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Don’t Let The Crumbs Eat You Up

May 5, 2016

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. 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.

Red Flags, Part 1: How to Pick a Better UX Designer

April 25, 2016

Are you selling your company short on the quality of employees or contractors it could attract?

I am a one woman business. While client work is what pays the bills, I also have to divvy up my time into bookkeeping, sales, content creation, marketing, as well as internal research and development. Oh, and keeping the domicile reasonably habitable and the carbon-based lifeforms within it fed, watered and given various levels of attention. Same as most solopreneurs, really. Maybe the same as you.

Now, you may imagine that as long as someone is willing to pay me that I’m entirely agnostic about who I work with, but in reality, there are some red flags that come up in pre-sales communication that tell me the work culture may be a bad fit for someone with more a few years experience, so I’d like to talk about what these are, and why I think they sell the companies short, not because they’re not working with me, but because they’re limiting themselves to a specific type of mindset of worker and evaluating them with, in my opinion, a bad protocol for business.

Before I get into it, I have to say that I completely empathise with this mindset and protocol, because when I worked in-house before starting Wyld, that’s exactly how I thought.

First, the mindset:

When your day involves doing one task, it behoves you to do that well. In order to know that you’re doing well, you will naturally look at what other people are doing and compare notes. You’ll compare trendiness, problem-solving, creativity, and technical skill required. If you compare yourself long enough, you’ll form Opinions on what is Good and Bad work. Over time, a natural consequence of measuring yourself and findings others short or at best equal, is that you’ll get kinda “pure” about it. ‘Snobby’ is how people outside the team may describe it.

When I worked in-house as a web designer, I cared a lot about how technically skilled people were. Frameworks were for the weak. Stock art meant you didn’t care. Your markup structure, skillset and page load speed defined your worth in my eyes.

But here’s the thing: the things we use to make ourselves feel skilled in comparisons to others within our field, may not matter to the business bottom line one tiny iota. Worse than that? Taking too narrow (or “pure”) a stance can actually stop you from making decisions that do positively impact the business bottom line and make your stakeholders happy.

So what are the red flags? I’m just going to pick one today, and write about the others later. Today’s is:

“I have the app/website I want you to base this project on.“

Here is the problem with thinking you know what the end product should look like:

UX is not the same as designing a css library and theming an app, website or product.

The final UX layout and look evolves from the functions the user needs to perform in your app. It’s based on your user expectations and from their experience levels. It is designed to meet your unique business goals in order of priority, designed to your specific sales model to your target demographic, it has to accommodate the content you already have or can acquire (not the ones in the rival app, theme or screenshot), with options appropriate to the content format of choice (video, sound, photos). It’s designed to deliver on the metrics you decide are important to measure the success of this app.

UX for an app that’s designed to influence user behavior will differ from one designed to entertain, to one designed simply inform, to one that enables users to complete a task with only a thumb swipe while getting off the train and chatting to a friend.

When the above factors are taken into account, the designs clients want to replicate are rarely appropriate. By attempting to self-diagnose, you’re inadvertently capping your business’s potential and that of your new or for-hire talent. People who liked to be told what to deliver are inexperienced and still working on their techniques. They haven’t learned to see where their skills fit into the big picture and shift their thinking to use those skills to meet business needs. Meanwhile, since the prescriber doesn’t have the full skillset of his potential employee to self-prescribe, the diagnosis is faulty or at best, incomplete.

Instead of giving the answer to the person you paying or looking for to fix something for you, try telling them what you need to achieve, what resources you have available, what limitations you have, and what your priorities are, then ask them how they would begin. You’ll get a much better final product, and attract much better talent, I promise you.

Barnes and Nobel’s Boutique Nook Store: What Makes it Different to Amazon’s

February 26, 2016

After Amazon’s physical book stores, Barnes and Nobel plans a physical Nook store to be launched this year.

One of the challenges of that (prototype) store is going to be the digital experience,” CEO Boire told conference-goers. “I don’t think until you’re fully connected—mobile, desktop, and store—that you’re going to be providing the full experience. That’s our goal.

I love their angle on connecting their physical stores to their e-readers. Waterstones had these boxed ebooks on shelves that you had to take to the counter, pay for, and then download via in store wifi. It’s true they loaded via wifi onto any e-reader, but queuing for a digital product was counter intuitive.

So, how will Barnes and Nobel deal with this? NFC chips on the back of book covers, I would imagine, based on this interview with ex-CEO William Lynch in 2012:

We’re going to start embedding NFC chips into our Nooks. We can work with the publishers so they would ship a copy of each hardcover with an NFC chip embedded with all the editorial reviews they can get on BN.com. And if you had your Nook, you can walk up to any of our pictures, any our aisles, any of our bestseller lists, and just touch the book, and get information on that physical book on your Nook and have some frictionless purchase experience. That’s coming, and we could lead in that area.

