Ben Sauer’s Blog

Dave Stone recently recommended that I try Action Method Online, as a way of managing tasks/projects. The suggestion was timely: its been on my mind to try things other than basecamp, and another project tool I was trying got lost in the ether due to an ‘unfortunate database incident’.

Additionally, I know that my GTD has definitely been slipping. I liked the idea of trying something a bit more action driven: tying in a nag system with target dates for tasks might be just the trick (which is what AMO does).

So I’ve been trying in for a couple of months now, and its been an agnostic experience: plenty of WIN, plenty of FAIL. I’ll start with the FAIL, so that we end on an optimistic note.

The FAIL

• Buggy as HELL! Tasks not being added when I pressed ‘add’, same for projects. Very frustrating at first.
• Preferences not being saved. My oh my, do I not need US style dates, very confusing. But the app ignored my chosen date format, over and over again (same for timezone). Support were responsive, but didn’t actually fix anything as far as I can tell.
• Discussions: I would not feel remotely comfortable collaborating with a client using it. The discussion feature is badly presented, and although you can get emails when someone starts a discussion, generally you don’t. This is REALLY important when you are dealing with people who don’t know ways other than email to converse, and aren’t really sold (yet) on the concept of using a project tool online. The system should email the recipient all the time by default.
• It utilises a facebook style notification popup (little red icon) for things it wants to remind me about: potentially useful. Problem being, the notifications were generally fairly useless, e.g. ‘Do you want to share that project that you just added’? Well, no. That’s a pretty low priority and if I wanted to do that, I would. Its the hidden/forgotten stuff that’s more important (e.g. ‘you haven’t touched that task/project for weeks!’)

The WIN

• Task reminders are more proactive than good ole basecamp, the system reminds me by email summaries about what I haven’t done
• I can tie in task deadlines to project dates
• I can delegate tasks (with nags) much more easily
• I can set up ‘mini projects’ much more easily than other systems - there’s nothing heavy about adding a project (unlike basecamp)
• iphone app! Joy of joys, a project tool that allows me to review/add tasks (or ‘action steps’ as the app calls it) while I’m away from my desk.

The Dilemma

As noted in my previous article, I generally find most online tools to be overpriced: the owners are overvaluing what they’re offering, and I’m buying too many of these different hosted services to pay what they’re asking.

This is yet again true of Action Method Online, with a special twist. Despite the awful drawbacks, I want to carry on using it, as I know its early days for them. But…. I’ve hit the limit on tasks on the free account, and I don’t wish to pay what they’re asking ($12 p/m or $99 p/a) given the drawbacks/exchange rate.

What should I do? Any ideas? Suggestions please!

Jakub has just posted an item over at wireframes magazine about some html wireframes I developed using polypage.

Say for example you want to show your wireframes to your client in the “logged out” and “first time visit” states, Polypage allows you to click through all your wireframes to demonstrate such a case. Later on when you decide to demonstrate the “logged in” state, all you do is toggle it in the top menu and continue your presentation.

Traditionally, developing a prototype like this would have been quite time intensive; tools like polypage and jquery make this kind of work quick and easy. Having a working prototype makes it very easy to show stakeholders and developers what you’re thinking.

Thanks to clearleft for developing it. You may have more fun exploring their example of this technique: mine is for a fairly unexciting government project!

Back in September I attended clearleft’s dconstruct conference. One presentation in the day really stuck out, and reviewing the slides again today I felt inspired to comment/echo one particular point.

Joshua Porter used some psychology principles to examine how to provide a persuasive user experience. See the slides and audio from his presentation are available, in case you missed it (I’ve embedded the presentation below).

Over the past few years, I’ve been exposed to a great number of webapps+software that had a free version or trial and then offered something extra in the paid service. Most of them were non-essential to my work, but did offer something I enjoyed using, and potentially made me a little bit more efficient (e.g. mindmeister or basecamp).

One thing they all share in common: the paid service or one off price felt too expensive. There are now so many services that I’d like to buy into, that my pricing decision isn’t made in isolation. I find myself thinking: “that’s not too expensive, but if I was only using it occasionally and there are 20 others, it costs too much.”.

