Archive for the ‘User Experience’ Category
iPad and the Future of Publishing
Popular Science+ on iPad
Now there is a lot of excitement about iPad saving the publishing industry. Even though I love my iPad, I doubt that it can do anything for the print media. The only real difference between an iPad-optimized website and an iPad App is the price expectation. We come to associate the Web as a free medium whereas we expect to pay for “Apps”. But this will change rather soon. The prices of iPhone apps keep dropping, and if any apps are more than 99 cents, people complain that it’s too expensive. It’s just a matter of time before the vast majority of Apps are free.
Although the novelty of iPad magazines like Popular Science+ may be worth paying for it now, the excitement will wear off pretty soon. Ultimately I don’t think there will be any advantage with reading magazines on an App. Google has done a great job of optimizing Gmail for iPad, and I actually prefer using it within the browser over using iPad’s native email App. Gmail has many great features, some are built-in by default, while others can be added. The features like labeling and filtering would not work on iPad’s email App. There is no chat or SMS features from within the email UI either.
App-based magazines will have the same problem: While some features are going to work better on the App versions, others will be better on the Web versions. The App version could only be used on the device you installed it on, while the Web version could be accessed from any device, iPad, iPhone, or desktop. Your own machine or someone else’s. You have to manage your copy of the magazine App; installing, upgrading, and backing up. The Web version would not require any of them.
As more websites start to take advantage of HTML5, the differences between the App versions and the Web versions will be virtually none. There will be less and less reasons to publish anything as Apps.
Also, less popular magazines could create an iPad version and make it free to take the audience away from more popular magazines, which could force all the magazines to go free.
Another situation publishers are facing now is that the brand names of magazines and newspapers are less relevant now for the readers. Because of the efficiency of the search engines, I can find relevant articles in any publications. I don’t really care who published them. I’m often reading articles from magazines that I’ve never heard of. And, I surf from one publication to another.
The same phenomenon is happening on TV. Because of DVRs, we no longer care what channels our favorite shows are on. In the old days, people were loyal to certain network channels, and watched whatever shows that came on those channels. This was mostly due to the fact that we could not watch what we wanted whenever we wanted. We were at the mercy of network schedules. DVRs and other on-demand video technologies freed us from this. Now we can search and play what we want to watch, just like on the Web. The concept of “network” is no longer relevant.
The same holds true for magazines. Much of the existing conventions and our reading habits are tied to the physical limitations of printed media. Because it did not make sense to print and sell one page at a time, they published a set of articles at a certain time interval. This is no longer relevant.
Furthermore, with printed magazines, we could only buy and carry a limited number of them, so we were stuck reading everything in the magazine we bought. This too is no longer relevant. With the Internet, we have access to thousands of magazines at our fingertip. There is no reason for us to read all the articles in one magazine cover-to-cover. We can jump from one great article in one magazine to another great one in another magazine. We don’t really care who published them. In the end, it’s the content that matters. This is yet another disadvantage of App-based magazines: It’s disruptive to have to go from an App to another App. It’s much easier to surf within a browser.
In the early days of blogs, most of them had no specific topics. Now, the idea of general interest blog is almost an oxymoron. On the Web, there is no point in grouping a variety of unrelated contents because the Web itself is doing that. There has to be a good reason why you would want to group contents into one site. I would rather follow a particular writer than to follow a general news media outlet like New York Times. The latter is too general to be useful. The differences between various news media outlets are too subtle. “New York Times” is just a way to group a variety of contents, and what ties them together is their editorial vision. But the difference between their editorial vision and that of, say, “Washington Post” isn’t great enough to offer any real value in those groupings. In our digital age, such groupings are no longer relevant.
