Choosing Smarter

Ah-HA!

I knew it.

I've had a blog post draft kicking around for a while entitled "The spreadsheet people are among us." Basically, I believe that there are millions of people using Excel to capture their findings when researching complex purchase decisions, but we're all too ashamed to fess up to our anal retentiveness to talk about it publicly. And now there's proof!

I recently upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 (better late than never...). Upon firing up the "new" Excel, I noticed this:

Apparently, Microsoft's research revealed that so many people were using Excel to gather information for making complex decisions that they put the official anal-retentive cell formatting colour scheme right smack in the middle of the main, default toolbar/ribbon.

Having used ChoiceBot for over a year now, I can't imagine using an app that doesn't actually do anything with my colour-coding, though. That would be kind of like using a pen and graph paper instead of a spreadsheet program to work on a bunch of numbers.

Irony... get it?

Much to my surprise, iTunes blows

Even though I've been using a few different media players/managers over the years, I was forced to install iTunes so that my PC could talk to my iPhone. After such a stunning user experience on the iPhone, I guess I was expecting the same from iTunes. Wow. Not.

The music selection, while vast, is full of gaping wholes. Putting together a playlist for a reunion revealed that there were no Housemartins albums and -much more shockingly- no AC/DC ones. No AC/DC? Really? While not my favorite band, they're not exactly obscure...

Horrendously bloated (64.1 MB download, 100MB+ while running in memory), slow to install, slow to launch, slow to everything. Primitive music recommendation/discovery system. No mini-player mode. No all-you-can-eat-for-a-monthly-fee plan. Keeps on trying to trick me into installing Safari. Crashed at least three times. YUCK!

Most shockingly for an Apple product, though, was the terrible usability, or lack thereof. I wanted to transfer some pics from my PC onto my iPhone. Could NOT figure it out. The help file was no help at all, and I had to resort to a Google search for instructions, which were not obvious (though ultimately successful). How come no-one else is complaining about this? I don't know... maybe it's because my brain isn't wired for the Mac (i.e., where iTunes was born and ported from). Didn't seem to stop me from the loving the iPhone, though...

I just can't reconcile the fact that the iPhone and iTunes came from the same company. Definitely not from the same design team, I am sure.

Angry blogger post: deceptive PayPal advertising

We just spent several days implementing PayPal on the ChoiceBot for e-Retailers site (not the MyChoiceBot site, which is and always will be free) because they allow our customers (in our case, online retailers) to pay their monthly subscription fees using a credit card OR PayPal.

When we started testing, however, the customer was always forced to create a PayPal account and pay via PayPal, in direct violation of the "no PayPal account required" promise prominently featured all over their website.

A call to their support line revealed that customers of recurring payments must use PayPal. The problem is that this very important fact isn't mentioned in ANY of the product literature I read, not even in this detailed, page-long explanation of the "no PayPal account required" promise.

At best, a horrendous oversight. At worst, a cheap, possibly illegal ploy to get more users to create PayPal accounts. Not this time, though... anyone care to recommend an honest payment processor we could use?

I feel a bit better now, though you probably don't. Sorry about that.

Why Apple gets a free "ignore the faults" pass from the phone market

Blogger Alec Saunders recently asked why the market has largely ignored the iPhone's many flaws, whereas they won't cut Microsoft any slack when its products are less than perfect. He suggests that Apple's propaganda machine is simply steamrolling Microsoft, but I disagree that this the main reason the market hasn't focused on the iPhone's issues.

Actually, I think Alec answered his own question with the last sentence in his post "I love my iPhone, warts and all."

No-one loves Windows, warts and all, because Windows does what you need and expect it to do, and nothing more. I don't think I've actually been impressed with any Windows feature since version 3.11's addition of networked file sharing like 10 years ago or something. Maybe plug and play hardware. But certainly nothing in the last 5+ years.

The iPhone, however, impresses me. It does being a phone better than I expect any phone to. I still find little features that impress me after 3 months of owning one.

In terms of functionality and usefulness, the iPhone has lots to love and lots to hate, so the love cancels out the hate. With Windows, there isn't much to love. Just lots to hate.

Why what was OK yesterday isn't OK today

Craig Fitzpatrick just put up a great blog post about how our expectations of technology products have evolved over time, following a series of stages that's in many ways similar (or at least analogous) to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Maslow's hierarchy tries to explain the behaviour of individuals when confronted with various degrees of deprivation. For technology products however, Craig's model attempts to explain how our behaviour as a society changes when we're presented with various degrees of abundance (in this context, "abundance" means functionality and/or usability that's better than the previous generation of products).

I would suggest one refinement to this model, which is that society's expectations are reset every time a radically new technology is introduced, then move up the pyramid as that technology matures. I suspect Craig was thinking about Web apps when he developed this model, and was making the point that our collective expectations of Web apps are now significantly higher than they were even a year ago (i.e., we're pretty high in the pyramid now and moving up fast).

This is a really important point, and one that I've been living for the past year or so. As a technology consumer, I finally dumped Yahoo! Calendar because they weren't keeping pace with Google Calendar, and bought an iPhone. When I started using both of these technologies, I could literally feel my expectations jump up significantly. Last week, a friend showed me how wonderful the Web browsing experience was on his Nokia N95, and seeing him using arrow keys to move around a page was enough to make me want to hurl -even though that was just fine to me a month ago. And don't even show me Yahoo calendar now... how did I ever use that thing?

When started developing the first version of ChoiceBot (which can still be seen on www.choicebot.com for the next 2 weeks or so), it was at the second-highest level in Craig's pyramid. By the time we actually released it, it was at the second-lowest level because everything had gone AJAX-y and broadband in the intervening time, and people's expectations had jumped. So, for the last 8 months, we've done nothing but bring up to the second-highes level, and even possibly the highest level of people's current expectations. And wow, it's a lot of work.