The Sign Up Problem

Joshua’s presentation illustrates ‘the signup problem’ brilliantly (see slide 29). Software customers overvalue their existing software (”why should I pay for x new widget?” i.e. hard to persuade) and software makers overvalue what they’ve created (”my widget really IS worth x much!!” i.e. missing out on sales).

I find myself thinking about the second point every time I get to the ‘Pricing’ page of software I might buy. I’m convinced that sellers are missing out on big chunks of sales as a result.

If there’s an ongoing cost, even if its small, I also worry about being tied into something I won’t use much, especially if I’m paying for a few. If I’m buying software at a one off cost, I end up thinking that the price is wrong given the ultra-low marginal cost.

Maybe I’m too frugal, and unrepresentative of the way a lot of buyers think. What I do know is this: when I buy software/services online, its not just about the alternatives to one particular market. I lump together everything I’m spending on these things into one big cost that I (irrationally?) try to keep under control. Therefore, things that don’t directly compete (e.g. basecamp for project management and blinksale for invoicing) end up affecting each other.

Now I know I’ve skipped over operating costs, development costs, and a lot of other factors that influence supply and demand. However, I can’t help but feel that these markets are being constrained by cognitive biases.

I’d be very interested to hear about alternative pricing/incentive approaches to the existing models. This is something I’ve been thinking about in relation to other industries (particularly film and music - MUCH more on that later).

This issue is important to me at the moment as I’m formulating more ideas about how to take the useful things that are out there and explain the benefits to individuals and businesses (see my ‘Geek Habits for non-Geeks’ workshop). The pricing model will be critical to adoption in so many cases, that I feel strongly that things need to change.

Mostly I end up thinking about how to assess how useful something is to a particular individual, and ‘tip’ on this basis. Something along these lines:

“You’ve used our widget for 99 hours this month, we suggest you pay X on this basis.”

“You’ve used our widget to create 50 files, we suggest you pay X on this basis.”

Taking this a step further, you could leverage cognitive bias to get people paying more, or at least more consistently. Social proof is instructive here, and I know its been tried on the independent music scene (wish I could remember which artist tried this…).

“On average, people have paid x per month to use our software. Pay this amount now.“

I’d like to take this last idea into the real world, but I’ll save the idea for another article. Thanks to Joshua for getting me thinking about this!

So at the beginning of July I sat down with web copywriter Ellen de Vries to refine some copy for a project I’m working on (more on that later). She asked me a series of questions that we attempted to answer together, in order to refine the ideas I want to present and produce some great copy.

What very quickly emerged was that I hadn’t really achieved the required focus for what I will be selling in my project, and that Ellen’s questions became much more of a strategic discussion (which often happens to me when I’m questioning a client in the early days of ‘just building a website’!).

In less than an hour we’d covered a lot of ground: I’ve now got some strategic clarity, fresh ideas for my product, clearer ideas about how to sell it, and an outline for copy that should practically write itself. I’d highly recommend going through this process with Ellen, and I may well try incorporate the exercise into my next project for someone else.

I believe the ideas are taken from ‘Web Copy That Sells‘. Here are the questions that Ellen asked: we had to write 5 answers for each one.

1. Name the key problems faced by your customers.
2. Why haven’t these problems been solved before?
3. What will have changed as a result of your product?
4. Paint a picture of how things will change for your customer.
5. What actions would you like a user to your site to take?
6. What makes you different from the competition?

Ellen really helped me to refine my answers into something very friendly and readable, all in under an hour. Thanks again Ellen!

Last night was a lot of fun, thanks to everyone for coming to an indoor event when there was such lovely weather and a beach so close by!

I am much happier with the results this time: the time I spent revising the concepts really paid off. I managed to explain the key points in less time, and with much more emphasis on personal benefit to the audience. Ellen’s advice on how to run the exercises was a big help: everyone understood what to do (although Google Reader was down for some of the time, great timing Google!).

Gavin has mentioned that there were still a few assumptions I made during the talk; I’m going to work on eliminating those.

Attendees

Those who came along should note that I’ve created a workshop page with some links to the things that came up, e.g. blogs like Ill Doctrine. If you need them, the workshop slides are also available (9mb PDF).

Happy feedreading, bookmarking, blogging etc!