In comparison, “Engadget” and “Gawker” are groupings that make sense. Many of these popular blogs started out as ordinary blogs operated by one person, but they have now become institutions. Blogs are becoming closer to traditional media as traditional media are becoming closer to blogs. I believe somewhere between the two is the future of publishing. iPad is a great device, but I do not think that it can save the traditional business model of publishing. If anything, it will probably accelerate the demise of it.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
The Reality of Online Stores
When I speak to clients who are interested in starting an ecommerce website, I try to be as pragmatic as possible, and even play a devil’s advocate a little. I go through a reality checklist with them because some of them have a completely unrealistic idea of what ecommerce is. The most popular misconception is that shoppers will come if you open an online store, just as they walk right into your store when you open a retail store. I always tell them that opening an online store is very much like opening a retail store on 1,234th floor of a 10,000-story skyscraper. Just opening a store on the Internet does not automatically bring any shoppers. Every shopper that comes into your online store is a result of your marketing effort. If you made no marketing effort, you will get zero customers. In this sense, a big part of the rent you pay for your physical store is actually a marketing budget. So, taking the store to the Internet does not necessarily save you any money because you would need to spend a lot more money on marketing and promotion.
Most people do not know what percentage of website visitors actually buy something. According to my research and my own experience with my clients, small online stores convert less than 1 percent of their visitors to customers. Even large online stores don’t do that much better either. (I believe 2% would be considered successful.) 1 percent is 1 customer out of 100 visitors. If your site can draw 100 visitors every day, I would say that is a pretty popular site. These days, it’s hard to get much traffic to your site especially if your site is new. We are all fighting for our shares of eyeballs on the Internet. Every year, new promotional schemes are invented, and the old ones become ineffective and obsolete. It’s pretty tough out there.
If you are not a celebrity, or if your business is not well-known, then building traffic of 100 visitors a day can take years. If your site or your product becomes a viral phenomenon, you could get thousands of visitors a day in no time, but that rarely happens, and you certainly would not want to count on that.
You could run online advertising campaigns to draw visitors to your site (e.g. Google AdWords), but this is often very costly. You could spend thousands of dollars in a matter of weeks, and as soon as you run out of money, the traffic drops back to where it used to be. Personally, I have never met anyone who had any success with advertising (online or print advertising).
Entrepreneurs need to be optimistic, because too much self-doubt can negatively affect not only themselves but also their partners, employees, and customers. So, to some degree, unrealistic expectations are unavoidable. But at the same time, I hate the feeling of selling shovels to gold-diggers, knowing very well that most of them would not make any money. It’s hard to play ignorant. This is why I play a devil’s advocate.
Many website developers ignore this part entirely, and try to sell all the bells and whistles of ecommerce to someone who wants to start an online store. Many of these sites would not make enough money to recoup the cost of the development. Think about it. Even if you are lucky enough to get 100 visitors a day to your site, only 1 person would actually buy something. If the profit for each purchase is $10, you would make $300 a month, which is $3,600 a year. That’s not much. You also need to keep in mind that most websites do not last more than 5 years because the technologies on the web evolve very fast. So, $18,000 is the total profit from this website. You then need to subtract the amount you spent on building the site (and your own labor too). Not very profitable, is it? Remember, this is based on a very optimistic scenario of 100 visitors / 1 customer a day.
Given this depressing reality, I always advise my clients to spend the least amount of money to build the simplest possible ecommerce site. For instance, instead of building a full-blown ecommerce site with hundreds of products, an inventory control system, and integrated payment processing system, just try selling a small number of products using PayPal or Google Checkout. Take full advantage of the fact that you can dynamically scale your store on the Web. (You cannot do this with physical stores.) Test the market potential this way, and if the result looks promising, then scale it up from there gradually. Adding PayPal or Google Checkout to your site is simple. It should not add significantly to the cost of building a website without ecommerce.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Why Facebook Introduced Username
I was pretty sure the reason why Facebook introduced “username” was because they wanted to add Twitter-like (or MySpace-like) public interface for each user. They have Fan Pages, but they are not designed for personal accounts (they are more for businesses or public figures). This is why I got very serious about securing the username “roxanne” for my wife (my own name “dyske” is too easy.), and I succeeded.
Now some rumors are spreading about this public feature of Facebook, called “Everyone” button, which will allow you to publish your status update to the general public. The idea is that your username URL would be the public access point. If you go to
http://www.facebook.com/dyske
you would see my public status updates, that is, assuming that you are not my “friend”. (If you are my “friend”, you would see everything: both public and private updates.) And, this page would act just like your Twitter page does. It’s a good idea. It would greatly enhance the value of Facebook, while still keeping the valuable aspects of the semi-private communication (among your friends).
