Wyld.Media

Digital Product Design & Innovation Consulting

When metrics are worse than gut instincts

 

(I took his advice by ignoring his advice)

 

When Metrics Are Worse Than Gut Instintcs

It’s happening again. I’m focusing on metrics and losing sight of the big picture. The more I analyse the individual elements, the more I lose sight of the whole. I’m feeling stuck. It’s time to remember the fishtank.

And as I ponder the Lesson Of the Fish Tank, I see wearable trackers are getting a bad rep for not helping their wearers lose weight. The fish tank again!

The molecular biology graduate in me has always hated the phrase “gut instincts” when it appears next to “data” or “metrics” because the two have always been presented as if they balance each other, usually by marketers. You rarely hear Nate Silver talk about his gut feelings.

When I was a part of Business Information, I could never understand why there was so much scepticism against data from people who’s best interests would be best served by it. Data – my experience had taught me – is absolute and non-judgmental. Data is an un-opinionated compass in many important journeys.

Until the Fishtank. I opened the hood of my 200 litre tropical tank one morning and immediately knew the water was off. This sometimes happened if Thames Water changed the amounts of chemicals in the water and I was too aggressive with my water changes that week. I did a quickie water change and threw some ammonia blocker just to be safe before driving to work. I came home that evening and tested my water to see how much water I might need to change. The ammonia – a chemical highly toxic to fish- was too high. I did a 70% water change, and added water protectors to minimise gill damage from the previous readings- at least I hoped. In the morning I tested again. Despite two water changes, the ammonia was now at a level so high nothing I would be able to do could save my fish from the internal damage. Tears were streaming down my face, knowing I had failed them. Until a teeny, far away voice inside my head said, “but they don’t look sick.”

I stopped crying and really looked at them. They didn’t look sick at all. They looked…pretty damn happy. Beautiful smooth scales. Healthy gills and colourings. Active and playful. I sniffed the water. No ammonia smell.

It turns out the particular brand of ammonia block I used as a preventative gives false positives on water quality tests. Because the test kit and the additive were by the same manufacturer -and because there was no warning on the bottle or kit- it didn’t occur to me they might cross-react. I changed the water again, this time leaving out the ammonia blocker and re-tested. The water was as perfect as it should have been after the first water change.

Data is absolute, unjudgmental and impartial, but data cannot self-aggregate nor self-analyse without a human made model, based on human-made assumptions. Data can be susceptible to factors we aren’t even aware are at play. Our interpretations susceptible to wishful or to fearful thinking.

The problem with the fitness trackers isn’t that step counts aren’t useful for losing weight. It’s that only looking at step and fitness targets made wearers vastly over-estimate how much they can eat after the log big numbers. Such trackers work best for weight loss with integrated with some kind of meal journal, macro counter or calorie tracker. This isn’t restricted to trackers, either. The results of exercise alone, as opposed to in combination with diet gives the exact same results.

By focusing too much one metric, we lose sight of the big picture.

That’s why if you start looking, you’ll see many examples that seem to support “gut” vs “data“, but are really “tunnel vision” vs “big picture” thinking, such as:

  1. Shrödengers Content SEO

 This is a story about one site architecture and backend running two sister brand websites using a variety of backend, server side, and front-end magic to swap out the domains, branding and content as necessary. The main site was older. The new sister site, newly acquired. Both had one master product list, with the majority of products filtered on the siter site, meaning they wouldn’t appear by browsing or searching, but you could still find them if you entered their title in the URL explicitly.

The sister site marketing team did not do content marketing. All new content was purely advertising the release new products. The master site marketers had weekly targets for blog posts. I had noticed that the quality of the content seemed very thin bordering to embarrassing at times, but it wasn’t until the main site was ranking below it’s blog-free, filtered, sister site for ALL content that we could fully appreciate just how bad poor content can be to a site’s SEO.

The very things the marketers were doing in the belief it would make their products become more visible and search-friendly- churning out shallow articles with repeating keywords- we’re getting us de-ranked. Worse, because they had to hit their weekly content targets, they didn’t have time to research and write articles that spoke to their audience.