Hello all you feedreaders (from the last workshop?) + site visitors,

I’m repeating my workshop on Thursday May 8th at The Werks in Hove.  Hopefully it will be much improved based on what I learned last time! Its been quite an interesting time since I did it: a few different parties/organisations have expressed an interest in me doing it for their organisation.

I’m being much more careful about the numbers this time, so please mark yourself as attending on upcoming if you want to come.

See you there!

Big thanks to everyone who came along last night: the weather was really dreadful (extra cake for you lot next time)! For those who attended: a PDF of my slides (9 mb), and the page of exercise links.
I think the event went pretty well: the feedback was positive from geeks and non-geeks alike.

My favourite moment was the stony faces when I put a blackly comic/gruesome bbc news article on screen. I had so misjudged how people would react (horror rather than laughter….) I felt compelled to laugh at myself for putting it in! Definitely a “Doh!” moment. Workshop attendees take note: I found this article by searching for “funny bbc” at delicious.

I’ve learned a lot too. Part of my reason for running the event was to learn more about how to convey ideas to people. Here’s some points:

• I didn’t know it beforehand, but people at the event were at very different levels of understanding. For example, I jumped straight in assuming that people understood already what a blog was. I perhaps need to work on some clear definitions earlier in the workshop.
• The whole thing was a bit longer than I planned! I don’t think people were bored, but I want to get the ideas across quicker next time, or perhaps cover less (but more effectively).
• I didn’t mention the benefits of some habits early+clearly enough, so we went straight to trying things before people had really understood why they would use something. I plan on trying to make the exercises more relevant to the individuals next time.
• The way I had planned the exercises was a bit unmanageable: I put the main instructions on the projector screen and got people to use a page of links at the same time. I really thought this would be a good way for people to run through exercises on the web while keeping the instructions visible elsewhere. It didn’t work that well, so I’m going to rethink this.
• I’m sort of glad that not everyone who signed up attended: many more than 11 and the time available for Q+A or discussion might have been a problem.
• I didn’t really have time to go through some of the more specific geek habits (e.g. GTD stuff). I think there’s room there for a series, its too much for one workshop.

Most interesting thing I learned about myself: at one point, Josh asked me what Feedburner was used for (it wasn’t part of the workshop). I rattled off a quick answer something like this - “it sits in between your site and the people using your feeds and tells you how many people are using it”. He said afterwards that he’d spent ages on their site trying to figure out what it was for (Gillian said the same thing), but that my description cleared it up instantly.

What’s funny is that I made up an on-the-spot quick description that works better than anything on their site, when I’ve just spent literally days working on materials/metaphors to explain concepts like feeds (with only mixed success)!

This leads me to question the usefulness of my slides, perhaps I need less of them: instead produce a very short conceptual description that does the job (which is supported by a slide).

I’m fairly confident I’m going to run more of these (watch this space all new feed subscribers!). James has suggested that perhaps I run some sort of monthly advice workshop, and this ties in with Gillian’s suggestion that we do a Q+A before the talk bit so that I can gauge understanding and interests first.

Thanks to Gavin for the photo above (and for being our resident geek!), Graeme for being the resident blogger, and James+Ian again for the use of the space.

So its been a while since I’ve blogged: I’ve had lots to say but not really enough time to do the articles justice. I don’t want to add to the noise that’s already out there: you’ll see from my digg article that it took me a while to process the results and write the article. I studied literary criticism at university, so I find it hard to rattle something off quickly. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to be a blogger: we’ll see how my time pans out.

However, I’m not resting on the laurels! For a while now I’ve felt that there are some developments and concepts that need explaining to people outside of the geek bubble some of us seem to live in. Its all very well discussing the next big thing on the web, but there’s been precious little effort promoting or explaining some of the things early adopters (curious geeks) already take advantage of (e.g. feeds/RSS) to everyone else.

I’ve decided to run a workshop for some of the people who I feel would benefit from this stuff on the 13th of March in Hove at The Werks. I know a lot of artists and entrepreneurs would could use a quick introduction. Please check out my upcoming event to register your interest and read a full description.

Its ultimate purpose is twofold:

• to raise their game (in whatever they’re doing)
• to improve my presentation skills

In my consulting work I’m having to present concepts more often, and I feel like this would be good practise: explaining abstract concepts about the web to regular folks!

