from the editor of aseidman.com

SPG.COM: Back to the Whiteboard

Posted by Ariel Seidman | December 19, 2007

SPG.COM (as in Starwood Preferred Guests) recently overhauled most of their site and it is still not entirely clear to me what they were trying to accomplish. But one thing is clear, they sacrificed simplicity in the name of “prettiness” — much of the site resembles a messy desktop with a nice desktop picture placed behind it.

In addition to the structural issues with the site they also got the small stuff wrong. Often times it is the little features that can either delight or frustrate users to no end. Here is an example of one of the most basic site features - logging in- gone wrong:

Login: Initial State

Login: In Focus State

So, whats wrong with this design?

The single biggest problem is that they require you to omit the letter from your SPG number (e.g. F8732333) when using your SPG number to login. This is likely a back-end issue that somehow forced its way to the front-end, this should not happen. The back-end issues need to be dealt such that they don’t hamper the user experience. After all, back-end systems are there to serve customers. Once you are dealing with this constraint here is what you don’t want to do:

1. Place the helper text in faint gray letters (see the Initial State screenshot above)
2. Place the helper text within the input box. Once the user sets their focus in that box that helper text is lost and if the user

Additional issues include:

1. Placing the “Retrieve Password” by the UserId — it should go below the “Sign In” button.
2. Placing the “Privacy Policy” link in this area.
   • a.) Once a user agrees to a Privacy Policy then stick a link to it in the footer — why place it in the login area.
   • b.) What purpose does it serve in the login area —is somebody going to say to themselves… wait before logging in again let me make certain that I agreed with their privacy policy.
   • c.) I wouldn’t be surprised if the internal dynamics (strong and empowered legal department vs. a weaker products group) yielded this poor experience.

As a customer of SPG I am looking forward to a return to function over form — focus on task completion not cinematic value.

Nike+ iPod: Starting the Self-Instrumentation Age

Posted by Ariel Seidman | December 16, 2007

@Work we instrument our products/services to ensure that we can track important metrics — as Peter Drucker said “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”  Yet, for metrics that impact our quality of life @Home we have yet to develop products that help people efficiently manage some of the more important aspect of their lives:

1. Health
   • How much exercise do you get per week?
   • How much crappy food do you eat per week?
2. Energy Consumption
   • How much money are are you spending on energy and do you know the cost of your energy choices?
   • How much damage (carbon emissions) are you doing to the earth?
3. TV consumption:-)
   • How much time are you wasting?

Because we all just have one shot at life, these are actually are a lot more important then the @work metrics.  Measurement and analytic products in the business domain are well-established and long-ago crossed the chasm.  However, on the consumer side while there are niche products such as Polar watches there are no self-measurement products (needs a catchier name, but for now this highly descriptive will work) that have successfully crossed the chasm. 

Nike+ iPod is poised to cross the chasm and is starting to uncover the opportunities of a self-measurement age. There are a couple of things that they nailed in this first version that will enable them to cross the chasm:

1. Plugs-Into Existing Products
   • We don’t need to create new products from the ground up to measure these everyday activities we simply need to plugin sensors and displays into existing products. Contrast this to a product like Polar that is attempting to build niche products from the ground up that help athletes measure their performance.
2. Low-Cost
   • Once you’ve spent $400+ on an iPod and Nike sneakers buying an Nike+ iPod Kit for $29 is not going to break your bank.
   • This point is driven by #1 above.
3. Simple Setup
   • Just put the sensor below the insole of your sneaker and a small receiver snaps into your iPod — that’s it your done. See here.
4. ‘Thermometer’ Interface
   • Explains to the user how they are progressing or regressing with their runs.
   • Lightweight analytics that allows you to slice/dice your runs — for those of you familiar with Business Objects or Siebel Analytics there are hints of those types of experience here.   Below are my runs for the past few months as seen on nikeplus.com

What still needs some work:

• Positive Peer Pressure
  • Enable users to encourage and compete with each other. This is incredibly imporant because it keeps people engaged and provides a viral way to introduce potential customers to the product.
  • They don’t need to create a new social-network to develop this community and positive peer pressure. Rather tap into an existing social network at the point of registration (more on this for another post).

Beyond the value that this creates for users, it also builds lock-in for Nike and Apple — when I get ready to buy a new set of sneakers in a few months guess what I will be buying.

Yahoo Shortcuts for Wordpress (Beta)

Posted by Ariel Seidman | December 14, 2007

Yesterday my team announced the launch of Yahoo! Shortcuts for Wordpress which we developed with Alex King and the CrowdFavorite team — CrowdFavorite team specializes in Wordress custom development and Alex was one of the early Wordpress developers.      First for some history…  We decided to take Shortcuts to Wordpress…Up until yesterday Shortcuts had found a home (a pretty nice one) in places like Yahoo! Mail, News, etc. but we decided a few months back that this technology needed to move beyond the walls of Yahoo!. Inspired by Luke Wroblewski’s early vision we decided to integrate Shortcuts directly into the authoring environment.   What it does…  As you type it find relevant terms such as locations/places (e.g. University of Texas), companies (Goldman Sachs), and brings you recommended content such as Maps, Flickr images (see the one in the upper left), Finance charts so that you can quickly add some spice to your blog post without the hassle of copy/pasting code.Both the Yahoo! Search Blog and the new Shortcuts home page do a far better job (or so I would like to think) of explaining what the product does far better then I will do here — so have a quick look.   What we learned from developing for Wordpress… 

1. Rich-Text Editor (RTE) Integration
   • Integrating  seamlessly into any RTE is hard.
   • Wordpress, while overall a great blogging platform, its RTE is still a bit flaky which made things that much tougher.
2. Security: 
   • Be very careful not to open any security holes.
3. Cross platform compatible plugin architecture: 
   • While we would get some scale when we do a similar plugin for MovableType — this needs to be a “build once deploy anywhere” where a developer can simply check the blogging platforms they want access to — Wordpress, MovableType, TypePad, Drupal.  
4. Stats
   • Standard way to instrument plugins to capture # of activations, de-activations, etc. — if anybody has found something that does a good job of this let me know.
   • We don’t want to force bloggers to sign-up with us as there is no need to, but it would be nice to see how many people activate the plugin and then whether or not they de-activate it.

Here is some of the coverage via Techmeme.   

My Rules of Tagging (with Del.icio.us)

Posted by Ariel Seidman | December 3, 2007

My Rules of Tagging (with Del.icio.us)Just finished cleaning up my del.icio.us tags as they looked like this screenshot to the left after 1+ yr. of using del.icio.us as my primary bookmarking tool. Over the year here are some simple rules I developed — hopefully these help:

1.) Generalized over specific

• you’ll never recall a specific term like “skyline” — rather use “bayarea

2.) Less is more

• no more then 2 tags per bookmark
• why? because this will help avoid violating rule #1 which leads to hundreds if not thousands of tags which leads to tag chaos

3.) Don’t bookmark blogs

• Use a good RSS reader instead that has a favorites feature — hmmm…perhaps these products should be integrated.
• Don’t import bookmarks from your desktop
• Applies to users of the del.icio.us browser extension

4.) The tags applied during the import process basically break all the rules above

• Plus if this is your work computer most of my bookmarks will contain private URLs that will either make no sense to the vast majority of users.

Looking forward to del.icio.us 2.0 and another good of year tasty del.icio.us bookmarking…

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