I was at a company the other day that I’m considering investing in. They walked me through their v2 web design and we did a detailed review of it. While it’s much improved over v1, there were still plenty of things that could be improved. One of the people in the meeting suggested everyone review the list of Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005.
In addition I’d recommend everyone click through the following links and look carefully at the page design.
Forget about the content – just concentrate on the design. Is that [blue black green] thing the Google standard, Yahoo standard, or Microsoft standard? Given that this is what people look at 90% of the time they search, why would you present search results in a different way?
And – in case you are wondering – there are great examples of Flash. Take a look at this IKEA site (thanks Eric D) – make sure you pan left and right. When Amy and I bought our house in Alaska, we went online and bought an entire house full of furniture at JCPenney.com in an afternoon. Unfortunately, the didn’t have a “buy a house full of furniture button” at the time – if they had, our online experience would have been that much easier.
I got a Verizon BroadBand Access card (formerly known as “EVDO”) 12 days ago. I’ve been on the road non-stop since then. I can’t imagine life without it. As I sit in the Seattle airport waiting for the redeye to Boston, I haven’t had to sign up for Internet, struggle with any weird logins, wander to another part of the terminal to try to get T-mobile, or anything else. It’s flawless – fast – totally effective – and trivial to deal with. I’ve already saved the monthly subscription fee ($60) through not having to pay $10 / night for Internet access in my hotel rooms and I’ve managed to squeeze in some online time at random spots waiting for things (e.g. the 15 minutes I had to wait for a cab at Microsoft today).
Now, if I could just get my bluetooth headset to work with my laptop and Skype I’d be in geek heaven.
Kevin Maney at USA Today was in fine form yesterday with his article titled “Tech People Appear Hyped About Their Industry Again.” It’s worth a read if you are struggling with whether it’s Web 2.0 or Bubble 2.0.
If you aren’t an avid Scobleizer reader you might have missed the GooglePark cartoon series. Hysterical.
It just feels so real. Web 2.0 fans, beware the underpants gnomes.
It appears that Google has finally officially declared war on Microsoft. I find this completely perplexing, as I’d think a more effective strategy would be to simply sidestep the whole desktop OS / app thing and just continue to innovate like crazy. Why pick a fight when you don’t need to?
At dinner last night with Scott Moody (the founder of Throw – which was acquired by Excite in 1998), we began talking about the difference on the web between groups and individuals. While we slurped down our intensely spicy Vietnamese soup, Scott suggested that much of the current generation of web software has a conceptual design flaw – namely that it has been created for individuals (one) rather than groups (many) even though it is used by many (and the great utility of most of the software is when it is used by many).
We batted the idea around for a while as the plates of food covered with fire came and went. Amy and I have been struggling with this problem as we’ve tried to collaborate on a few things recently using new web-based software and haven’t been able to get everything “just right” (ask Amy about organizing “our” photos). When I reflect on the challenges, it comes back to the notion that the software we are using is really designed to be used by a single user (vs. a group of users). There is no concept of workflow, no shared storage, no intra-process communication, and no notion of shared conflicts that need to be resolved.
When I first started designing PC-based custom database applications in the 1980’s, we used to differentiate between “single-user” and “multi-user” mode, as data sharing issues were different (non-existent) in single-user mode and you could do performance optimization that you couldn’t do in multi-user mode. As hardware became faster and the database software built in more levels of abstraction, this distinction disappeared. However, we had long since shifted our designs to multi-user mode in almost all cases as it was the general case (where single-user mode was simply multi-user model with #users=1).
It seems like the same issue applies here. There are some specific cases where multi-user design has been embedded in the app (wiki’s immediately come to mind), but many of the current web apps are decidedly single-user or – even if they support “multiple-users” – clearly have a single-user feel to them making their design suboptimal for a group of more than one users.
So – is many a special case for one or is one a special case for many? All Lisp programmers know the answer – do you?
Most of the customer support stories I read on the web are about lousy experiences. Tonight – I had an awesome one.
After dinner, Amy treated me to 30 minutes at Best Buy in Soho to buy a Verizon Wireless EVDO Card for my October Life Dinner gift. The folks at Best Buy did a good job even though they ended up setting me up for the wrong version of the service. My laptop doesn’t have a CD-ROM drive, so I had to download the software from the Internet.
My first attempt failed as the Verizon web site didn’t recognize my cell phone number. I called customer support, worked through the phone tree, and immediately got to a guy who seemed to know what he was talking about. He gave me a special magic code to download the software and then asked if he could stay on the phone until everything was up and running. I downloaded the software and then walked through the installation step by step. When I got to the end, things worked, but they seemed very slow (much slower than my expectation). It turns out that the Best Buy folks set me up with the wrong service plan. Mr. Good Support told me he could transfer me to an account rep to get me on the right plan.
Two minutes later I was talking to Ms. Very Nice Southern Accent who looked up my account, made the change (while keeping me on the same payment plan), walked me through resetting my EVDO card, and confirmed that I was all set to go.
For once, an awesome experience. Thanks Verizon people.
I spent some time at lunch recently with Chris Sacca – one of the business development guys at Google. Chris just put a post up on his blog with hints about how to get his attention if you are a company that wants to do a deal with Google. It’s instructive, useful, and full of Google style.
Jeff Jarvis – who has written extensively on his terrible customer experience in Dell Hell – doesn’t have a monopoly (nor does Dell) on stupid customer experience moves. Ryan McIntyre – who I work with closely and has been a huge Apple user (and fan) for as long as I can remember – has a delicious post on his absurd experience with Apple, at the Apple Store, and with the Apple Customer Support Immune System. Painfully funny.