Big thanks to James and Ian at The Werks for letting me do this.

So an idea that Sophie and I have had bubbling away for quite some time is starting to get moving. We’re joined by Danny Hope of Hobo Internet in our efforts, who persuaded me over lunch that the key idea was good enough to put some serious effort into.

We’ve started a blog to track our progress, get yourself over there for more info. I’ve detailed the inception of our ideas in a post.

The recent riot over at digg got me thinking again about the role of the media in our society.

The articles on digg.com only hit the front page if they’ve been submitted+voted there by the users. Digg presents quite a threatening, democratic model to ‘old’ media. This doesn’t mean there’s no editorial influence, it just means it takes a very different shape.

When the owners of digg buried a recent story for fear of litigation, the users revolted. It was a fantastic display of democracy in action (or not), watching the same story hitting the front page over and over again. I do wonder though, what has been buried in the past without the users noticing!

Users who submit to digg tend to use quite sensationalist headlines to grab attention (and diggs), but I’ve often found that they’re highlighting issues outside of the ‘media circle‘ (important issues that even the left wing press won’t draw attention to, such as corporate influence on the media itself). This was particularly noticeable when Tony Blair criticized the media recently: neither he nor the media even mentioned the underlying problem of media ownership. That, to me, is a far more important question than the ‘tone’ of public discourse, as it sets the agenda.

I digress. Since my impression of digg was that this (hopefully) democratic news channel might provide hidden secrets, I decided to do a quick test to see if it was worth further investigation. I asked a simple question:

Are popular articles of news on digg getting the same attention in the mainstream media?

Answering this question might give us a sense of the hunger that the public have for items that the mainstream won’t touch.

My chosen method for this test was to compare digg to Google News, where its easy to gauge the amount of attention an item of news is getting from ‘old’ media (leaving aside the issue of how Google does this and how reliable it may be!).

My methods were extremely unscientific, but again this was just a brief test to see if its worth taking further. I welcome criticism of and alternatives to these methods.

Here’s what I did:

1. Took a snapshot of the top stories on a section of digg (politics - the a topic that gets plenty of attention at digg and in the mainstream)
2. Recorded the popularity, the date/time of the story, and (rather subjectively) picked a few keywords from the story to search Google News with.
3. Search on Google News, recording the number of media outlets reporting the same item.
4. Chart the relationship between digg popularity and media exposure.

Here’s the chart. The initial results are are striking in their shape.

I’ve approximated some of the numbers here: the count on Google News was too small to chart in many cases, but for anyone interested, here’s the spreadsheet complete with links, stats, and more.

Step 3 is where my methods really fall down. There’s a big gap between the way something is reported on digg and the way its reported everywhere else. Some might say its not even the same item any more.

For example: there were two stories on digg highlighting the same issue: that a small group of US politicians are sponsoring a bill to impeach Dick Cheney. The digg articles highlighted the third and fourth senators to sponsor the bill. Searching for ‘cheney impeachment’ at Google News gave no clear results. Some articles in the media mentioned the bill, but mainly the results were were about efforts to impeach Bush.

Making it harder still was that occasionally Google News gave no grouping to the items (a helpful feature when it recognises that the media are reporting the same item), which could lead to several conclusions:

• there really wasn’t a central ’story’ - quite often the digg articles highlight a single fact/quote from a broader item (there’s that that sensationalism again)
• My keyword choices didn’t accurately connect with the media’s take on events
• Google News didn’t group the items (for whatever reason)
• There’s a potential gap between the time of the digg articles and the media exposure

My count of the Google News items was a bit of a compromise: if the grouping for what was obviously the same item, I took that number. If not, I went through the results counting the number of strongly related articles.

To conclude: this quick and dirty test indicates there might be a real desire for the media to cover a wider range of topics, and place a very different emphasis on some.

Moving forward: I’m going to spend more time on democratic news channels (e.g. ohmynews). I’d really love it if my digg test were a long term experiment (perhaps using the API’s of both sites to automatically record/chart the results), but I’m unsure of how to get over some of the problems with my method. It does seem like every item needs human input to collect/verify results.

I’d welcome ideas about how to get this going: for example, could you send a link to the Google News API to gauge media popularity instead of using clunky keywords?