and online ASAP.  If you are building or re-building your main site, get the blog up and indexed before all the main dev is done.  It’s gaining search engine traction while you’re testing and making final mods to your site.  Even if you decide not to take the blog live, you can always line up 15 or 20 posts.  With WordPress 2.6 & newer, you can schedule your posts to auto-magically go live on a specified date.  So you drink two or three cups of that crazy Vietnamese coffee that has quadruple the caffeine and write them all in one mad literary sprint.  Then stagger out the publish dates.

If you keep the blog layout simple, you’re going to get it online faster.  You won’t waste time debugging complex interface issues.  The simpler the layout, generally the more compatible it is with blog platform upgrades and plugins.  I’ve worked with some very complex WordPress themes.  After we add some plugins, the really crazy animated multi-columns themes will inevitably break — and that is just during the initial build.  Complex themes and heavily customized layouts limit forward compatibility.  Weigh that carefully.

Finally, use your blog.  Post to it consistently.  Especially at the beginning, daily posts that are rich in relevant keywords are the key to success.  You can slow down once you have a couple hundred posts.  Seriously.

Now with all that said, do you REALLY want that fancy layout???

Dozens of press releases, countless emails and calls to editors then sometimes you just get lucky.  Like my photo and a topLingo shout out on the OC Metro homepage type of lucky.

Hi I’m Mike.  Co-owner of topLingo and meet me on OCMetro.com’s new social network for Orange County business professionals.  Recently launched,  this network is a hybrid between LinkedIn and Facebook and proof that “niche’s” can work.

J.D. Power & Associates did a study for automotive manufacturer websites.  They found that users were more likely to buy a car IF the manufacturer’s website put the data — especially pricing — about models in the forefront and kept the fancy flash interface elements (virtual test drives, 360 degree rotations) to a minimum.  Also of note, speed of the website contributed greatly to user satisfaction.  Hmmmm, does this really surprise anybody?  At least this is great validation for the usability mantra we’ve been chanting for the last 3 or 4 years.   Link to study here.

Incidentally, they came up with a median rating for the industry.  I’m proud to say we worked on part of Kia‘s online dealer training and they are above the median score.  The Big 3 were below the median … yikes, and they wonder why they need bailout money.  I bet they spend millions on their websites with litte regard for usability.  “Chairman, we need more rotating Ram Pickups!”  Resounding yesses from around the big cherrywood conference table.  Stocks plummet.

It’s no longer cool to have a brown box on your Twitter profile.

Way back in March just HAVING a Twitter account said “savvy”.  Now the marketing  mavens  are branding the holy lights out of all things “Tweet” and Twitter’s gone main stream.

Here’s some examples of what I’m talking about:

Executives, and the publications that target them, are talking non-stop about how Twitter should be leveraged in the enterprise – as in  this video of CIO’s from Home Depot, Baxter, and Yahoo, and this  CIO Magazine article “Twitter’s Potential for Business Users“, and in newly coined vernacular like  “Real Time Monitoring” used by Lenny Mendonca in this Think Big video.

For a great example of how one brand is leveraging Twitter to extend its brand reach, increase goodwill, and improve customer service, check out Whole Foods. (Thanks Denise, @denisess for tweeting this).

How to leverage Twitter for your enterprise is a fundamental strategy question that should be carefully studied by your organization’s executive team.

The take away message is this: Ignoring Twitter is a way to get noticed – only not the way you want.

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P.S.  Your mid to large size organization may qualify for a free 60 minute executive workshop customized to your brand.  Contact topLingo