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The iPhone Experience Lock-In

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

A few weeks ago I got my hands on a Google Nexus for a few weeks and used it as my primary phone.  I have no intentions of doing a Nexus product review as lots people have done that by now.  I can critique a few user experience issues but overall it is a good device, and for anybody upgrading from a Motorola Razr device it is an awesome device.

But for me, the iPhone has become like those pair of jeans that grow so comfortable you just don’t want to give them up.   Given the hundreds if not thousands of weekly interactions one has with their iPhone it becomes part of your muscle memory and switching to a new mobile platform (i.e. new experience) becomes a significant investment in time and energy.  This is experience lock-in.  This lock-in is likely stronger then PC experience lock-in because your mobile phone is an extension of your body in a way that a PC is not.

I know people who can barely use a PC to send email but would never give up their Blackberry or iPhone.  Apple has a significant experience lock-in.  Can it capitalize on this quickly enough in some of its key markets (North America, Western Europe, and Australia).  The $99 iPhone is a good start.

Posted in Product, Strategy | No Responses »

How to Communicate with Customers (via Email)

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

I own and use multiple Panic products (Code and Transmit).  Panic sent out an email that is instructive if you are looking for effective customer communication techniques.

  • Clear why I am getting this email:  ”You signed up for our list via Coda”
  • Empathy:  ”we’ll write at most a few times a year, and only for big news.  No minor updates. We know your Inbox is crowded.”
  • Call to Action: The button entitled “Unsubscribe from eList” is embedded prominently in the email.  I don’t feel like they are trying to sneak anything by me.
  • Short and Sweet: See for yourself.
  • Formatted for PC & Mobile: Most of my email consumption is happening on my iPhone and they nailed it.
  • Simple graphics: No big and splashy images, just some elegant graphical accents.

Posted in Product | No Responses »

Scrapping Features is Hard (Very)

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Today at Yahoo! I had the pleasure of hearing Marty Cagan talk about building awesome products and a good question came up.  What companies do a good job at scrapping (aka retiring) features?  Building features is relatively cheap and easy.  Scrapping them after afterwards is very hard.  Netflix attempted to retire their Profiles features (allowing users to create profiles and set controls around on how many movies and the types of movies each profile can rent).  This did not go over well with their community.  Two weeks later they came back and decided to keep it.  Now the feature is buried deep into the Account Settings page.  This is the right way to do it if you absolutely cannot retire the feature. Here is how the sequence of events played out on the Netflix blog and site:

Posted in Product | No Responses »

Review of Garmin Forerunner 405

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

I am a competitive person and find running for pleasure boring.  I need to measure my runs and hit specific goals to make my runs interesting. Without basic feedback on my pace, distance, and time my runs get shorter and less intense overtime. After switching to Adidas running sneakers my Nike+ iPod system became useless which is an unfortunate tight technology coupling that I would like to see go away. After some Amazon research, I splurged and bought the Garmin Forerunner 405 for its combination of slick looks, wireless sync, and GPS capabilities. Six weeks and fifteen plus runs later with my Garmin Forerunner 405 I am sorely disappointed. First let me explain the macro level issues with the product design and then I will delve into specific issues I found.

Build a Sensor, Not a Computer

The Garmin philosophy seems to be centered on building computers into devices. It bewilders me why Garmin do not take full advantage of peripheral and common devices like the iPhone or PC. Trying (they certainly deserve credit for effort) to perfect data setup and vast information consumption on a watch form factor is a fools game. The watch is a perfect sensor that can track time, rate, and location while the iPhone and/or PC is a perfect device to setup runs, track progress from run to run, and share run data with friends. Let each product do product what it is best at then marry the two to create a delightful experience.  Here is how I see the system working:

Keep it Simple

Even for the most ardent runners and tri-athletes this watch does too much. Its as though somebody handed the engineers a list of features and said go build all of these. Why is this a bad thing? While running or stopping to stretch the Garmin Forerunner 405 will inexplicably change to a different mode, and reverting back to the basic mode is not intuitive. Other times the device will begin beeping – since I never set up any complex training goals trying to determine why it was beeping took hours. On a nice sunny day while enjoying the outdoors the last thing somebody wants is an annoying beeping sound. The focus needs to be on collecting distance, rate, and calories. Once brain dead obvious how to collect these then begin to gently expose additional features to the user.

The Issue List

Collecting a list of product issues and fixing them one-by-one is no way to do product design. With this approach the core issues are never discovered. Such is the case here, if you were to fix every issue on this list you would still be left with a mediocre product. With that said here are the specific issues I encountered using my Garmin Forerunner 405:

  • Form factor: The watch head extends into the area usually reserved for the watchbands and this is a hard plastic not the soft and malleable plastic used for watchbands. This means that the watch does not hug your wrist, rather sits awkwardly and sometimes painfully on your wrist.
  • Packaging: The product should have some battery juice when it comes out of the package. It’s a huge let down to un-package a cool new product and then wait an hour charging it before you can do anything.
  • GPS: takes minutes rather then seconds to connect to a satellite, and sometimes it fell into a discovery state and never failed completely.
  • Touch Wheel: Provides no visual feedback. Which means you don’t know whether you have successfully engaged the wheel. Furthermore, if one successfully engages the wheel it does not bounce back at you if you are moving through the modes too quickly.
  • User Interface Item Selection. No clear way to select an item when a dialog is presented. For example, when trying to sync via Bluetooth one needs to select OK in order to accept the connection. It is unclear which button or button combination to hit in order to select OK.
  • Battery: poor battery life is not unique to this device, but whereas a phone is a critical part of my productivity this is a nice-to-have product. Forcing users to recharge their watch constantly for a nice-to-have product means that users will lose interest quickly as the effort exceeds the value returnd.

