Catch-22

Gmail Users: Avoiding "oops" E-mails

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 05:25:00 +0000

If your a gmail user, and are looking to avoid resending mails because you forgot to attach a document in the original one then Greasemonky has a solution for your problem. It's a script called "Gmail attachment reminder". This reminds you to attach a file to your mail based on whether you have the word attach(ed, ment, etc) in the body.

If the script detects a situation where it thinks that you have forgot the attachment, it will pop-up a warning message alerting you.

It's been very useful for me and I have not send any "oops" e-mails for some time now. You can get the script from here [userscripts.org]

“Email-Responsiveness” – Learning the Art of Email Correspondence

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 13:41:00 +0000

I get really frustrated when someone does not reply to my messages within 24 hours! Most of the time you get a reply only after you've politely (but persistently) badgered them a few times? The crazy thing is that even though I know how annoying this can get, I have done this with others myself. So, I thought it would be good idea to find out why this happens and if there are any know ways to improve my email responsiveness.

People typically give quick replies to two types of people:

whose immediate cooperation they need in order to get their own job done
who badger them persistently enough to make them feel uncomfortable or embarrassingly inefficient

There is a high chance if you don’t fall in the above two categories, then forget getting a response within 24 hours. The weird thing is that they are not doing deliberately. So, why does it happen then? Let’s try to figure out!

It’s extremely tempting to leave an email in the inbox as a reminder to reply. So these messages loiter around in the inbox until the user gets around to answering them.

So your inbox gets clogged up with messages that you have already read but have not taken any action on. Such messages tend to get buried and forgotten, and at best you end up wasting time re-re-reading them while scanning your inbox.

I found two interesting and very simple suggestions by people to get your max response time within 24 hours.

The first Solution :

Need to reply but don't have time right now? Drag the message into a special folder, entitled "Reply", that holds all the messages that need replying to.
Schedule a couple of times a day, every day, in which to crank though the Reply folder, during which you shoot off the necessary answers and file the messages elsewhere.

Note: I don’t know how this method will manage the case when you don't have time to formulate a reply to a complex or time-consuming issue

The second solution:

An alternative solution suggested is to file every email immediately, but to put a flag on those which need a reply; then to just work through your folders. This approach means there is no need to move emails first into a special reply folder, and then move them again once you’ve replied to them - though at the cost of having to set and later clear a flag. For longer e-mails they suggest to save your response in drafts, and finish them periodically.

The author of the technique says that he files the email after having read and flagged them. Then he works his way through relevant folders as and when he has time. Thus the emails are always there in the right folders with the relevant other emails etc and when he has dealt with it, he simply clears the flag and the email is already filed with the reply.

The second technique seems more effective to me. However, will it solve the email-responsive problem in totality? Let me try both ways for some time and I will let you know!

“Understanding the true spirit of the new web”

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 16:04:00 +0000

There has been a lot of talk about web 2.0 and online services which fall under this category. I have become an ardent user of some of these services myself and have gained a lot of value from them. Hence, I thought it would be a good idea to explore the philosophy of the new web.

Web 2.0 for me is not so much a change in the web, but more a realization of the goal of “The network is now your computer” philosophy. This means that users are no longer viewers and consumers of services/content, but are actively participating in creating new services and content from customizable Lego-style web based software. They’re gathering and disseminating their own news with blogs and podcasts, creating customized articles and photo feeds from their favorite sites and even annotating them with helpful text tags that others can search.

Paul Graham, co-founder of Viaweb (the first web-based application) wrote an enlightening essay on what differentiates the new web from web 1.0. According to him, the key differentiating elements are:

AJAX: "Ajax means JavaScript now works, and that in turn means that web-based applications can now be made to work much more like desktop ones.”
Democracy: This means that given the right kind of system to channel their efforts, a group of amateurs can surpass professionals. Some of famous examples of where democracy has won on the web are:

Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia
Reddit / Digg vs. Traditional Newspapers

Value your users: In the late 90s most popular sites were loaded with obtrusive branding that made them slow to load and sent the user the message: this is our site, not yours. (There's a physical analog in the Intel and Microsoft stickers that come on some laptops.). Most popular services this time around give great importance to their users. So whether it is del.icio.us, flickr, reddit, or basecamp; for them users always come first and this shows in their products.

However, what got me excited was the fact that if you pay close attention to these elements mentioned in Paul’s essay, you come to realize that Google has been a pioneer in all three components of Web 2.0. "Value your users" is a subset of "Don't be evil,” motto that Google swears by. Google’s PageRank technique relies on the millions of individuals posting websites to determine which other sites offer content of value instead of relying on a group of editors or solely on the frequency with which certain terms appear and of course Google set off the whole Ajax boom with Google Maps.

Google is one of the few internet firms that not only survived the internet bubble burst but was really unaffected by it. So does this mean that the new web is nothing more than all the good things about the web 1.0 that survived the bubble burst? If this is true, maybe the new resurgence in web-based services (which follow the web 2.0 philosophies) is not just another media buzz. Well I guess only time will tell!!!

Surviving the Featuritis Plague

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 17:53:00 +0000

One of the most common reasons for loss of productivity due to office software is a syndrome called Featuritis (i.e. overload of features). Most software applications used within an enterprise seem bloated because of unnecessary features.

The image shown below provides a pictorial explanation of how user happiness is linked to the number of features associated with a product. Any user feels comfortable with an application as long as the application makes him feel like an expert. This is the feature threshold value for that user. If the features are less than the user’s feature threshold, then he feels that the application is incomplete. If the numbers of features are more than the threshold value then users start to get confused by them, and eventually conclude that they suck at using the product. No person likes to use a product that makes him feel this way.

The two primary reasons for featuritis are:

Feature Arms Race with Competitors
Ad-hoc User Requests

Features Arms Race happens when product companies start adding features just because their competitors have them. This happens because:

1) They are afraid of falling behind competition.

2) Feeling that whatever a competitor adds is something that users want

3) Assuming that potential users will buy off a checklist, and having maximum features will get their product selected

4) Compulsive need to add, since the idea of an upgrade that subtracts features seems counterintuitive.

5) New features are easier to promote than better/working versions of existing ones.

The solution of winning the feature arms race is to avoid participating in it. Devote all of your attention to users and your own ability to innovate. This will ensure you will spend more time on understanding your users rather than building unnecessary features.

There are situations when users do shop off a checklist. This typically happens when they lack a deeper understanding of what is important and what they really need from the product. Buying off the checklist makes them feel that they are getting better value for their money (the whole ROI concept). You need to educate such users so that they make more prudent decisions.

The second cause for featuritis requires more careful analysis. This happens when users make ad-hoc requests for features. Such requests are made because the feature threshold value for every user is different from other users. If the product company says no to such a request then they may lose a genuine user. However, if they start saying yes to every user request and keep adding features to their product, they are sure to end up with a product that is mammoth and bloated.

The open source community has provided a solution to this problem. Expose as many API’s of your product as possible to your user community. This will give them the flexibility to add or develop new features to the base product. Firefox, for example, has a robust community of developers who write extensions and themes that people can use to enhance Firefox with a flexible set of additional features. By providing these separately, Firefox avoids becoming too bloated and also keeps user needs satisfied.