Toluu

Common Challenge

...blogging on dooyt.com

Notes on seeing Andy Budd.October 10

I just went to see Andy Budds presentation on “Designing the User Experience Curve” today. I was badly late, but I managed to catch half of the presentation. Afterwards I took Andy, Marcin Jagodziński (of blip.pl) and Michael Sliwinski (of Nozbe.com) to coffee-shop, for what turned out to be a great conversation.

I will not write about the content of presentation, here, but I would like to share some thoughts I had during and after our meeting. One of the questions I asked Andy was should a startup deploy a half-baked product asap, or rather polish it to get the perfect user experience. His opinion was that, granted you have necessary resources, you should always go for quality. He even used the Rio vs iPod example - Rio being first to market by 3 years, but eventually leaving polished iPod to dominate.

We also had a discussion about customization, personalization and user’s tastes. Andy thinks that personalization is very important particularly in social apps - where you can show off with your personalized space. On the other hand, Michael said that we don’t want users to customize our apps too much, because then we can’t control the quality and experience of the user (Andy strongly supported that). Marcin haid his point on that one, coming from Blip’s experiences - that sometimes you have to give your users features that they use anyway, but not in a comfortable

Back online :)October 9

I was just going through my Dooyt work and I realised that the last post was on the 24th of July. This is unacceptable, and I humbly ask for your forgiveness. I will change these poor statistics in coming days, and I pledge to post at least twice a week. The first post - tomorrow after seeing Andy Budd of Clear:Left in Warsaw Institute of Technology.

Oh, and btw.: Dooyt is going into very-private-beta on Monday

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Know your distribution channel.July 23

I was just watching EpicFu on Revision3 and I had a little revelation when arriving at ‘user comments’ section. They were all Seesmic. Now, I used to think Seesmic was rubbish until I read that, but even afterwards I didn’t really see it as a viable business. Mainly because I didn’t know exactly what was it supposed to be: a blog commenting tool, a video conversation platform? Blog comments using Seesmic always seemed a bit out of place, mainly because you had to switch your attention from quickly scanning text to watching motion picture - this used to set me off track. Public video conversations? You could easily do it on Youtube if you wanted. So, what should it really be? Why, of course - a web TV commenting tool - just check out episode of EpicFu embedded below to know exactly what I mean (you have to watch it till the end).

You may now ask - what’s in it for me? (Well, all of you except Loic of course)

You have to know your context in more ways than you (probably) are aware of. In this particular case you have to watch how users consume content that you are utilizing and check whether your medium of communication is right for them.

Negative examples (of how not to do it):

• Text ads embedded in videos - too static
• Video ads on

Demand interaction (and help your users).July 3

Getting a ‘comment notice’ e-mail from Mashable today got me thinking - it clutters my inbox, but also it helps me track the conversations I commented on (disqus and co.comments were not very helpful with that). So I clicked the included link and followed this conversation. It served mashable at least one page view, and probably some more from other people that commented the story (thus it’s effect could be expotential instead of linear). So using the simplest possible tool Mashable helped me engage into conversation and also helped itself by increasing revenue.

Modelling it for the rest of the web-world, we should focus on helping our users interact with our content - simple RSS is not enough anymore (although it probably could be used here as well if I had an auto generated channel for posts that I commented on) - as it brings users only once. You need mechanisms that constantly remind your users that the conversation (interaction) is on, and they should take part in it.

Seek balance though - if you push too much on your users they might stop coming back at all. Give them an instant opt-out to any incoming inform

There is place for everyone (free).July 2

Bloggers, especially A-list ones like to trash services whenever a new and effective competitor apears. This is not a new thing by any means - when TV was announced radio was dead. When video was announced - cinema was dead. When computers were announced - books and paper were dead. But they’re all still walking. From economical point of view, a consumer here has a choice of two free products that serve a similar need (and are thus substitutes). Since the transaction cost (of for instance switching or simultaneous use) are marginal - consumer has no other incentive to choose one product over another than the utility she or he gets. On the other hand, with no usage cost consumer has absolutely no incentive to abandon either product completely. Thus one product must produce ultimately higher utility than it’s substitute to be a real winner. Which is usually the case when technological leap happens (CD to MP3 for instance).

So when someone is writing that Twitter will die because Friendfeed is here, or comments are dead because Seesmic (and Friendfeed) is here, or Myspace is dead because Facebook is here - they slept on history classes. The truth is - if you have two competing ser