I saw Mike Tyson at SXSW. Partied with the Angry Birds Crew. And found IDEO’s Birth Control talk to be the best session I went to… And that was day 1!
This blog title could also have been “Swoop, poop, Zappos, and Fugaboo”… The most quoted phrase by speakers referred to executives that ‘swoop’ into projects, ‘poop’ on design, and then ‘swoop’ away again. Most hilarious use was Jason Putorti (former lead designer of Mint.com) against Aaron Patzer (Mint.com founder) in a panel about designers vs. developers.
I’m a big fan of learning about and hoping to have great culture in the work place. So it was quite a treat to be handed the book Delivering Happiness from the man himself, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (who’s name I just spelled correctly for the first time ever without having to look it up! do I win a prize?).
And in classic SXSW fashion, perhaps the most interesting conversation I had was sitting at a burger stand, chomping on some fries, and meeting the founders of Fugaboo. They’re trying to bring more ‘neighbor’ into neighborhoods by bringing to digital life all those pegboards and stapled light posts about local activities and ways to get more involved with those who live around you. Their ‘Facebook’ for neighborhoods will be available soon, and if I have my guesses right, could be something you’ll be using soon yourself!
What else did I learn? Do not go to a wedding in New Orleans before SXSW. Unless you are Charlie Sheen. Simply too much of too much. It was hard to keep up with all the networking night life of SXSW.
Lastly, what do I think of SXSW? I think it’s quite possibly where we’ll take the whole company to next year for our annual All Hands. We had just finished this year’s in our San Francisco office. After my 1st trip to SXSW, what better conference/fiesta to take the whole company to?! We’re still small enough to even think of such a thing. And better do it soon before SXSW consumes itself like an over-heated sun into a black hole. Such a huge, amazing conference.
And I haven’t even mentioned the ‘more geebees twins’ or Beardyman or Hugh MacLeod or Das Racist or my new YouTube tube socks!
May you all avoid swoop and poop.
I had a great chat with Johannes over at IDEO last week. Johannes is in charge of bringing some quantitative flavor to IDEO’s magic, and he’s up to some interesting stuff. After our morning coffee conversation, though, a few ideas stuck with me:
1. User churn
Me and the team at EchoUser have been getting more involved with start ups of late, helping them with usability, general user experience and the like. General start up concerns revolve around reducing “user churn”, or in other words, “how to keep users interested and encourage ongoing usage of our product/service.” It turns out that this is a sticky problem, especially when it comes to balancing the needs of new users (who might get “churned”) and “habitual” users who already use the product on a regular basis.
Our work inevitable hunts for what we’ve come to call “the aha moment”, or that one particular experience that helps turn a casual/new user into a habitual one. Of course, we all know it’s probably not one single experience that does the trick, but the simplification is helpful nonetheless.
In talking with Johannes I drew out what usage paths look like for a given product:
user churn paths
Ideally, you want users to take the path going up and to the right, because this means they’ve had their “aha moment” and have now become habitual users. And for start ups looking to raise funding from VCs, being able to say “our usability work has shown we can improve user churn by X% because we can guarantee an aha moment” is a very good thing.
2. Switching
Then it was Johannes’ turn to pick up the pen. He drew this, which deals with a marketing concept called “Switching”:
User switching
Basically, switching refers to the idea that many people, when trying out a product or service, will tend to switch between different ones – this is represented by their degree of “loyalty” to a given product. The general point is to try to get users to either extreme, either 100% loyal to one product, or 100% to the other (to me this is a little simplistic, given that it’s a zero-sum outcome, but more on that another time).
It’s interesting to note that the Churn graph is a loose inversion of the Switching graph: users who have yet to experience their “Aha!” moment are less likely to become 100% loyal to a particular product – and therefore more likely to switch (as well as churn).
We’re finding more and more that startups have to balance design changes that appeal to both habitual users and new ones, changes that try to straddle the divide between 100% loyal and “I’m not so sure just yet”-loyal. The balancing act is an interesting one to say the least, and we’re using our usability special sauce to make it that much easier. More to come.