Target numbers aren’t a metric, but team managers do like giving them to their staffers or freelancers thinking they will boost a metric down a line- such as website traffic, email subscriptions or sales. Targets are good places to start but without keeping an eye on how they are being met, they lose all meaning. For the teams above, literally doing nothing worked better than hitting their marketing targets.

2. Twitter: Metrics over User Experience

As we all know by now, Disney has turned down Twitter for purchase because they fear the way the platform has fostered trolls will hurt Disney’s image. But Twitter started off as a great platform. It started to go wrong once it started optimising interactions around the idea of boosting “engagement”. Applied without context (e.g boosting engagement within your social network, or among peers), trolling can be seen as a roaring success. People are watching hashtags scroll by and replying to multiple strangers all day long and starting fires of discussions in multiple timelines- all signals that tick the boxes of “engagement”. Twitter is a classic example of how designing for a metric over the user experience has lead to many users abandoning it, and not feeling safe to share the same fun, personal thoughts that made it so great in the beginning.

3. The ‘too trivial’ metric

When I started running, I was using endurance and speed as metrics. First, I improved my endurance then I wanted to improve my speed. I tracked my running vs walking interval times and how much distance I covered in each. What I wasn’t measuring was how I felt during and after a run. I felt like my lungs were on fire, and after running my arms, legs and lungs felt like they were on a slow burn all day long. It would be a year before I realised this wasn’t how other people felt. By focusing on endurance and speed (what everyone shared online as “important”), I was ignoring some serious red flags that were blocking my progress. On the other hand, reviewing my inability to reach my goals in my expected timeframe by visiting a doctor got me a nifty flip-top inhaler and a series of physiotherapy appointments. Now, I measure the above plus my heart rate during a run and how I feel after.

The problem with data isn’t the data. The problem is lacking sufficient context in which to understand it.

Data needs context.

So what’s my take home message?

  1. Just do good work. Focus on the end user or consumer, not optimising for stats, but have a data and business analyst review and ask meaningful questions to understand both what’s important to every team, what’s influencing their internal data, and to provide some holistic, big-picture feedback on what direction to take.
  2. If you’re not hitting your targets you expected, get an external opinion. Maybe you set a target that makes sense for a similar business model, but not for yours. Maybe there’s something else you need to be focusing on before you can even start worrying about that metric. Before someone starts worrying about content SEO, first they need good, human- readable content. Before they can do that, they need to understand their audience.
  3. Ignore what other people are doing: People love dishing out simple solutions: You need to be on social networks, you need to use this new technology, that email service provider is no good, change CMS. Back to my running project: A runner friend recently told me that caring about my heart rate range wasn’t important. He then went on to tell me that he didn’t care what his other friends did to improve, as long as what he did worked fine. So I took his advice by ignoring his advice. I’ll run my first 10K race in two weeks. Ignore what competitors and peers are doing and focus on what brings meaningful results for your end users.

So, what about you? Have you had any situations where chasing a metric was driving you off-course, or compromising your vision? Have you seen anyone look at their mixpanel and leap to a strategy you had doubts about to improve something? Drop me a message or email below. I love a good story :)

The ROI of Habit Formation Features in Apps

 

the ROI of Habit Formation Features in Apps

The App Graveyard

On every mobile phone it exists: those apps that people never use, but which they don’t delete because they feel they should use again- one day. This is the app graveyard.  Created by people who downloaded  the product, signed in, and then dropped off the earth after a week, while still claiming to want what your app offers them.

The Value of Habit Formation

What’s the purpose of your app? The chances are, the solution to its’ ultimate purpose requires some degree of habit formation on the side of its users in order for the app to be able to deliver its promise.

Want to save money? You’ll need to create a budget and log expenses at least every week in order for YNAB or GoodBudget to be of any use to you.
Want to become a runner? You’ll need to train two to three times a week for 9 weeks on the Active.com’s Couch-to-5K plan.

Want better emotional resilience? Headspace, Calm and Pacifica can only be effective if you log in regularly to meditate and track your moods.

The most beautiful design and clever algorithms will go to waste if you can’t persuade your users to overcome their initial resistance and at least “show up” to your app on a regular basis.

What does not work

The defacto habit builder for every startup app I’ve seen seems to one of two things:

a. Push notification reminders

b. Email reminders.

