I saw something in my facebook feed that I hadn’t seen before: a media player for an entire album. I had a quick listen and really liked what I heard. All the links point to bandcamp, where you can purchase the release.

$5? I clicked buy without thinking about it much.

The payment options are good: I can use a card or paypal, thereby avoiding entering my card details. The price is the same regardless of format. Once I had paid, the download started automatically.

If I had one criticism, I’d say that the price should be advertised in the facebook player: that might have tipped the balance for some people.

Well done bandcamp for designing the player, Asthmatic Kitty for the music and the progressive pricing (and I suppose facebook for allowing this kind of media in the news feed!). If only other labels would wake up to these approaches: it really is about the experience.

My personal productivity struggle has been songwriting. I don’t have much time in the day for it, but even 5 minutes can sometimes produce interesting results. Now that I’m rather short of time, I’ve been thinking of ways to use Jerry’s method to make sure I at least do some kind of writing every day.

Today, in about half an hour I hacked something together. I don’t have space for a wall calendar, but I do have some basic php skills and I use google calendar. I took a php application called icalendar and set it to import a new google calendar I created called ‘music’.

Now every day that I do some songwriting, I will put an ‘all day’ event into the music calendar, which will show up in icalendar’s year view (with a mild bit of template hacking). There’s a red dot on each day I manage to get something down.

Clearly, there’s not much to see yet (see below) but I’ll set the calendar as my home page as a daily reinforcement and see how it goes! I thought it was important to see the whole year view, hence my desire to see it in something other than google calendar.

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!

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.

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.

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.