November 9th, 2008 by Jilles
I felt we should just talk to as many customers as possible, and do whatever they say. But that is a bad idea. It confuses the tactic, which is listening, with the strategy, which is learning.
(reference)
Exactly! This is quite hard to do, though. What happens when there are multiple people involved in the listening? People will fall into three categories:
- Not listening: don’t listen to your customers at all, instead driving your own strategy
- Only listening: start executing on exactly what your customers are asking for
- Listing & think: listen to your customer, but define your own business strategy and stick with that
This of course, needs the quote by Henry Ford about people asking for a faster horse. It is while you listen to your customers you validate and refine your strategy.
Draw up your own plan, validate it and stick with it: don’t breed a faster horse!
October 27th, 2008 by Jilles
User Experience. It took a while for me to understand the importance of User Experience (UEX) to product’s. Personally, that is pretty weird since a) my brother is a professional user experience designer and b) I worked my entire career for product companies (vs. a services organization).
It started to dawn on me when I got to see Luke Wroblewski at work. He took both a scientific approach to his work as well as tons of intuition. To me, it was a revelation to see him at work.
Later, I started getting annoyed by all kinds of UEX “bugs” in everyday life. Let me give you an example. Look at the picture of this beamer. It’s not a cheap one (nor a really expensive one either). Look closely… What is wrong here?
InFocus Beamer
The standby indicator is a couple of centimeters removed from the actual on/off button. Clearly whoever designed this, hasn’t used it, didn’t prototype or whatever. Usually beamers are used in low-light environments, and it is therefore almost impossible to find the on/off button. If the designer had just used an illuminated on/off button, the beamer would have worked better! It is these little things that start to add up. (People would start to comment “it just works”, the word spreads and booom! You’re Apple ;-))
Why do not more companies try to compete by using User Experience as their unique selling point?
Update: See this thread I started on StackOverflow for recommendations on UEX for Webapps.
Update 2: Thanks to LukeW for referencing both this blogpost, as well as telling how it is (he was the person for me opening up the importance of user experience). Go read that post, it contains more insights than my ramblings!
March 24th, 2007 by Jilles
Normally, I just follow my own Bloglines account, checking those blogs that I’m subscribed to. I always try to force myself skip on as many posts I can. But every once in a while I go on a rampage in search of new good blog (-posts). Here is a round up.
- Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me: lists the 10 things the author thinks software development has thaught him. My favorite: “he business likes to say that all the features are as crucial. They are not. Push back and make them commit.”
- Here is a post on Particletree (bookmark that site!) that talks through the 4 ways of delivering JSON objects from the server to the browser client. Also this other post that talks through paging through JSON/Ajax data plus preloading the data.
- A nice aggregation of articles talking about business models on the web
- Update: another really nice post on Amazon’s technology and what the advantage of using their systems give. (I’m not completely buying into it, but thats a post for another time — Microsoft shoving all their apps onto Amazon and Amazon not going to budge underneath the pressure??)
September 16th, 2006 by Jilles
In a recent blogpost, Edward de Leau talks about his notion of “Leanardo” — the person that is primarily responsible for innovation. I tend to agree in principle that these persons are really scarce, and even if you know someone then there is still timing to wreak havoc.
Edward goes on by providing 3 innovative ideas which he intents to revisit in a few years time to see if some came to frutation. In my blogpost I try to make a shortcut and safe Edward a few years:
1 - A site that will crawl the internet in search of structured data (XML) of products that are being sold. After the aggregation, the business model would be similar to existing classifieds sites including features, monitizing eye balls and Google AdSense.
However, such an application already exists. Instead of forcing people to write XML files and put them on a server, EdgeIO allows people to make blog posts on their already existing blogs and aggregate that. Additional revenue stream is redistributing the aggregated content “EdgeSense“.
2 - A Todo list site that brokers between people without time and with time.
This one I have not seen yet in the form I think Edward is seeing this. I envision a generic Todo site like Tadalist, including its “share todo” feature, but then with price brokering system where the person who has the Todo and the person that is willing to execute the Todo can agree a price (and potentially setting up an Escrow service).
3 - A meshup between Google Earth and anything else with a physical location.
GlobeAssistant is a company providing technology to stream locations out of your database into a users Google Earth application. A prime example is the leading Dutch Real Estate site Funda.nl (try this link if you have Earth installed).
May 28th, 2006 by Jilles
An interesting new product became available on the Internet a few months back, called “Moola”. Moola is basically a free “Weekend Millionaires” for the normal people.
It works by showing a small video before you start playing one of the games. This video nets you $0,01, for free. You ante up this one cent in the game you are about to play. That game is a game against someone else who also ante’s up one cent. If you win the game you end up with $0,02, and are only removed 29 wins from earning $10M. The coolest thing is that during this “ladder” you are free to exit and get payed as long as the sum is above $10. In total Moola already cashed out $615.000!
Currently, Moola sports two games. One is a Rock-Siccors-Paper game with a twist, over 6 rounds. The other game I did not play yet. The games are cool in and of themselves, but the added incentive really works.Up till here Moola already had some exposure in the blog world, for example on
TechCrunch, and other blogs. However, I did not see any other blogs yet that wrote about the bonuses that Moola is giving away. After me loosing my money twice Moola decided that I needed a bit more cash to get me off and decided to sponsor my account with 10 cents, see the screen shot below.
Anyway, this is a really interesting business model in my mind. The only problem with it is that the objectives of the players (you and me) are not nicely aligned with the advertisers that provide the cash. This will ultimately hurt the ROI for the advertisers and their willingness to participate. How it ends up we will see.
Update: I still have 1 invite left. Ping me if you want it!
Update 2: Things move fast in this space. Already there is a site called http://www.playmoola.com/ which sports a strategy section for the games and loads of invites left seemingly.
September 18th, 2003 by Jilles
I write this sitting on the bench, half watching television with my girlfriend. Thinking of something to write, my thoughts stumbled over how you can notice a good development team behind a product. One sign of is the roll-out of new features. For example, take Funda, a site where most houses end up when they go up for sale (in the Netherlands that is).
Because we’re looking for a house, I visit this site regularly. What I notice is that new features are implemented all the time. That feels nice for a user, you get the idea you’re not looking at some boring old system that somehow forgot to brake down. Also, the UI design is pretty good (in particular, I like the ‘Add this house to your favorites’ feature pretty well). It feels like they have this plan, containing all new features that they have planned out, waiting to go live…
But, as with every actively developed product, someone is writing it. That someone is probably not alone (believe me, I know what it takes to run a large scale website) and a development team costs money. And this is where competition (read Vbo) could cut in. For example (I’m going out on a limb here, guesswork!), to pay for the development they charge for having 360 degree pictures and visitor statistics for your house. That last feature is pretty easy to implement, possibly needs an extra database server in that database cluster, but that’s all it takes. Charging people more that 10 euros’ for the stats feature alone, seems like a real cash cow to me.
But overall, I think Funda is doing a very good job, at least feature- and UI-wise. (Might be I give it another close look, see if I can come up with a follow-up.)
It is funny how you change your thoughts about a field (commercial websites) when you move into it yourself.
PS: One small thing about this site is how many pictures of the houses they post on their site. If some local company has 8 or 9 pictures on their site (for a particular house), Funda might only publish 3 or 4 pictures. And with houses, just as with classified ads, you can never have enough pictures!.
Update: And they are hiring, which tells something about how good they are doing…(maybe)
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