I get that these are easy to implement, but they simply do not work beyond the ‘enthusiasm phase’.  The problem is not that users are forgetting to log in, but that they are actively avoiding logging in.

Why Resist Something You Want?

But why does someone who has identified a desire to – say- save money and who just downloaded (maybe even paid for or subscribed to) an app to achieve that purpose, stop logging in after a week?

Why do some people see the five minutes a day it takes to reconcile their spendings “too much”, when they probably spend three times that amount of time checking their social media accounts?

In order to understand the root causes of user drop-off, we need to understand how procrastination works. I’m going to keep this short because I want to get onto the “habit hacks”, but once you understand why these hacks are effective against procrastination, you can make your own new hacks- your own killer engagement feature.

The 2 Things you need to know about procrastinators

1. Procrastinators actively seek distraction. You can block facebook at work or via a browser extension at home, but they’ll probably spend more time near the coffee machine chatting, more time replying to email, or more time on cigarette breaks. The focus of their distraction is not the cause of their distraction.

2. Procrastinators come in three flavours:

a. Avoidant; these use distraction to avoid negative feelings, such as overwhelm or fear of failure. It’s more rewarding to swipe on tinder than send out job applications on monster.com, for example, although they both take the same amount of time.

b, Thrill Seeking: Some like the “thrill” of getting things done last minute. This may seem like a variation of prioritising social media approval over a meaningful life improvement, but it’s motivated by manufacturing an “epic win” out of thin air, rather than avoiding what they see as “crushing failure”.

c. Decision Avoidant. People in this category dislike making decisions because they fear making the wrong one. It’s easier for someone like this to live on takeout than to pick a diet out of all that conflicting diet advice out there, pick meals that correspond to that diet, and then attempt to make the meals and maybe still gain weight.

Now, I know you’re thinking: “Wow. I just don’t know if my team are equipped to talk people off the edge like this”, but the good news is that apps and SaaS:

1. Make the creating “epic wins” out of nothing easy and super attractive

2. Take a lot of decision-making away.

3. with smart messaging, you can even make users not see falling off the wagon as “failure”

Habit forming hacks

There are a lot of ways different apps attempt to solve the problem of procrastination or “pain avoidance” and in my opinion, developing a solid habit for people who are not organised naturally takes a combination of different approaches. Sometimes, you have to think outside of app features.

In-app habit forming features:

i. Make it easy to “win” and brag about it.

1. The social brag

You’re probably familiar with those facebook posts via Runkeeper, Endomundo and Strava. But how do apps without a braggable number (10K in thirty minutes? Oh my!) make it easy to “win” online?

MyFitnessPal broadcasts that you

a) logged in that day

b) are under your target calorie goal (if that’s the case)

Forest app likes to incentivise the habit of logging in and focusing as planting a tree, with the result of extended successful task completions a lush forest. Erratic logging in or task incompletions results in a patchy forest. This type of visual abstraction is helpful in cases where, unlike with running apps, a number either doesn’t exist or shouldn’t be shared for sensitivity reasons.

FocusNow takes this a step further, making the growing of fruit almost like playing Farmville, with multiplayers all exploiting their successes and gaining points collectively, incentivising them not to compete -as fitbit’s leaderboard does- but to supervise each other (i.e creating accountability). FocusNow works so well because it makes staying focused as appealing to avoidant type procrastinators as logging into facebook and getting likes, while also appealing to thrill seekers by making a “big win” out of something they should already be doing.

2. Creating Competition

What I’ve seen with fitbit’s leaderboard and other similar features is that competition works best if you have a chance of “winning”.  People who are perpetually at the bottom of their social leaderboard just think “this Fitbit stuff isn’t so great” and eventually drop off altogether.

3.  Setting Milestones and Microgoals

Fitbit attempted to correct this by breaking down their big step goal into something more achievable: from 10k steps a day into hourly step goals of 250- a “getting things done” hack that makes striving for the rest of the steps achievable. 

This brings up something important: habit forming isn’t the same as sensible goal setting or the ability to break down a goal into milestones. We need milestones to help us know that although we’re still away from our mark, we are progressing steadily towards it. A microgoal would be something like seeing circles in the calendar filled in as having logged in and completed a task that day.  Microgoals work best when combined with..

ii .. Intelligent Messaging

Going back to alerts: they could work if repeatedly swiping them away or archiving or deleting emails (as indicated by: “user has enabled alerts/email notification but hasn’t logged in over x time period” inside your metrics app) resulted in a different alert asking if the user would like to change their reminder time since the time they’ve picked isn’t working anymore. 

