Trumblog

I was listening to an NPR story on credit the other day and was struck by the similarity between credit score and search rank.  Here’ s an edited transcript of one section of the story:

Texas-based flight attendant Lilli Durbin used to have six credit cards, which is fairly typical for this country. She couldn’t pay them off, but she says she always played by the rules: “Always paid more than my minimum balance, always paid it a week or two in advance.” … [then] Durbin was notified late last year that the bank behind two of those cards was going to drop her credit limit — from about $10,000 to $4,000 for each card. That was right around the average balance she’d been holding… Durbin was particularly upset that the change meant her credit score would drop, because her balance was suddenly bumping up against her credit limit. She feared that might complicate her effort to refinance her house.

Like search engine ranking, credit score has some basic known rules, but with underlying uncertainty on their precise application to achieve the score, and that alogorithm can and does change at a moment’s notice, which can have disastrus effects on the user.  A good analagy that I’ll be using with clients in the future.

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A couple weeks ago Skittles changed their website so that rather than Skittles.com leading to a brand website it now leads to one of several social media websites, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. along with a widget allowing visitors to navigate between them.  Relying on these sites rather than their own releases their control of the brand and places it in the arms of their fans to steer, amplify and spread.  Skittles also adds to  the conversation through media on YouTube and Flickr.  Though Skittles was not the first brand to have done this, Mondernista has used this strategy for over a year now, it resulted in a flood of news stories and blog posts.

Now a company, UnHub makes it easy for you to “Skittle yourself” and use your fan’s, or your own, online activity to publicise yourself and your engagement with the online conversation.   UnHub makes it very easy to set up a page with links to almost 50 websites and includes analytics of activity on your page.  Take a look at Barack Obama’s UnHub, with links to his Wikipedia entry, WhiteHouse.gov, his Twitter account,  his books on Amazon.com and his YouTube account page.  Josie’s Retaurant uses their UnHub page interestingly with links to their website, third party menu and delivery sites and of course their Yelp reviews.  I’ve set up my own UnHub page with links to my LinkedIn page, blog, Twitter, Del.icio.us., Google shared items, Flickr, my music reviews blog Playlistapalooza, Zune and Yelp that should show my full range of activity and interests. I’ve also added a link from my Lifestream to my UnHub page, which may seem duplicative, but there you have it.  Let me know how you have used UnHub in interesting ways and why.

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Saving the world from drunken emails last year Google launched Mail Goggles that was an after hours hurdle to sending inappropriate emails by requiring a few math problems be solved in advance.  That humorous concept seems have led to a more serious and useful feature.  Google Mail’s new  Undo Send functionality holds your email for 5 seconds before sending so that you can pull it back and switch from reply to all to just reply to sender, attach a forgotten attachment, etc.  This feature must be for a more sober audience, since it will take an alcohol addled brain more than 5 seconds to realize that the email that they sent was a bad idea and by then it’s too late.

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Some  symbols are obvious, like red hexagons and yellow triangles for street signs.  Some are less well known, but unconsciously drive our understanding and decisions, such as orange being the international color for decaffeinated coffee.  At our peril we ignore these shorthand identifiers and therefore risk misunderstandings and errors.

Baking Soda, Baking Powders and Their Containers

Baking soda and baking powder are very similar.  They are both ” leavening agents” , which means that they are used to increase the volume and lighten the texture of baked goods.  They both have the word “baking” at the beginning of their names.

However, baking soda and baking powder are different. Baking powder is basically just baking soda mixed with an acid, like cream of tartar.  This means that they are not a 1:1 replacement for each other, though you can see that it is easy to whip up some fresh baking powder from scratch if necessary.  If you make the mistake of using baking soda when you should have used baking powder you’ll probably realize it when either your pancakes turn out hard and flat or with a bitter, tinny taste.

Arm and Hammer is the best known brand of baking soda and for baking powder it’s Rumford. Considering how close the two products are I have no idea why neither brand seems to sell both products, but they don’t.  Whether it was purposeful or not these two products come in two different and very distinct styles of containers.  Arm and Hammer baking soda is sold in a familiar yellow box and Rumford baking soda comes in a small red cylinder.  These styles of container have become visual shorthand for their contents.  There’s no need to read the exterior, the style of the container says it all.