It’s true that I’m not seeing any Nook devices with NFC available on Barnes and Nobel store yet (although of course, many mobile devices have NFC already and their app is promoted prominently on their site) but it gives an idea of Barnes and Noble’s long game.

Connecting online sales to offline marketing (and vice versa) has always created a data gap filled with GQ codes and google tagged short links on flyers and billboards – but anything that takes effort on the part of the consumer, such as downloading a QR code reader or entering a non-readable, randomly generated short link, or even standing in line with a ridiculous empty box in your hands that needs to be scanned before you can download you ebook- is a barrier to sales. Meanwhile, publishers don’t need to embed NFC chips into their books on printing: Barnes and Nobel can stick them on in the same way that every product has a chip to stop you sneaking them outside the stores.

With a physical store boosting sales of their branded devices, promoting their bookstore app, and control over their own device hardware, it’s a nice way of making the transaction of digital product in a physical store seamless and pleasurable, gaining a bigger share of the digital sales, as well as connecting which stores -if there should be more than one in the future- influence more digital sales.

I can even see the potential for a Audible-like or kindle Unlimited style subscription model, where you get X number of books for free per month or unlimited per month. Maybe even retargeting customers who “bump” a book or otherwise load it but don’t complete the sales transaction.

Even without NFC, I definitely hope that customers won’t be expected to scan books with a separate store app nor be required to enter the title manually in their Nook app or device for searching. Both are equivalent of queueing for digital in this day and age: a barrier.

The barcode scanner in GoodReads can pull up book information from their database, so at the very least – although it’s less elegant than Lynche’s idea, I would hope that Barnes and Nobel make a scanner part of their app and make it easy to launch without needing to search for it in their menu sidebar. The risk is that a percentage of consumers will load the book details, walk out of the store and then purchase it later after thinking about it, so the data gap won’t be closed if they have more than one store in the future.

The barcode scanner in the GoodReads app brings up book data and reviews and could be a model on which the Nook store connects their physical and digital products

Either way, the store will make their store ecosystem more visible in a bustling market of competing bookstore apps. The company’s online sales took a hit of 15.9% in 2015 with their relaunch of their BN.com website.

To me, bringing in the right talent that truly understands the difference between digital and physical and how they’re all coming together is critical.

Analysis: why ebook sales fell in 2015, and students prefer printed books

February 12, 2016

This week has seen two bits of news that superficially paint a dark picture for digital publishing:

Student’s “overwhelmingly prefer printed books” to ebooks
Ebook sales are down since 2014

And much like with medical news that’s reported, I can’t help but dig into the data behind the headlines and connect the dots.

First, let’s look at that ebook sales data, as reported by The Guardian.

Ebook Sales data between 2012 and 2015 showing a drop between 2014 and 2015 for the big five publishers — Ebook Sales data between 2012 and 2015. Taken from the Guardian.

Now, let’s reformat this table of ebook sales data based on sales percentage change year to year.

For Macmillan, Harper Collins and Hachette, there is a clear upward trend in ebook sales until 2014.

And what happened in 2014 that affected ebooks across the big five publishers?

Screenshot of amazon.com in 2014 after publishers won the right to set their own ebook prices

Yup. Price affects sales.

We’d need to see the profits data to know whether this strategy is paying off or not for publishers. In an ideal world, there would be an increase in sales and price, but it takes time for consumers to readjust to the value of a product being more than it was a mere month ago, and for some readers, price alone will be the deciding factor for some purchases. Next years data will be interesting.

Royalties vs Sales

Another event in 2014 that would cut into publisher sales data was the launch of Kindle unlimited. With their all-you-can-eat subscription model that the big five opted out of, it’s quite possible people are working their way through their perpetual, never-ending reading list and buying other books less often.

True, Oyster and Scribd were there before kindle unlimited, and do feature books by the big five, but- profit from these services would be reported as being from royalties and not sales. When you consider that about 4% of book buyers are using at least one of these services -10% if you include Amazon prime subscribers- a 2.4% dip in sales overall seems pretty modest.

A commodity more valuable than sales

What’s not reported in this data is that publishers on these subscription platforms are getting something that’s valuable for their future strategies: reader behavior metrics. Is it possible that the dip in sales indicates a lack of direction in how to interpret and use this data for maximum advantage?

“Students prefer ebooks”

This topic interests me because there have been reports suggesting that paper books provide better learning experiences, but in the cases I’ve seen so far, this amounts to either software user experience (UX) issues or poor content strategy. What am I talking about?

In students aged 7-14, interactive ebooks where the animations did not support the content of the text were found to cause less reading comprehension, as the students were distracted by “entertaining” animations or games instead of the text. When interactive content reinforced the text, however, comprehension was found to go up. The headlines imply the technology is the problem, but it’s the content strategy for that medium that was poor.