Appboy has a great write up on how Runkeepers positive and personalised messaging keeps it’s users from seeing a small blip in their training as a “failure”.

Out-of-app habit-forming features:

As I’ve said before in “The Quirky Truth About Churn“, software designers and product owners need to think outside of our apps functionality to help our users achieve their end objective. Here are some of the best I’ve seen used:

1. Stickers and NFC tags to remind users to log in. Jiffy uses everything from simple stickers inside of books or desks to remind their users to log in and track time. They also make NFC tags, which can be used to open apps when you pick up your car keys, go into your office, sit at your desk or walk into a meeting room, but I feel this kind of automation suffers from the same problem as timed daily alerts: if our schedule changes and that’s no longer where or when we do our finances, workouts, or blog writing, it simply becomes annoying.

2. Training Webinars: sometimes it’s about training people how to manage their thinking about their project (whether the ‘project’ in question is adopting a new dog, finding a tenant or new flat, or training for a marathon) in the first place and taking questions and answers, as well as reframing those “niche scenarios” that usually easily solvable. This is something YNAB does very well and which keeps people loyal to their product, because as people’s lives change (new baby, new house, change of job) they must be are able to adjust, and that requires a readjustment of thinking. In Getting Things Done, Dave Allen tells us “no tool, fancy notebook or app can fully automate in place of a solid methodology” and this is true. Look at YNAB teaching people “how to prioritise”.

3. Community: do you what killed Filofax in the 90’s? That no one remembered to ever use them, or when they did, they didn’t know how to plan with them beyond filling out their day calendar. This was before webinars were possible for most people to attend, but what’s caused Filofax’s resurgence now is that there are so many Facebook groups online and youtube videos with #planwithme as a hashtag where people help each other and get ideas from each other. In other words: community.

The next level of community is when fans organise events in the real world, like maybe host meet-ups, like Runkeeper’s global 5k runs, or YNABS meetups in Barcelona or HeadSpace fans meeting up in Munich or even a bunch of budgeting geeks meeting up for drinks and some productive support, the latter isn’t affiliated with any software or product, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be, or at least sponsored by one. The easiest community for a digital product to build is one that already exists.

Accountability:  Real life communities like the above create accountability and support, which is hugely motivational, but if real life community isn’t possible, some goal oriented websites allow you to auto-share progress with a few trusted people you know in your contact list, rather than broadcast to everyone via social media.

Others have an in-house motivation team as part of their offering, or assigning a new user to other new users (in Facebook groups or a private slack group) for accountability and weekly check-ins.

A Habit Formation Salad

In the same way a decent salad is more than simply leaves or a vegetable, successful apps use a mixture of the above methods depending on their user demographics, feedback and application aims to build regular habits in their users.

If you’re trying to work out what would work best for your target demographic with the budget and resources you have, drop me a message!

The Overlooked Feature Blocking SaaS Engagement

 

The most overlooked feature that's blocking SaaS engagement

Every digital product has it, but most brainstorming, design and functionality sessions skip over it.

It is the login screen. Don’t roll your eyes. I’m serious.

Your login screen is the first experience a user has of using your app or SAAS, but all too often it acts a barrier to buy from or engage with your product.

Don’t believe it could have such an impact? Aren’t log-ins pretty standard now anyway?

Here’s a list of things I’ve not been able to do because of lazy log-in design and overcautious passwords in the last week alone:

  1. Rent or buy anything via Apple TV since I had to change my password. I have to get up and confirm my account on my computer – not happening when I have a mouthful of pasta at the end of a long day staring at my monitor. It doesn’t even allow me the option of doing this on my ipad, which is usually nearby.
  2. Log into my Audible account. Before it joined Amazon, Audible used a username instead of an email address as a login. Well, it seems I got creative with the username, and I must have stopped using whatever email account it was registered to because the ones I enter aren’t being recognised. Do you think I feel inclined to buy more audiobooks from them with my Amazon log in? NOPE. I’ll stream podcasts, but that’s it until I can recover my old audiobooks.
  3. Use Twitter on my desktop. Every time I log in, I get an email saying there was suspicious activity on my account. Like Pavlov’s dog, I’ve now been conditioned to stop logging in from my desktop. Only, I also don’t log in often from my mobile often because of too many notifications. Great way to drive up user engagement, Twitter!

