from the editor of aseidman.com

Mitten Strings for Bluetooth Headsets

Posted by Ariel Seidman | August 4, 2008

I am now on my third Bluetooth headset in the past 9 months. At roughly $70 each I could have funded my new iPhone. While these headsets burn a hole in my wallet this represents an opportunity — a docking station for your headset that is integrated directly into the the phone. Don’t need your headset — simply slide it into your phone. Between the health and public safety (see state of California and New York) concerns hands-free headsets will become integrated into the phone and some clever and innovative phone manufacturer can begin to bundle them together and provide a nice parking garage for the headset.

I imagine the early versions of this feature will be similar to the integrated docking stations for the PowerBook or those strings your mom used to attach to your mittens to keep them attached to your coat. Yet, with fewer male-female connections to make the mobile phone version of the docking station will progress far more quickly then the docking stations for the Powerbook.

[PowerBook docking station. picture source wikipedia]

Poetic Justice

Posted by Ariel Seidman | July 20, 2008

Innovation at the expense of laziness and old-minded dogma

• Ford Motors pumps billions into upgrades of its Ford F-150 pickup truck (i.e. gas guzzler)
• Ford Motors loses $15.3 billion in 2006 and 2007 and more to come.
• Ford Motors shuts down its Menlo Park, CA car dealership
• Tesla Motors (an electric car manufacturer) opens up a new car dealership in Menlo Park on the same site as the old Ford dealership.

250 Milliseconds

Posted by Ariel Seidman | July 2, 2008

…is the maximum time that software can elapse without doing anything before the user thinks something has gone wrong.

I looked this up after trying to move my cable service from one location to another on comcast.com — while ostensibly a helpful service I never actually made it thru the process.   I was attempting to do this while eating lunch at my desk and listening to my voicemail.  Whenever I submitted or requested information I thought the site was down as it never displayed a processing icon and I simply thought the site was down and hit refresh — multiple times.  Now I could have just glanced over at the status bar on the lower left hand corner of the browser, but while eating lunch and checking v-mail this was not something I thought of at the time and I imagine that millions of users actually have no idea where the status bar on a browser sits or what it does.  So, after multiple failed attempts I ended up calling the Comcast call-center costing them about $5+ to handle my call. While $5 may not seem like much the fact that such a simple user interface fix cost them real dollars is unfortunate.

Is the End Near for Quicken and Microsoft Money?

Posted by Ariel Seidman | January 10, 2008

In the fall, the personal finance software space — led primarily by Mint.com (which did a superb execution job for a V1 product) and Wesabe was all the rage. Its clear that this space was due for a refresh and had grown stale as both Intuit and Microsoft starved their products for too long creating an opening for the likes of Mint and Wesabe, but its too early to write the eulogy for Quicken and Microsoft Money as Omar and others suggest.

It will be a few years before we can declare any winners in this space — but there are three questions that the likes of Mint and Wesabe need to answer in order to be considered long-term viable competitors?

First, do Mint.com and Wesabe investors have the patience that is needed to fight this out over the long-term? Building a loyal user base in this space will take time as even the early adopters will only dip their toe before committing significant financial data to these services as they want to be certain that these services are committed to privacy and security but perhaps as importantly that their built for the long haul. Nobody wants to wake up two years from now reading an email that they are shutting down and moving all of your data to ACME Financial Service Inc.

Secondly, can they expand the set of users in the personal finance market beyond the Quicken and Microsoft Money base? The personal finance software market is relatively small as the effort to reward curve is steep — your forced to spend lots of time and energy setting up Quicken or Money before you start to see its benefits which only works for a small and dedicated set of the market.

Finally, can they broaden the value proposition beyond simply providing a 360 degree view of your spending and wrapping it in a slick user interface? Sexy pie-charts are interesting for all of 3 minutes, but what will keep people engaged?� The savings trick employed by Mint is a good start, but from my short experience with it not super helpful (i.e. it’s an execution problem).

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.

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