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]

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.

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.

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 (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.

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.

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.

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…

This year’s Darpa challenge introduced the autonomous cars (yes— no drivers or human input to navigate the cars) into an urban environment — NY Times has some good coverage here.


Below is the strange yet predictable part of the article — the media always tries to anthropomorphize robots — uhh… last time I checked this is software that operates metal and plastic. Once we do get around to commercializing this stuff, these autonomous cars will have brands much the way an Apple computer has a different kind of brand vs. a Dell computer, but we won’t confuse them with people. Talking about the applications and commercialization of this technology seems like a far more useful conversation to be having.

“Donald A. Norman, a psychologist and an industrial designer, argues in “The Design of Future Things,” his recently published book, that a new organism is emerging that he calls a “person+machine.”

“Machines have neither motives nor emotions,” he wrote recently in an e-mail message. “Still, machines, appliances and even services have personality traits, if only because they were designed to be conscientious or not, friendly or curt, smooth or abrupt, condescending or understanding, recalcitrant or forgiving.”

Autonomous machines of the future, he said, will increasingly have emotions for the same reason that people have them: to protect themselves as well as to make choices among competing demands for their attention as well as a mechanism for social cooperation.

Though the Darpa autonomous vehicles were clearly not “thinking” machines, there was evidence that the line between human and machine consciousness might have just become a bit less clear.

{note to self: never use words with more then two syllable in a title}

No doubt Apple (AAPL) is on a tear: new iPhone refreshed iMac, refreshed iPods. One sees a similiar story on the software front: refreshed iLife, some new and refreshed iWork. Not only is the quantity pretty impressive, but so is the quality of these new products rolling out. But here is my issue — for such an innovative company with lots of cool and differentiating features their product roll-out process is growing stale. It basically boils down to this:

1. News starts to leak out a few months in advance (this is good to get bloggers all worked up)
2. Apple calls press conference a ~week in advance
3. Steve and team head north (for lesser launches stays on campus) to the Moscone center
4. Steve gets on stage and does a dance using terms like “revolutionary” “seven wonders of the world” “isn’t this cool”
5. Steve introduces a good friend like Jerry, Eric, or Howard
6. Steve introduces a musician like Nora or Tom.
7. Steve walks off.
8. Musician plays
9. Apple site refreshes with all the new cool toys.

Mix it up a bit… here are some ideas:


Venue: I love SF Moscone, but how about Big Sur (breath-taking) or Harlem to show another side of America?

Musician: how about some Outkast or Coldwar Kids.

Friends: how about real people who buy the products Apple is selling?

Pricing: Don’t announce the price at the press release tell people to go to apple.com to checkout the latest pricing so you drive traffic and deeper engagement with the apple site.