The secret's out: We are our own salespeople

A huge study by Universal-McCaan was released about a week ago, but just seems to be hitting the blogosphere now for some reason. In a nutshell, there are bazzillions of us online now, and a significant portion of us are creating (as opposed to just consuming) content. The details are captured in this presentation:

Universal Mccanns When Did We Start Trusting Strangers

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: digital web2.0)

There's been a fair amount of ooing and aaing about the the staggering numbers of content creators (bloggers, photo uploaders, Twitterers, etc.), but to anyone who makes a living on the Interwebs, these numbers really aren't that surprising. I think the Universal-McCaan study is having an impact primarily because it's a credible source delivering the news to those who aren't in the ecosystem yet, and who may still be thinking that it's just for kids, geeks, just a fad, etc.

The net effect ('Net effet?) is that product and service providers of all sizes are slowly losing control over what's being said about their offerings. People are much more interested in what other people have to say about them than what brands have to say about themselves. Like I said, not really news to the "active Internet users" that constituted the 17,000-member study sample, but probably big news to lots of other people.

Some noteworthy items from a ChoiceBot perspective:
-Slide 12: 28% of bloggers write about "Opinions on products and brands", 14% use widgets.
-Slide 17: "Active" Internet users create some kind of product-related message or content 25 to 44 times per month (!!!)
-Slide 38: Product and service providers have to be transparent now. To me, this says that product flaws and weaknesses are harder to gloss over now with big ad spending.

The real reason there's no Flash Player on the iPhone? (yet...)

 

We developed ChoiceBot widgets as Adobe Flash objects for a number of technical reasons that I won't go into. So far, this has definitely been a good decision since it's part of the reason why ChoiceBots perform well, contain all those helpful little effects and animations, and why it looks and runs the same on any browser on any operating system.

Except the iPhone. There's been a lot of speculation as to why Apple didn't include support for Flash in iPhone 2.0, since it's been one of the major gripes users have had since the day the original iPhone hit the market. Apple's official excuse has been that the Flash player is "too bloated" (i.e., uses too much memory and/or CPU power), but no-one seems to really believe that based on the device's powerful ARM processor and ample memory.

Maybe they just didn't have time to get it in there. That, I'm more inclined to believe.

I wonder, however, if the real reason isn't that Apple is worried about cannibalizing its App Store business. Most of the App Store apps that I've seen could have easily been developed in Flash, and a number of them were Flash applications before being ported to the iPhone. Once Flash is supported, the thousands of visually-rich applications in the App Store is going to be instantly dwarfed by the millions that have already been built in Flash, and that are freely available on the wild, wild Internet.

Apple's resistance to Flash starts to make sense when you consider that nearly all Flash applications are free, whereas many of the App Store apps aren't. And Apple gets 30% of every paid app that gets sold on the App Store. Hmmm...

Having access to ChoiceBots on a mobile device would be absolutely killer, because you could see your rankings, product pros and cons, etc. while you're in a store. I've personally experienced the need for this many times already. Let's hope Apple does the right thing and puts its users ahead of a cash grab that can't possibly last very long anyway.

UPDATE: Apple was just forced to pull a TV ad that claimed that the iPhone enables users to access "all of the Internet". People complained that Flash- and Java-enabled sites are a big part of the Internet, and that Apple's claim therefore constituted false advertising.

Criticizing the cloud

The #1 worry people talk about when using web-based apps is that they don’t work if you’re offline. No argument there, though platforms like Google Gears and Adobe Air are (slowly) starting to make that less of an issue. The rapid proliferation of WiFi hotspots and increasing affordability of 3G wireless data subscriptions will probably make being disconnected a thing of the past even before Gears or Air really catch on anyway. But yes, for now, if you’re out of range of an Ethernet jack, out of range of a WiFi hotspot and don’t have a 3G plan (or are in a long tunnel), you can’t organize your pics on Flickr or update your leads SalesForce.com.

The #2 complaint, however, makes less sense to me. People seem to loose sleep fretting over not being able to access their data if their web app provider goes offline. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen... when Twitter, Amazon S3 or Gmail go down for a few hours, it’s front-page news and the pundits rub their hands anxiously and list the perils of using an application that stores your critical data on someone else’s servers.

All of this fretting implies, however, that your data is always accessible when it’s on your local PC instead of being in the cloud. Ummm… <virtual hand raise> … When you install a new printer driver and it breaks the photo organizer software you’ve been running for the last year, you can’t access your data until you figure out what happened. When that game that your nephew downloaded from a Russian website that uses DOS fonts forces you to bring your PC into the shop to get cleaned up, you might not have access to your data for days. When (heaven forbid), the microscopic head in your hard drive gets one micron too close to the disk surface and you lose it all, you REALLY don’t have access to your data. IT departments inside of large companies spend their days running around helping users who can’t get at data on their local machines for one reason or another.

Sure the above are all infrequent events, but when you consider that most Web apps go down for less than a few hours a year (when you may or may not actually be even using them), well, if you’re going to lose sleep over something, worry about not being able to get at what’s on your hard drive (especially if you use a droppable, stealable laptop).

It has to be said, as well, that in all of the mini-catastrophes listed above, you’d be able to jump onto another computer and keep working if you were using a Web app.

Web apps are run by companies (like mine) that live and die by uptime. If our app goes down, you can bet that someone competent is working like an idiot to get it back up again. When your local word processor won’t launch for no apparent reason, no-one’s scrambling to fix it except you.