I won’t go over Twitter’s and iTunes password paranoia, because Joel Califa does it better in Patronising Passwords, which I encourage you to read.

Suffice to say: if your product requires your users to download, subscribe to and maintain a separate desktop and mobile product to access them, your user experience and product design are deeply flawed.

if a product requires users download, subscribe 2 & update a separate product to login, it's flawed Click To Tweet

So what to do instead?

1) Never give the option to log in with a username.

2) Always give the option to sign up and log in with Google/Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, depending on your audience. This solves having to remember what email address you used and leaves password issues to those services to handle, not you.

NOTE: I’ve used popular apps that allow you to sign up with one of these accounts, but then expect you to log in thereafter with your email and password, while still showing the social media buttons. This is confusing, as I inevitably hit them thinking I’ll sign in with them and wind up on the registration page. Don’t rely on users saving their logins in their browser. Don’t expect people to read the friendly instructions under the login.

3) Mock up the user flow of lost passwords, security challenges, suspicious activity notices, etc. Ask yourself, if this happened to you on your commute home, how long would it take you to be back inside the product and completing key tasks? How often might it happen? When can it break?

4) Test signups, logins and password resets when you’re busy, distracted or only have a few minutes to get in and out. That’s when you’ll have a harder time remembering passwords or inventing secure passwords, and it’s a more accurate to many “real life” use cases.

5) Ask yourself: what happens if your app is bought by Big Inc and google/FB/Twitter logins are no longer ok? Repeat step 3.

6) If you are bought by Big Inc, give your users the option to merge their old account login with their new Big Inc login. Save everyone the hassle of trying to remember what email address they were using 8 years ago. Audible has yet to implement this, which is interesting.

People want to buy from you and engage with you. Don’t make it hard.

What Makes a Great Dashboard? The “Quirky Truth” About Churn

 

what-makes-a-great-dashboardI was writing an article about what the best dashboards have in common, and then something nearly happened. I nearly bought a new planner. It often surprises people that I use paper at all, since I’m so integrated into the web ecosystem of tools that I use and since I design online tools, but I see my planner as a “wireframe” for my days.

And given that the system I use is completely flexible, customizable and 100% reusable, my near impulse revealed a “quirky truth” about users that applies to digital products as well. Actually, two quirky truths.

So I’m going to talk about what makes a great dashboard and I’m not going to mention NoSQL or “material design” or UX anywhere. Instead, I’m going to focus on how to make a product that prevents users jumping ship to a newer, shinier product in the future.

 

  1. Narrowing down your audience. You can’t make an intuitive product for all types of users with all types of needs, but by embracing a narrower type of user, you can make something that caters to their needs perfectly. You may have some doubts about this now, but you’ll come around.
  2. Get to know your audience inside out. How old are they? Is there a geographical location they are mostly in? What kind of education or backgrounds do they have? How do their mornings begin? When they open their emails the most? When they are most likely to start a project that would need your software? or if they already are using a similar tool, what motivates them to change tools? Outside of their objectives for your product, what kind of apps, programs and hardware do they use? Do they drive? Cycle? What do they do for recreation? What motivates them? What discourages them?

    Everything from the app functionality they need all the way down to the language you use in the app and it’s integrations, marketing and email timing will depend on this information. This is where putting together some user personas can help.  Get my free persona template in google doc format.

Let’s consider what kinds of data different types of users would expect in a fitness app:

A person who’s just beginning to get fit will track their journey towards fitness differently to a runner who’s training for a half-marathon. We can imagine a former couch potato will do more workouts indoors and may not have many exercises they want to share publicly yet, since they’re not “braggable”. They may care more about logging how they feel (breathless, good, energised) after a workout, and progress could be tracked by measuring interval times if they are jogging, or maybe something like working out three times a week and staying within their aerobic heart rate range, or increases in weights and reps. Seasoned runners will want to show off their routes, and distance, speed and cadence of their run and maybe photos of their location, and they way they feel after a run will probably be on a different scale.