And the UX-related issues? When we talk about students and ebooks, we need to consider how these ebooks are read. The data for the revealed this week was conducted in 2010, only a year after the second generation kindle was released and the same year the first ipad was released. These high-end items that most students just didn’t have yet. They were reading on their computer, which if you’ve ever tried reading a 70 page pdf at work will know, is a terrible user experience, so I’m not surprised they voted the way they did. Similarly, studies indicating that the ebooks result in more eyestrain compared to paper books were also conducted by students on monitors, not e-reader or tablets.

Today we have $40 and $27 tablets. e-readers more accessible than ever, and the software interface more important than ever.And what students are telling us about this software, is that:

Today we have $40 and $27 tablets. The UX of e-reading software is more important than ever. Click To Tweet

They need more help monitoring their time studying.
They want effortless, regular feedback for the amount of progress they’ve made in study session. Studying is a lot like running, and you need regular, unprompted encouragement to keep going. When I think of running apps, they do a great job of asking individuals how often they want to be notified and what they want to be notified off. This would also help point number 1, and encourage break taking.
They need notifications to be switched off on devices to focus on their reading. There are standalone apps that do this for user specified time slots, but I would like to see a “Study mode” switch included in e-reading software that takes care points 1-3.
Note taking needs to be easier. Tablets or kindles don’t make this a comfortable experience yet, and there is evidence that hand writing that reinforces learning, so I think this an interesting UX problem to solve, perhaps in a more streamlined way than evernote links handwritten notes to digital pages.

Evernote's camera and note pad link handwritten notes to digital notes — Evernote’s camera App and notepad link handwritten notes to digital pages.

Printables should be bundled with ebooks. Flashcards, cheatsheets, and for note taking.

I’m optimistic that there is an immense opportunity for growth for well thought out content and improved reading software features.

2 Myths about enhanced ebooks that need to die

January 27, 2016

Every time I read about enhanced ebooks, one of these two phrases creep up somewhere, and not only are they wrong, but they hold the product type back.

1. “Enhanced ebooks must offer a consistent experience across all devices”

If there is one thing that having an android phone and apple tablet have shown me, it’s that mobile users don’t expect consistency from app developers. Facebook for iPad has a different layout to Facebook mobile. Whatsapp’s interface looks different on Windows phones than for android or iOS- like a native metro app. Many start-up apps (is Peach dead already?) are iOs only, and even in more developed apps, not all features are always available cross platform.
No. We don’t expect constancy. We already know that the price tag on the iPhone includes the fact that apps will be developed for it first, and for all other devices later. Now, imagine if games developers decided that unless a game was playable on every computer and platform, they won’t develop it. There would either be no games, or very basic ones.

That’s what’s happening to enhanced ebooks right now. Trying to make a product for everyone means no one gets a good product, let alone a great one. You don’t need to cater to every e-reader out there. It just creates deeply average products, and people don’t pay extra for average.

Which brings us nicely to point #2…

2. “Enhanced ebooks don’t sell”

This is like saying that because Pompeii bombed in the box office, that 3D films don’t sell. As much as I like watching Sasha Roiz, Pompeii was an underwhelming film offering with 3D effects tacked onto it at the end.

Similarly, enhanced ebooks are still too often just regular ebooks with a few embedded videos and audio files, so unless it’s a language learning, music learning or similar ebook where having audio and visuals embedded in the book adds real value (imagine having to put down your book, pick up the phone or tablet, or boot up the Chromebook, trying to ignore all the other notifications, download the MP3s or supplementary learning materials, opening them and then switching back to your book. Way too much context switching to learn something) it’s not worth paying extra for.

To get the most value from enhanced ebooks, such that they are worth the extra cost, they need to be planned as such ahead of production – ahead of writing, even- to find a presentation narrative that works for that subject and its audience. And believe me, as a graduate in two STEM subjects, there are so many ways that having those big, heavy course books transformed into something that not only can be carried with you lightly (as the success of loose leaf bindings already show), but can go beyond the often confusing limits of text and static images to really help you absorb the subject matter more quickly, is something you can expect to get real returns from investing in.

These are difficult, kinda scary subjects for undergraduates which their libraries are out of stock off a few weeks from exam time – the exact moment they’re feeling the most insecure about their ability to understand, say, immunology. And who can blame them? Look at this diagram and tell me you wouldn’t pay extra to understand and memorise this within two weeks? Because that’s what you’re really selling – if you plan the product well.

A simplified guide to the immune system. A complex, giant graph that would benefit from being made interactive or animated in en enhanced ebook — “A simplified guide to the immune system”, found on meducation.net I think we can agree that the interactivity an enhanced ebook offers could really simplify the learning of complex subjects such as this.

What do you think? Tweet me @atomicbutterfly or use the contact form below.