February 2012
1 post
Demoing Product
Most product demos are disastrous. I’ve gone through more trainwrecks than I would care to have, and thought I’d share some of my scars and random learnings on the topic.
Beware the projector. These things are the devil. You have three challenges here: a) severely limited resolution b) severely limited contrast and c) unpredictable connection to the demo machine. Mitigate the first by...
September 2011
1 post
August 2011
3 posts
This is Broadway
Most likely we’ll do several things over the course of our career, maybe 6 or 7. If we’re lucky we’ll do interesting work, or if we’re really lucky, work that we genuinely enjoy.
It is an uncommon and fortuitous opportunity to have work that is fascinating, challenging, enjoyable, and that can leverage an existing force of nature and become simply unstoppable.
This is the...
Ben M Greene: Why Continuous Deployment Matters →
benmgreene:
Here at Boundless Learning, we implemented continuous deployment about six weeks into the start of the company and over four weeks before launching our first alpha release. Why was this so important to us? Because we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Continuous deployment is more than a…
May 2011
3 posts
How to Turn Hate into Love
Love or hate are the signs you’re on to something. Indifference is to be avoided. - @dcancel
The above represents, for many, a confusing and even troubling statement. If you are aiming to build an amazing product, why on earth would you want people to hate it?
Building a world-changing product is quite difficult, and like any creative effort is largely the process of making thousands of...
Must Have Features
The next time a feature seems like it absolutely has to be included in your next release just remember that Constant Contact went public without multi-user support and iTunes has no record button.
April 2011
1 post
March 2011
1 post
WatchFacebook Page Analytics
February 2011
2 posts
1 tag
January 2011
4 posts
Conversion Secret #2: No More One-Night Stands
Every year I spend the entire first week of September going to birthday parties.
Do the math.
No one had a baby AT the New Year’s Eve party I went to this year. Does that mean no one got pregnant that night?
Anything worth anything in this world has a gestation period. This is especially true for decisions regarding purchase, adoption, and loyalty of products/brands/companies/services.
...
December 2010
1 post
1 tag
How to Build a World-Class Facebook Page
Why you should listen to me on this topic: A few years ago I started a blogging program. It grew from one person writing feverishly (me) to a staff of about 30 people. Readership is today approaching the 1,000,000 mark. Facebook was a huge part of this growth, and today that blogging effort commands the engagement of about 500,000 fans. I won’t get into growth numbers, but I will say that...
November 2010
5 posts
The Next Iteration
Today is my last day at TL. This is the first time I’ve cleaned out a desk, packed up the car, and driven off without looking back.
In truth I will look back, and I have already started to reflect on what we’ve accomplished as a company in the past 3 1/2 years.
We completely reorganized the company. We moved successfully from desktop software to a product line that allows...
Return of the JFDI
Today is a day of mixed emotions. I just told the team that I will be leaving the helm of our product/ux group and beginning a new chapter. That chapter begins on November 29th, 2010, and promises to be massively challenging as well as a huge opportunity for learning and growth.
It’s time to take a deep breath and a leap of faith.
Above all else, it’s time to just fucking do this.
The Best Freemium Data Visualization Ever
Cohort Conversion Rate Over Time
I want this graph in an analytics product so badly it makes me dizzy.
Look closely until you are sure you understand the power of this visualization.
This is not the Evernote conversion rate to premium over the years they have been in business. This is the cumulative conversion rate for a group of users, as they live with the product for several years.
A 1%...
Time to Renovate Your Embeds?
We recently redesigned our Word of the Day foreign language widgets. We’ve had these up for a couple of years now and they’ve been placed in the wild a whole lot.
Look what happened to our main site traffic when we launched the redesign (there were two stages of the launch, which explains the two distinct upticks).
140% total increase in site traffic.
It’s worth considering...
October 2010
4 posts
Air Travel
danpullman:
United: you may not board early. There will not be room in the overhead bins. Your mileage plus points won’t help you. Thank you for paying for extra leg room but you still can’t board early and you should still check your carry on bags.
Jet Blue: welcome aboard. Enjoy the tv. You may board early. No you don’t need to check your bags.
Why Test? Because You're Wrong.
A couple of months ago we started a split test that I was extremely excited about. We had been testing basic hypotheses by removing top-level navigation, adding/subtracting Learn More buttons, as well as running some of the other plays in the basic landing page optimization playbook. This new test was to be a departure, a redesign of the site chrome as well as some of the page elements.
Our...
September 2010
9 posts
Please reblog!
hiten:
Everyone with a tumblr site should use http://wasitup.com and start forwarding their emails to support@tumblr.com so they *fix* their uptime issues once and for all. Who’s with me?
7 tags
Time Ranges Done Right: Fixing a Common Analytics...