With much of the core technology in these devices commodity components (Bluetooth, GPS, accelerometers, etc.) there is an opportunity to develop an open (i.e. not tethered to Nike sneakers or Apple devices) simple and elegant watch that serves as a way to easily and reliably capture core metrics (rate, distance, and calories) and then sync this information to ones mobile phones and computer to view and share the data.  Somebody will make a simple and compelling device that capture the essence of the above and in the process will make me a happy customer and themselves boatloads of money.

Posted in Product, Self Instrumentation | 3 Responses »

The Death of User Generated (UGC) Review Sites

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Growing up one of three brothers my parents conditioned us to questions the norm.  As Andy Grove said — “When “everyone knows” something to be true, nobody knows nothin”   This questioning and debating extended to a variety of topics but centered mostly on business, world affairs, and politics. We grew up without a TV.  That meant for purposes of entertainment we all read the NY Times and Chicago Tribune  - and not just the sports section.  These papers provided the knowledge base to feed our debates.  This constant questioning and debating serves me and my brothers well when it comes to business;  most industries often times get caught chasing an idea well beyond its useful life.  A few years ago (during the excitement of Yelp, Wikipedia, etc.) my brother shot off an email questioning why there wasn’t an authoritative travel review site based that did not rely on the whims of a few unknown reviewers.  A bit less then two years since that email Oyster Hotel Reviews was born today.  Oyster generates unique reviews and undoctored pictures of hotels across tourist destinations like Miami and Jamaica amongst others.

Oyster Hotel Reviews contrarian take on travel review site marks the end of review sites built purely on user generated content (UGC). There are literally thousands of sites set-up to enable people like you and me to review restaurants, books, airlines, hotels, apartments, and much more. Except for a few companies that one can count on a single hand the rest never make it as they operate under the motto of “build and pray.”  For the starters, the underlying technology is not complicated to build quickly and most end up differentiating on user experience.  Secondly, as the name denotes the companies themselves don’t generate any unique assets (content, pictures, etc.), rather are left praying that they will be able to somehow socially engineer a set of users to contribute high value content.

Even the successful UGC review sites like Yelp provide inconsistent reviews between cities and restaurants making it difficult to rely upon unless you trust a specific user who shares similar tastes.  Ironically, UGC review sites are highly susceptible to death at the hands of their own users — who either become too verbose and unfocused in their reviews (see the Yelp one-thousand word review), degenerate into yelling matches between users, or find ways to game the review system (see TripAdvisor).

If you are about to spend $1500+ on a hotel you want to know exactly what you are buying.  When spending this kind of money you want to ensure that an authoritative service dug deep into the hotel rooms, pools, conference rooms, food, and more.  Pure UGC reviews sites cannot cover products and services at this level of depth across all products. Yet, these details matter. Details like:

Don’t be mistaken UGC will still have an important role, but I doubt savvy investors will form entire business built exclusively on UGC content. After all, people are social animals and love  to voice their opinions, but they don’t do so in a vacuum. They need to something to respond to, and in Oyster Hotel Reviews they have quality content and pictures to respond to.  Have an awesome picture to share or want to share your own experience at the Fairmont Turnberry in Miami — you can do that on Oyster.com.

[Full Disclosure:  If not abundantly clear from the opening paragraph -- the founders of Oyster.com are my brothers - Elie and Eytan]

Posted in Product, Trends | No Responses »

Managing Consumer vs. Enterprise Products Part I

Monday, November 24th, 2008

After spending four years at Siebel and now approaching my 4.5 year anniversary at Yahoo I am asked relatively frequently how does managing enterprise vs. consumer software products differ.   It was a question I first asked myself when I decided to leave Siebel for Yahoo! and now it’s part of my arsenal of interview questions.  Beyond the obvious points - enterprise customers pay millions while consumers usually pay nothing - there are more interesting answers to this question that deserve exploration.

Let’s start with a simple question – how do you know what to build?

In the enterprise world if you want to know what to build jump on an airplane and visit five or six telecom companies of various sizes from British Telecom (BT) to Bezek Telecom and you will quickly see that the problems that BT and Bezek face in order management, billing, or ticketing are similar.  If you can solve it for Bezek and scale it then you have a product you can sell.  While there is a tremendous amount of work to build, sell, customize, deploy, and scale these enterprise solutions identifying the correct problem to solve should not be the risky part of the endeavor.

On the consumer side determining what to build is the risky. Even the best product managers and designers with adept consumer touch will get it wrong more often than not.  If each new project requires the resources of a reasonably well funded team and only one out of ten are successful then you are operating a business with VC model economics.  Most consumer software companies (even growth companies like a Google) are not in the VC business for good reason — they have shareholders that expect consistent returns. Therefore building out processes and platforms that enable you to experiment quickly and efficiently is vital. 

  • Build: Plant a few seeds with a some features at a reasonably low development cost.  
  • Test: Bucket test these features for a reasonable amount of time to allow a signal to form - patience pays as users often have to discover and learn new features.  
  • Analyze + Decide: Then decide to double-down or dump.  It make take a few iterations before you can make a definitive double-down or dump decision, but each iteration should provide signals that inform that ultimate decision.

The nuts of bolts of getting these experimental systems working is where much of the product magic will come from.  Assuming the product is gaining traction – what features should be prioritized.  As products in the Internet consumer space start gaining traction they generate goldmine data sets.  Coming from the enterprise software where the major software providers (Oracle and SAP) don’t see much of the data their customer generate (albeit this is changing with salesforce.com and NetSuite) there is a temptation to allow these data-sets to drive all product decisions. Falling to this temptation will ultimately lead you to a very stale product.   Incremental features designed to address specific metrics will impress when viewed via a narrow lens but the product will quickly become a series of tactics with no larger vision.

Posted in Product | No Responses »

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