Without these public features, username URLs would be rather useless. Those who are already my friends would not need to use the URL. And, those who are not my friends, should not be sending me friend requests anyway, which means I should not promote my personal URL. Then, why would I need one?
Facebook probably did not want to announce these features before the opening of username registration, because if they did, the competition for securing usernames would have been much more intense (and therefore taxing on their server).
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Is Google Really Scared of Bing? At Least There Is One Reason They Should Be.
There seem to be a lot of articles about Google feeling scared of Microsoft’s new search service, Bing. I wonder if this is part of the massive ad campaign. If so, it’s pretty effective.
There is actually a good reason for Google to be afraid. Unlike operating systems or office applications, switching the search engine of your choice is rather easy. No installation, learning curve, compatibility issues, or licensing. Nothing sticky. I can set the default search on my browser to Bing in a few clicks, and it wouldn’t disrupt my daily work at all. Google search isn’t even tied to other Google services like Gmail. The search engine market is actually a relatively easy market to compete in. The only problem is that the infrastructure required to support the basic search capabilities is so costly that small businesses can’t enter the market successfully. It needs to be someone like Microsoft.
Also, search has a lot to do with perception. I have a feeling that if Apple entered the market of search, even if their product is inferior, many people might believe it’s superior, and they might be able to beat Google. The average people have no way of gauging the quality of the search results. They just want to be assured that the results they are getting are the best possible results; so that they don’t have to search on a variety of search engines every time they need to search. Second guessing is what the users want to avoid because it’s time-consuming. In this sense, advertising and PR are key factors in the success of search engines.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
Exit Strategies in Web Page Layout
I see more websites are adopting this layout where they have no sidebars; instead they put it at the bottom of the page. Here’s an example: http://www.americanidol.com
This is something I realized recently, and thinking about it, it makes perfect sense to me.
I think this is about knowing and understanding the difference between the visitors who actually read your articles and who didn’t.
It’s sort of like how you should think if you were a store manager at Prada. Probably only about 1 in 100 people who walk into the store would actually buy something. To treat all the visitors equally would be silly. Someone who reaches the bottom of the article is qualitatively different from the rest, and we should treat them differently.
These days, your home page is not so important because search engines send visitors straight to individual pages. So, the visitors who come to my site are looking for specific things. After a quick scan of the page, if the visitor determines that it is not what he wants, he leaves and goes back to the search result page. This is fine. In fact, I would not want to encourage visitors that are not properly targeted because they are just wasting my bandwidth. The one that really count are those who actually read my articles. I should offer an after-care service, an appendix, a further reading section. It shouldn’t just be another navigation bar (we’ve always had that in the footer.). It should be relevant to the interest of someone who actually read the article.
A group of “share” buttons are definitely relevant. Links to other related articles are also relevant. I think highlights of what’s new is good too. If you have other related websites that you want to promote, it’s a good idea too.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
The Public Perception of Various Payment Methods
I found an interesting discussion about how people perceive different payment methods on the web (such as PayPal, Google Checkout, etc.).
Personally, I’m with the camp that I feel much better when I can pay using either PayPal or Google Checkout because I don’t want to give out my credit card information everywhere. It’s too dangerous to do so in this age of identity theft. I often leave the site when I see that the site does not accept neither.
But my view does not necessarily represent the majority. I wish there was a definitive study on this topic. But anyone smart enough about protecting their personal information would prefer PayPal and Google Checkout, and I suspect that this view will be the majority as more people become smarter and savvier about online shopping.
So, in my opinion, if you were to start out with one payment method, I would recommend my clients to use PayPal or Google Checkout, and add different options as the sales grow. As some people have said in this discussion, the perception that PayPal is for “amateurs” is changing. It used to be true, but it may no longer be true. Naturally the programmers and webmasters would have a vested interest in discouraging their clients from using PayPal because they can get paid more for implementing a full-blown shopping cart system. So, the perception of “amateur” is mainly the perception that webmasters have. In essence, they are saying that it’s the amateur webmasters that use PayPal. That may be true, but such a perception may not hold true for the majority of the consumers.
—posted by Dyske » Follow me on Twitter or on Facebook Page