It can takes customers weeks to complete a purchase cycle. How does your analytics product handle that?
The Epidemic
It’s no secret that web metrics, analytics, measurement and optimization products have been much the rage as of late in the technology and marketing communities. Recently we’ve seen promising startups gain traction, and large companies in this area exit to even...
7 tags
Conversion Secret #1: Length Matters
Bad news: Your funnel is too short
This one goes out to everyone out there obsessed with measurement. Ok you, get your mind out of the gutter, we have real business to attend to here.
The last step of your funnel is not sales
In past articles I’ve discussed the importance of favoring downstream metrics in your testing. This principle basically means that the further through the sales...
5 tags
Facebook Ads: The New 'Social' Metric
Facebook just added a new ‘Social Context’ metric for Facebook ads
I’m not surprised. We had recently figured out that targeting on Facebook was not just useful, but necessary, and the single biggest targeting trick we discovered was targeting friends of people who were currently fans of our page. Why? Facebook uses social proof brilliantly by showing users who in their social...
August 2010
5 posts
Offline Report Generation on App Engine
Check out this article I wrote for the good Google peeps. It’s about boring things like Map Reduce and marketing data. w00t!
dream.ini
Background
I have, throughout my life, had periods where my dreams have become extremely vivid and intense, and at times fully lucid. There’s a movie out about lucid dreaming right now, perhaps you’ve seen it. Much of what is in Inception is actually quite real; perhaps I should go into that in another post but in short, the totems, clocks, time stretching and inconsistency and so...
6 tags
I'm Split Testing ... Why Haven't I Doubled My...
The Challenge
Perhaps you have been doing some split testing with your landing pages, particularly ones close to purchase.
Maybe you’ve done nifty things like change call-to-action buttons around and test the impact and WOW you are getting a nice 50% bump in people clicking that Buy Now! button.
Here’s a real test running in Performable. This is a late-in-the-funnel page seen only...
5 tags
Sorry Doug, Marissa was Right. Very Right.
Would drivers be more or less likely to stop at this ‘redesigned’ stop sign?
There are calls to action in this world. In many cases these rely on visual cues, signs and symbols. As a society, and even as a species, we communicate through a ‘universal’ visual language. This language comes from experience, from government, from cultural trends and taste, and many other...
A/B Testing for Product Market Fit: Resonant...
At a talk I recently attended, the speaker advocated the use of split testing testing and pointed to the visual beauty and quality user experience of a well-known (and recently acquired) web application. The message he left the audience with was “see, this is why you test, because you care about ux and quality design.”
My belief is that this particular company, well-known for their...
July 2010
1 post
4 tags
The Trouble with A/B Split Testing
Background
Split testing is very popular right now, and many people have the perception is that without hardly lifting a finger a company can achieve game-changing lift. This one post alone sent scores of designers and marketing folks running to change the text on their signup buttons, and in many cases pursue split tests of their own.
For a few more common and interesting data point on the...
June 2010
4 posts
3 tags
What's Wrong with the iPad
With permission, I am publishing here an extremely in-depth and relevant review of the iPad by someone at our company.
The owner of the iPad was absolutely thrilled to buy one, after playing with the company model a bit.
She is now selling her iPad.
I asked her why. What did she find frustrating?
Pretty much everything…I basically justified keeping it in the 14-day
return period just...
1 tag
WatchLearn:
1) A cool Google Analytics hack that you can use on your site.
2) One way to think about metrics that can help create actionability in your anayltics.
Why You Should Care About Your URLs (and how to!)
I’ve noticed something in user testing, and in my personal life observing friends (including non-tech-professionals) using the internet: they visually scan the URL of the page they are on all the time.
People read and use URLs.
URLs are part of every page on the web, they are a handle, a pointer, a reference, a micro help file, and a guide.
URLs are intuitive. Every user of the web has...
Turn Off Your App
I want you to do something, and this is not a joke.
Turn off your web application. Seriously, pull the plug - don’t put up a ‘site maintenance’ page. Wait an hour. Turn it back on.
Miraculously, the world continued to rotate, didn’t it?
If you are reading this, chances are you are not publishing/developing a product that people rely on for, say, the functioning of their...
April 2010
3 posts
Hypothesis and Action
‘Don’t be an attorney, be a judge.’
‘Agree before you disagree.’
‘Take the conversation up a level.’
If following these pieces of advice are second nature to you, perhaps this framework for general business/product strategy may hold some appeal. My hope is that it is equally applicable to product managers, developers, marketers, executives - anyone on...
March 2010
2 posts
Performable Blog: Does Page Color Matter? (Test... →
One of the questions we get a lot at Performable is: “Do light or dark web pages work better?”. This question usually comes after a design team has been discussing a change to their web site, and they’re considering their options.
There are several reasons why light pages seem like the right…