  1. Take a new path to reach the end-goal: with your user persona sheets, you can now decide your product objectives are and how it will achieve that. This may not be the literal objectives as reported by your demographic during your research. Remember the Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

 This is where having an off-the-wall approach can make big impact. A product that does the same thing as another product is will inevitably compete on price, functions (which is price charged to you if the cost of two products are the same) and look and feel, and you wind up with circular debates online about which one is better, but a product that helps you get to the same end goal in a very different way will stand out and be worth experimenting with.Examples of stand-out products:

  • There are a dozen journaling, mood logging and gratitude apps out there. Pacifica focuses on managing anxiety by analysing your text entries for “thinking traps”.
  • There are a dozen recipe sharing ecosystems out there. Yummly indexes the entire blogosphere for recipes and displays trending recipes as tiled images for visual inspiration.
  • There are a dozen learn-to-run and running apps out there. Zombies, Run makes the process as entertaining and varied as following a tv series.
  1. They make success instantly recognisable. This is the part where we decide what our users want to see on their dashboard. This doesn’t have to be a hit and miss process. I’ve put together a Product Research Survey Template you can copy to google drive, customise, and use with your focus group. With the persona sheets and feedback from the user research survey, you can ask yourself:
      • What does success look like to this person? Not in a metric sense; in real life. Yes, this is subjective and opinionated. Not everyone will agree. Some people won’t use your product of it, but like I said in point 1, you can’t make a simple, intuitive app, SAAS or other digital product that appeals to everyone and also retains complete flexibility for all types of users. On the other hand, there are so many people who use products they complain about for not matching their situation, aims or skill level – until they find the one that does. You’d be better off targeting and keeping that loyal slice of users over the long-haul, than casting a wide net every so many months.
      • What would let this person know are successful or getting closer to success?
      • Do they need instructing or encouraging? Or just information? The good thing about picking a demographic is that it’s not too big a niche to make assumptions or set targets for.
      • Are there any red flags that can help someone turn things around if something isn’t moving in the right way? Is this helpful, or more likely to be annoying to this person? Getting an alert that your e-commerce is way down is tolerable to a small business owner if they only get notifications a when a serious dip occurs (maybe over Christmas, perhaps), but if they’re not getting a lot of consistent traffic in the first place, they could be getting alerts all the time.

     

  2.  Kill their distractionsmaxresdefaultWhat is distracting your users from their aims in using this app? Not within your product. In general.

There are lots of features I like about Balsamiq mockups, but the two that made me buy way before my trial ended are the “play background music” and “what’s for dinner?” features. Yes, those are real items in their menu bar, because the need for get-in-the-zone calm and the need to not break my attention span to hunt for dinner inspiration allow me to get work done faster.music The music is even set to 25 minute cycles so I can use it as part of my pomodoro cycle.  Instant. Brand. Loyalty. 

A different example is Fitbit’s “Active hours” feature, where users have the option to enable being encouraged to take a given number of steps each hour within normal working hours, for all those desk-bound individuals who get to the end of week feeling like this daily 10k step target thing isn’t workable.  

Another is Freeagent’s weekly ‘Monday Motivator’ email, whose primary purpose is to subtly remind their users to log-in and update their books/send their invoices each week so they’ll get their money’s worth out of the product, and keep subscribing.

The first quirky truth is that although it takes less time and energy to learn to use or set a reminder to use an existing tool, most people will prefer to jump ship to a new tool once they’ve identified that their goals aren’t being fully met with one they already have- even if their obstacle is forgetting to use it. I had nearly bought a new planner not because it did anything different, or looked substantially cuter but because:

  1. The “newness” promised to make actually using it less boring- for a while.
  2. The manufacturer wasn’t afraid to show an opinion: its’ pre-filled inserts closely matched the custom ones I already use. At best, this only saves me 10 minutes a month of opening my insert file and printing, plus color ink, but the boldness of their identity appealed to an irrational part of me that felt chosen at the expense of a more general audience.

The second quirky truth is that using a product is a relationship, and it can be infatuating to find a product that “just gets you” and has eyes for only your demographic. You need to appeal to an irrational, deep-set part of people’s psyche to get the kind of brand loyalty you see in iOS fans, for example.

