Just a short post to say that I’ll be posting screenshots from the most excellent skitch.com mac screengrab software from now on, in an effort to comment more frequently on UX and also enliven this blog!

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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.

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!

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!

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!