rahul gaitonde dot org

Sharp, sharp:

The American consumer culture is predisposed to replacing a broken product instead of refurbishing it, whereas Pakistan’s consumers demand ingenious repairs to keep products functioning far past manufacturer expectations. Conversely, America’s political culture is inclined to repair any malfunctions that arise through democratic rule, while Pakistan’s people repeatedly scrap democratic regimes and “start fresh” out of frustration at politicians who fail to satisfy their needs.

…which a legislator may not use in the Delhi Assembly: among those expressly prohibited are “haathi ka bachcha”, “smuggler”, “sala”, “andher nagari choupat raja”, “abe chup” and “are doob maro”.

No wonder the Parliamentary version of the book runs into 900 pages. Because apparently of examples such as

“bandicoot”, which is unparliamentary if any MP uses it for another, but which is okay if he uses it for himself.

Any satire is as misleading as it is true. But read it anyway: “I knew Christopher Hitchens better than you”

This was twenty five – twenty five! – years ago, at the 1986 Australasia Cup final:

For starters, batting first, India managed to put on a massive 245 runs on the board. It was the highest score in Sharjah then and we were already under psychological pressure. The pressure increased as Pakistan’s top order returned to the pavilion one by one. That’s when I realised the responsibility on my shoulders,” Miandad recalls.

It’s striking how similar Miandad’s position was at his last match almost exactly ten years later at the 1996 World Cup quarter-final. India scoring 288, Pakistan chasing, a quick fall of wickets, Miandad as the last hope, a screw-you fightback. Different ending, though.

Indonesia’s Industry minister, on RIM’s decision to set up a factory in neighbouring Malaysia instead of Blackberry-crazy Indonesia:

“I suggest we impose an additional value-added tax, or luxury tax, for such goods, so that people would choose to invest here instead,”

Way to go, minister. Exactly what’ll make Indonesia *really* attractive.

(via Penn-Olson)

So usually you identify One Key Metric to measure success. Or maybe more. And those metrics are probably the right ones for your product/service – pageviews, signups, app downloads, dollars, ponies.

The thing is, when everything’s right and you’re growing like gangbusters, nothing really matters. You just stand in front of that giant screen that measures the One Metric in real-time, and down shots with every milestone (ten thousand ponies!).

But then you’re not doing so well. And so then you switch to detective mode and dive into your logs to make sense of what’s happening – or what’s not.

It’s going to be hard to do that every time something goes wrong. And yes, things will go wrong more than once. Because once your baby has launched, you’re going to obsess over every little negative point and trend, however fleeting.

You don’t need an event log. You need a dashboard. Something in addition to your single-point metric. That’ll help you find why that One Metric isn’t doing so well [1].

Three general principles that will likely help:

1. Model and track your ideal customer flow. Create a state diagram of how you want your customers to navigate through your app or your website. Now track state transitions, not state populations.

For our paid subscription service with a free trial, our One Metric was payment transactions. When that slowed, we just didn’t know why. We just knew a lot of people were signing up and now weren’t paying enough. Why didn’t they like the service?

Then we created the following state diagram [2].

Which then told us that of the people who stated the free trial, too few people were paying us (x%) and too many were letting their trials expire (y%). It wasn’t that they disliked the service as they just didn’t *do* anything [3].

2. Track over time. Track both your One Metric and customer flow every day (or minute?). When you tinker with something, you’ll see how it affects your customer behaviour. Today, and a week from now. Note: you can get carried away with tinkering this way.

3. Export, don’t just display. Week-on-week on-screen charts are great, but have both the OneMetric and customer flow snapshots exportable as CSV. Being able to find correlations between data sets will help your cause/effect analyses no end. Chimps can do pattern recognition too. But they can’t rock a vlookup.

So then. To a million ponies.

[1] Look, chances are you’ll muck around with your log file or raw data exports anyway, but your dashboard’s going to tell you exactly where to look.

[2] Very briefly: the states ending in ‘f’ were free trial states, the others were paid states; a customer began in SSF (service started, free) and either paid (SSP or service started, paid), or actively stopped during the trial (USF or unsubscribed, free), or had their free trial expire (PPF or payment pending, free), and so on.

[3] We first thought they just didn’t care (terrible!). When we surveyed a sample, we found that communication was a problem – we were doing a terrible job at telling them just how they could pay.

As your teams hurtles towards launch, there’s one thing you may have overlooked.

Your new user experience.

No?

Because you guys live in the product, rough edges and all, it’s been a while since you signed up yourself. Your team members’ accounts have been well populated by now – with friends/email/messages/subscriptions/songs/whatever you’re building for. Do you remember how an empty, first-time page or screen looks?

It’s also likely that your product’s not-logged-in home page, or your app’s at-launch screen looks perfectly OK to your guys because you’ve been staring at it all day for the past several weeks. What about your potential customers, who’ll see it the first time?

Finally, everyone on the team knows how to get to the other pages/screens. Heck, if it’s a web thing you’ve probably even bookmarked the inside page URLs separately. How discoverable are they by a newbie, however smart, who doesn’t know they even exist?

A few weeks ago I signed up for one of our products as a new user – not flattering. The product per se was awesome, but we could have done way better with setting expectations up-front, the first-time user flow and on-screen messaging.

At this point, it might help to record this new signup experience using a screen recorder like Cam Studio and view the video as a team. It’ll likely be eye-opening, with lots of eyebrow-raising and finger-pointing. Such is life. And egos.

But your product will be the better for it [1]

[1] Sure, your beta users will point all this stuff out to you. But you want to give them a half-decent experience too, right?

You know, you’d think the Macbooks were the only laptops with gee-whiz multitouch gestures – they certainly get all the press. But there’s multitouch on those lookallthesamedontthey Windows laptops too.

Synaptics, the company that makes trackpads more than plastic skating rinks for your fingers, has done a bang-up job. On my 11” Dell Inspiron, I have configured:

• Two-finger vertical and horizontal scrolling
• OS X Lion-like ‘reverse’ scrolling
• Fantastic one-finger circular scrolling for long-distance vertical and horizontal scrolling
• Standard pinch-to-zoom and twist-to-rotate
• Pointer ‘momentum’ to slide rapidly across the 1366×768 display
• ‘Tap Zones’ to configure each of the 4 corners of the touchpad as custom buttons (my touchpad’s bottom left corner is a ‘show desktop’ button)
• 3-finger flick left and right to go back and forth through photos and the browser
• 3 finger tap-and-hold to launch custom applications (Google Chrome for me)

But laptop manufacturers have let customers – and Synaptics – down with the size of their touchpads – these touchpads have remained the same size even as they became far mroe capable.

Compare the Macbook Air’s trackpad (10.46cm x 6.22 cm = 65.06cm²) to the Dell Inspiron’s (7.5cm x 3.8 cm = 28.5cm²) and you’ll see that the Macbook’s has 2.28 times the Inspiron’s surface area. Here’s how bad it is:

(Macbook image taken from GottaBeMobile)

Think of how much more joyful and fun it’d be to use your Windows laptop with a giant trackpad. If the design folks at Dell and Lenovo are using their own laptops, surely a trackpad thrice as large should be on the top of their agenda.