What creates a great product that inspires customer loyalty is more than a products features, technology, look and feel, marketing and even service desk.

It’s deeply understanding your chosen users, their head space and making it fast and easy (and yes, attractive) to get what they want while obliterating their obstacles to getting there.  

To make truly amazing dashboard, we need to see ourselves as a life coach and motivator with a magic mirror to our users, not just present them with prettier graphs and higher tech tools.

Don’t Let The Crumbs Eat You Up

 

The smallest crumb can devour us- the cost of thriftiness to online services

I want to tell you about the day I ditched the free email my hosting service provided and paid for google apps.

It was around about early March, and I got an email from my UK accountant asking about my annual report. I don’t remember what the question was, but the point was, it had totally slipped my mind that it was due. Worse than that was that I had actually signed up for email reminders from Companies House to file them in time, but had never seen a single email from them. Digging through my desktop email client, then mobile phone client, then a different desktop client, then my gmail client (where I had synced some emails to a folder), I finally found them- buried within mountains of updates and newsletters I had moved to the archive folder.

I had nearly missed my deadline but for two days notice, all because I felt that 4 euros a month was an unnecessary expense when I had free email. Compared to what I spend Adobe alone, this was illogical stinginess. I had nearly let the crumbs devour me.

We’ve all seen examples of this illogical stinginess in the non-work world:

  • Buying a flat, but not installing a fire alarm or buying insurance.
  • Training for a 20k run and eating well, but putting off getting that persistent cough or mole checked for “some other time”.
  • Opening a marine fish store, but failing to buy a backup generator in case of electrical failures. 

The crumbs are things we think are not important yet or not worth spending on after spending on bigger things, and which we forget about until the day everything we built hinges on them.

In the world of online services and SAAS, the crumbs might be:

  • Skipping on user testing at the low fidelity wireframe stage. It’s much cheaper to fix things at this stage than later on.
  • Developing a powerful product but failing to include help files and customer onboarding flows. Guess what happens if customers thinks a product is too hard? They stop using it, and stop paying for it.
  • Using dummy data or not providing data in the mockup stage. The entire usability and flow of a product changes when I use real data, like using my sometimes hyphenated surname in sign up forms. Don’t make designers guess what your data will be. If they’re good, they’ll probably need to correct those assumptions later on and that will be billed to you, but if they’re bad, your product will suffer.
  • Not being crystal clear on what steps a user needs to take to activate an account. In the website for car2go in Madrid, my partner and I waited for two weeks for his driver’s license to be validated (I am used driving on the wrong side of the road, so didn’t apply). Only after wondering why it was taking so long did we read their FAQs and realise that it wasn’t the automated process that their site promised (“simply sign up here”), but required an in-store visit after signing up online. You question the point of the website if you could save time by registering and validating in store.
  • Sending out password reminder emails or other important emails from generic department@yourbusiness.com accounts which get trapped by spam filters. Especially if you haven’t worked to build up your sender reputation for that domain.
  • Cheaping out on images in your content after design handover. Nothing ruins the look of a website or product more than overly “stock” photos. Consider that Netflix’s artwork drives their customer choices in which shows they watch and how much Netflix A/B test those artworks alone for increased user activity, and you’ll see that taking the time to source quality images and customise them professionally pays for itself.
    netflix's images drive user choices and engagement. illogical stinginess sometimes means that images used after design handover are basic stock photos.
    Netflix’s images drive user choices and engagement. Time pressed as we are, it’s always worth it to not use basic stock images.

We can get so focused on our big picture goals or the things we are chasing in life that we lose sight of the crumbs that could devour us.

We can get so focused on our goals that we lose sight of the crumbs that could devour us. Click To Tweet 

So, my question to you is: what is it that you told yourself you ‘should really be doing differently’ but haven’t gotten around to yet?

What is not urgent enough, or too difficult, or takes too long to make a start with today?

What do you just feel you shouldn’t have to pay for and could do yourself when you get time? (you haven’t found time yet, but you will! Maybe ..next week?)

Those are your crumbs, and they are waiting for you. 


Drop me an email below and let me know what they are or were. I love hearing and learning from other people, and maybe I can help you find that first step.

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