Guide me through a process...

Just ordered some tea online from Mighty Leaf - they sell delicious teas of many different kinds. Quite good, but not the focus of this blog. I just wanted to call out what I thought was a great user experience in signing me up to their system and helping me order the tea quickly and efficiently - i.e. they got $50 out of me without blinking an eye!

The below screenshot is a view of the entire purchase process - it was a clean look and feel, along with a nice navigation across the top of the screen that let me knew what step I was in, and which ones still remained before I completed my purchase. This is alot like TurboTax, which is another relatively good user experience in terms of letting you know where you are in your tax filing process and removes any 'uncertainty' of what has happened and what remains. This is really helpful, as opposed some experiences you get on sites like expedia where you can feel like you're lost in different screens and pages. This was a refreshing experience - if only more companies could take a page from the Mighty Leaf book, online purchases would be much better.

One other thing to note here - it's not necessarily about reducing the number of screens I see as a user, it's really about making the experience flow nicely and easily without requiring any heavy thought from me... or distraction throughout the process.

Just a small observation. Well done Mighty Leaf.

1984

An elevator pitch for your app / product

A great marketing / awareness / on-boarding tool that has gained increasing use over the past few years has been what I call the application elevator pitch - it's essentially a ~1 minute video explaining how an application or product works and why it's valuable for the end user. Google has been a great proponent of this and applied it to many of their early stage products and developments. Many other companies have also followed suit. I am a big fan for a few reasons:

1. It helps a user quickly and easily (in a fun way) understand what a product is about and why they might use it
2. It forces a company to really focus on the value they're providing to the market - if you can't explain what you're providing to the market and why it's important in less than one minute, then chances are you don't have a focused enough offering

Some great examples of this that I've seen include a few from Google:

One from the personal finance application, Mint.com:

Just a great way to get your product idea out there and gain awareness.

Enjoy!
1984

Credentials & usernames - how about something people will remember for once...?

One particular issue I take with many web applications these days happens when they ask you to create a username for yourself to sign in to their service - I'm fine with creating credentials (though signing in with Facebook would be preferable), however what I don't like is when they get you to create some random name -- what really needs to happen is for these sites to force your login credentials to match your email address... this only makes way too much sense:

1. You know that there will never be a namespace issue, as every email address is by definition unique
2. People are much less likely to forget their email address, as opposed to some random username or tag they gave themselves when signing up for your service

Ultimately, if people want a 'tag' name for posts or some social aspect of an application they should be able to call themselves whatever they want... but for credentialing, let's keep it simple stupid!

Signing off for now,

1984

Our life as a game...

I don't know that this is necessarily a new thing per se, I imagine it has been growing in popularity over the last few years, but what really struck me today was how many Web 2.0 companies / applications are applying gaming principles to attract and retain users. It's both brilliant and bizarre at the same time. Our lives are now being turned into games... get points for:

• Eating at restaurants - Foursquare
• Watching TV shows - Gomiso
• Driving your car - Waze

This has been driven perhaps by a few things:

Zyngbook - Facebook and Zynga - these two behemoths of the social technology world were instrumental in bringing small time multi-player gaming into the mainstream

Pseudo-psychologists - There have been a number of pseudo-psychologists in the last decade or so that have hit it rich with best selling books that look at the irrationality of human psychology and behavior. I'm sure burried in their ramblings is something about how humans inherently love variable reward games and will play them repeatedly

Whatever the cause, it's still bizarre. While I admire the efforts of these companies from the standpoint of a savvy businessman, it pains me to see that so many people continue to wrap their lives up in what can only be described as noise. Facebook is of course the pinnacle of this... perhaps it's time people stopped playing their virtual lives and went out to get a real one.

1984