The Perils Of Ignoring Expectations

If you don’t have one nearby, Trader Joe’s is a specialty grocery store that sells organic and gourmet  foods as well as staples, many with a house brand label.  It’s a niche market that people either love or hate.  A while back I thought that I bought baking powder when shopping at Trader Joe’s and didn’t find out that I had actually bought baking soda until we wondered why our pancakes tasted weird. Looking at the container on the right, you’ll understand why I made the mistake twice (once when I bought the can and again when I used the can thinking that it was baking soda).

The small red cylinder that Trader Joe’s puts its baking soda in clearly mimics Rumsford’s baking powder packaging.  Not only that, but the fact that the baking soda isn’t in the small yellow box that I, and most of America has grown to associate with baking soda is also confusing.  It’s a double whammy.  Sure the package says “Baking Soda” on it, but to shoppers and cooks who for years have associated one type of packaging with this product  why bother reading the label.  Arm and Hammer and Rumsford have been so successful in their marketing that we associate the packaging that their products come in as shorthand for the products themselves.  We’ve been conditioned to not have to look at the brand or the product name, just the type of container.  This makes it easy to mistake the Trader Joe’s baking soda for baking powder and is the reason that we label the top of  our container in order to avoid mistakes.

Learning From The Mistakes Of Others

I write this both as a warning to all of you who shop at Trader Joe’s and also as a lesson on usability. Trader Joe’s probably had good reasons for developing their Baking Soda packaging the way that they did.  I’m guessing here, but I can imagine a designer explaining how much nicer it is to have a matching set of red containers rather than the Laurel and Hardy pair of a  squat yellow box and tall thin can.   The cylinder is also a better container in general.  It’s more easily resealable, the yellow box never fully closes after it’s opened, and the canister has a handy straight metal edge at the top that is so useful for leveling off a teaspoon measure.  Smart people had good reasons for this design.  But it’s problematic because it conflicts with user expectations.

It’s a usability issues that I’ve run into myself. Many times I’ve reviewed website designs where a designer has developed a new navigational element or functionality like a search window that uses a new or different layout or icon.  We discuss how it works and it all makes sense, maybe it’s even better than what is “standard”.  But 9 out of 10 times in usability testing we run into problems because the new indicators are different from the visual shorthand that the visitors to the site expect.  They don’t see the new icons or understand what the icons are telling them.  It’s not because the designs are bad or because the visitors are stupid, it’s just that they expect something other than what they are given.  And when that happens there are problems.

These are the usability and design issues that are the hardest to uncover and prove why usability testing is so necessary.  Clients, project managers, designers, developers we all get too close to a project to realize the assumptions that we’ve made and that fresh, new, visitors won’t.  Only usability testing can uncover it and is why it’s so critical. What packaging usability issues have you run into and are you doing enough testing with your own projects?

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My wife is always impressed with how much I read and keep on top of the news, which results in lot of stupid facts that I can pull up at a moments notice. She thinks that I read a lot, but the dirty truth is that I’m a skimmer. Books, those I really do read, but anyone who’s friends with me on Facebook knows from the infrequent updates to my Visual Bookshelf that the number of books I actually finish is pretty small until a holiday or vacation rolls along. But I keep up on the daily minutea through blogs, magazines and newspapers and those I skim like a madman.

Headlines are key when it comes to successful skimming.  The reason is pretty obvious; skimming is all about hierarchy and digging deeper when as you get the scent of more interesting information.  The headline is the top of the hierarchy. If that summary of the article seems interesting then I dig deeper.  If the first paragraph seems to lead to even more interesting content then I read the first sentences of following paragraphs and look for key words that jump out in paragraphs after that.  For a lot of articles this is enough for me.  If the scent of information is strong enough I really read the article from beginning to end.

There is an implicit trust that I have that a headline is an accurate summary of the article is leads.  When that doesn’t happen it is frustrating.  I think that I’ll be getting one bit of content and receive something else instead.  It slows me down and hurts my trust in the content provider.  Here are two examples.

Americans Say News Still Fit For Print, Distrust Blogs
This MediaPost article’s headline links American’s desire for a print news medium and distrust in blogs.  Now the fact that 80% of Americans subscribe to magazines and 83% consider daily newspapers to still be relevant is great news for the floundering newspaper industry.  It’s also interesting that 60% of respondents do not consider information found on blogs to be “credible.”  But there’s no connection between these two facts which would have been very interesting. The article doesn’t state how much more credible the respondents find print media if they do at all. And if print news is so necessary for credibility then why, as the article states, do “two-thirds of Americans now use Web sites “devoted to news” as a daily source, and nearly a third consider them to be their No. 1 source of news and information.” It turns out that the news really is that though readers don’t completely trust information on blogs it doesn’t mean that they then want or need a print newspaper in order to receive trusted news, which is sort of the opposite of the headline.

Obama drives US toward socialism, GOP says
Now it seems to me that whether bank and auto industry bailouts are steps toward socialism and then if Obama’s actions are any more socialist than Bush’s is a matter of opinion rather than fact .  Therefore the news that the Boston Globe should be reporting is that the GOP is making this charge against the president and the correct headline should be “GOP says: Obama drives US toward socialism.”

Come on folks, write a good, useful, accurate headline.  Not only does this help us to skim, but it leads to more accurate search results and trust from the reader and credibility. And, if you read that first article you’ll understand, are the two things that consumer’s want in their online media.

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This post is made possible by the folks at Virgin America and Go Go Inflight Internet.  I am flying over the heartland of the United States, returning email, IMing, Twittering , surfing the web, posting to Flickr and now blogging.  There are some who will mourn the loss of one more refuge from accessibility, but today I am not one of them.  I am grateful not to have cell phone service which saves me from some conference calls and of my own and listening to those of the other guys in my row.  This state of being connected with limitations is serving my productivity well.   Who knows how long I’ll enjoy this but for now I’m riding the wave and ordering another cup of coffee from the touch screen.

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I just updated to WordPress 2.7.1 and it went swimmingly.  I can see no difference to the display of the site, but the admin offers a lot of new features that are very exciting, auto-updating especially.  Also very gratifying is that none of my existing plugins seem to have any problems with the new version of WordPress.

I didn’t get to the addition of Facebook Connect Commenting this weekend, but perhaps in the next couple of weeks, especially if it starts catching on.

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Over the holidays we moved our offices from Hollywood on the Charles (Watertown, MA) to the heart of New England biotech (Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA).  Actually I didn’t do any of the move myself, I just packed up a few bins before the holiday and then while I was enjoying some time off other folks made sure that those bins were moved into the right office and that internet and phones were good to go when I got in this morning.

I’ll miss the old mill building on the Charles, funky decor and lunch walks along the river, but I won’t miss the mice that would visit in the winter and the conference rooms that were either too hot or too cold.  The new place certainly has less character, but is pretty cool.  A three stop commute on the red line can’t be beat and rather than a ground floor view of a zip car in the parking lot I’m on the 17th floor and can see Fenway park from my window.  Come on over for a visit if you’re in the area.

Update
A few days later they turned on the lights at Fenway Park, which is also visible from my office.

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Sara Taylor is the former political director of the Bush White House and she has one idea [about what will be next in harnessing grass-roots political support via technology]. “We’re at a place in the country where almost everybody has a cell phone, but not many people have a smartphone, meaning a video-enabled phone. But that will change over the next three to four or five years” and by then Taylor says if you are a mom with two kids who cares about education “a smart, forward-leaning campaign will know that. They will have had you sign up into their system and they’ll be able to serve you advertising, via a text message that links right to video, with your candidate speaking, in a beautiful video, about the importance of education reform. That, I think, is most likely to be the next iteraction of new technology .”

Obama Looks To Harness Grass-Roots Support
by Mara Liasson Morning Edition on NPR 11/12/2008

It feels like since the election news has been either deciphering the Obama campaign or prognosticating about the Obama administration and last week on Morning Edition there was a piece on technology and social media discussing what Obama would do with his enormous database of volunteers collected and motivated to action online.  In the report, Sara Taylor from the Bush White House envisioned a country of soccer/ hockey moms, smart phone in hard having exactly the right message targeted to them.  That’s not far fetched and I’m sure that in 2012 it will happen.  But if that is what Taylor learned from the Obama campaign then the Republicans should prepare themselves for a longer absence from the oval office than they think.  What they should learn is exactly what I told the radio “It’s not about advertising it’s about conversation.”

Targeting audiences is nothing new.  Direct mail has been doing it for years.  And targeting an individual voter/ consumer through their smart phone, a highly personalized medium that can deliver faster a more dynamic video message, would clearly have a significant impact.  But it’s still a one-way communication.  Taylor’s not seeing the opportunity in the revolutionary way that Obama used the internet this election.

Obama succeeded because he engaged in a conversation with his audience, a two-way communication.  He didn’t just send messages, he encouraged a response.  And the response that he got was amazing.  New websites, blogs, songs on YouTube and artwork about Obama appeared every day.  My wife and I wondered if any candidate had ever inspired such art before.  Probably not, but even if they had the internet allowed the artists to promote their art and social media helped to spread the word and make it viral.

Supporters shared the latest inspired reaction to Obama via email, Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc. and those recipients forwarded them along again. The echo chamber got louder and louder.  A message from a politician is one thing.  A message from a friend about that politician is quite another.  Why?  Because your friend is trustworthy, or an expert on some issue, or you just want to be like her.  Whatever the reason, hearing about the campaign from a friend is a powerful and persuasive message.  And messages from many friends about the same politician becomes a movement.

Understanding what audiences want and how to reach that particular segment is tough. Smart phones can make that easier. But the real revolution will be the mom with a smart phone who records a rally and sends to her friend’s phone the part of her candidate’s speech that resonates with her.  That’s an even more targeted message from a trusted source.  That’s the message that changes minds and inspires action. That’s what leads to a historic election result.

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Three weeks ago I started a blog post with a description of my luck ending up with an empty seat beside me on the Jet Blue flight to Oakland visiting a client. Since then I’ve been back to SF, traveled to NY for a day, launched a website for this client and saw the world’s view of the USA change on November 4th.  But I still haven’t finished that blog post.  The topic of that post was the same as this one; a commitment to blogging. Ironic huh?

Blogging is hard.  It takes commitment to keep doing it, to pay attention day after day and develop content. It takes time that could be spent with your family, working, reading, meditating.  It takes creativity to come up with ideas and new takes on existing ones rather than writing “me too” posts.  It takes resolution to stay on message, maintain a theme and keep up with the topic that you and the occasional reader care about, rather than drift willy-nilly from idea to idea.

I’ve been a crappy blogger lately.  If you look back at posts for the last few months you’ll see post after post of auto generated “My bookmarks…” Del.icio.us links with a post here and there.  My last real post was written 2 months ago, back in September.  Between then and now there have been 7 posts with a combined total of over 40 links, but no real content from me.  I’ve been a lazy blogger and am going to change that.

I can’t promise to do this over night, nor that I won’t stumble now and then, but here’s what I’ll commit to.

• At least 1 real post a week, hopefully 2
• Stopping Postalicious posts, if you really can’t live without those bookmarks then check out my lifestream or subscribe to my del.icio.us feed
• Add better social features to the blog; cocomment is toast, my About section needs updating and links to contact me are needed

The first commitment is the hardest.  The second is done as of right now. The third I’ll get to in the next few days as long as it doesn’t conflict with the first.

The commitment that I ask of those of you who read regularly is to keep me honest.  Ping me if I didn’t post this week.  Let me know if I’m just saying the same thing everyone else is about some new topic.  Help me be blogger that I tell my clients that they should be.

Thanks for your patience and wish me luck!

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