douglas berger

Sensors on everything? Sure, why not?

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 08:42:16 -0500

Call it the sign of a bubble - or just call it a sign of innovation - it seems that in the future we’ll put sensors on everything (or at least we’ll have the option to) - and track activity with our smartphones.

The first obvious thing to throw a sensor on is ourselves. That’s where Fitbit, Nike, and Jawbone come in as the leaders. They help us track everything from sleep to exercise, and allow us to “manage what you measure.” Now I just read on AllThingsD that a company/product called Whistle is doing the same for our dogs! Some might scoff at that, but I think it’s pretty amazing to be able to measure our dog’s activity, sleep habits, etc. - especially since they can’t talk to us.

Then there’s all of these sensors for things we use in our daily lives: Nest and Automatic are great examples of this. Nest is known as “the learning thermostat” and Automatic is a new dongle that hooks up to your car’s existing data port to help you understand the black magic mechanics behind your car. Who really knows what that check engine light means anyways?

The Bottom Line

Smart sensor/app combinations are just heating up. Check out Kickstarter (e.g. LUMOback) and you’ll see some of these fascinating ideas/products in their infancy - and catch a glimpse of what’s to come.

"When Jobs asked for a number of options to consider, Rand declared that he did not create different..."

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:44:18 -0600

“When Jobs asked for a number of options to consider, Rand declared that he did not create different options for clients. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.””

- Isaacson, Walter - Steve Jobs (p. 219).

While in Santa Fe, NM for vacation this past week, we watched a...

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:18:35 -0600

While in Santa Fe, NM for vacation this past week, we watched a man blow and form glass into a tumbler. It’s an amazing thing to watch from start to finish - and see it take shape into the final piece.

"When a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he..."

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:06:46 -0600

“When a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he responded, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.””

- The Man Who Inspired Jobs - NYTimes.com

"When launching a new technology, it’s far better to constrain the capabilities of your big new..."

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:02:16 -0600

“When launching a new technology, it’s far better to constrain the capabilities of your big new idea—even if it’s an artificial constraint—than it is to over-promise and under-deliver.”

- Want To Create A Breakout Product? Start With A Narrow Focus | Co. Design

"Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to..."

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:32:36 -0600

“Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact.”

- Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think

"I can’t stress enough how important it is to write bad songs. There’s a lot of people who don’t want..."

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 08:23:39 -0500

“I can’t stress enough how important it is to write bad songs. There’s a lot of people who don’t want to finish songs because they don’t think they’re any good. Well they’re not good enough. Write it! I want you to write me the worst songs you could possible write me because you won’t write bad songs. You’re thinking they’re bad so you don’t have to finish it. That’s what I really think it is. Well it’s all right. Well, how do you know? It’s not done!”

- John Mayer, in a talk to Berklee music students via JoelBlog

How to respond to "help, my computer is slow!"

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:57:00 -0500

This past weekend, after using a friend’s computer to book a flight and hotel, I was getting frustrated with how slow her computer is. She told me that she probably needs to get a new computer soon because it’s so slow. I decided to try out a few things to see if they made a difference. First, I noticed the computer was running Windows Vista - or possibly Windows 7, and was running what looked like Internet Explorer 8.

My first observation after clicking around on the desktop, start menu, etc., was that the computer itself was not slow, rather, browsing the web was slow - and I mean painfully slow. Since she was so used to running IE, I decided to try installing Google Chrome Frame - which is supposed to speed up browsing, and make more rich internet experiences to people with IE. After installing it, and browsing again (namely aa.com, and hilton.com), it was still painfully slow.

My next thought was to install Firefox, but since I’ve been having issues with it crashing ever since Mozilla updated to Firefox 4, I decided to avoid that headache.

I decided to install Google Chrome, which I use as my primary browser at home (not approved at work). Chrome installed easily, and will upgrade seamlessly in the background without bugging her in the future. Chrome not only sped up the browsing experience 20-fold, but it also gave her the perception that her computer was dramatically faster than it was before. Instead of her having to wait 15+ seconds for something as simple as American Airlines’ site to load, it went down to probably 2 or 3 seconds. At that point, I deleted the shortcuts to IE on the desktop and in the Taskbar, and replaced them with shortcuts to Chrome.

This absolutely amazed me that hundreds of millions of people are sitting out there thinking that their computers are slow, when in fact it’s just their web browser.

Here are the morals to the story:

With even the most basic computers being as fast as they are today, it’s highly unlikely the computer is the problem. Before you jump to conclusions, ask your friend what they do on the computer that is slow. 9 times out of 10, they just use their browser, and Microsoft Office.
If you want to look smart when someone complains their computer is slow, just install Google Chrome.

"You actually don’t want people using your product because it’s cool… because then..."

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:51:11 -0500

“You actually don’t want people using your product because it’s cool… because then it’s a fad. What you want is people using your product because it’s a part of their life… and they can’t stop using it.”

- Sean Parker, Co-Founder of Napster, founding President of Facebook

"Focus is about saying no."

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 10:01:42 -0500

“Focus is about saying no.”

- Steve Jobs, open Q&A at WWDC 1997

Lessons Learned: Choosing your "contact us" method

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:01:00 -0600

After supporting an enterprise service for a few years now, I have had the opportunity to test support via email, phone, ticketing system, and web-based forum. Depending on the service you’re actually supporting, the number of users, and the support model you feel most comfortable with, there are pros and cons to each.

Something you should keep in mind while making this big decision: In most cases, your goal should be to reduce the amount of support required. I am not saying to stop picking up the phone, or stop emailing people back, I am suggesting to figure out why people are calling in the first place, and make it so nobody will need to contact you for those reasons ever again. Each of the following sections will not only contain pros and cons of each contact method, but will also tell you how to use each as effectively as possible. Hopefully, by the end, you will have the answer to these simple questions:

How do I want my customers to contact me?
And more importantly, how do I want to contact them back?

Phone

When I first started supporting my service, 100% of support was done via the phone. My company has a shared enterprise helpdesk, so they would take the basic support calls, but every time they had to escalate, I would receive a call on my cell phone. If I didn’t pick up the phone, they would leave a message, and that was the only place I could find what was in my “queue”. People typically only leave their phone number to get back to them (even when you specify to leave an email), so my only option was to call them back. As you can imagine, there were several times when the voicemail filled up during an outage. In most cases, I would try and figure out their email address by searching the corporate directory, and send a bulk email back to all of them at once. This usually happened when I received so many voicemails that I had no choice but to “declare bankruptcy”.

Services like Google Voice – or another helpdesk voicemail software could help out with this, but I would ultimately recommend avoiding phone support. Taking orders over the phone is fine - since orders actually make you money – but supporting customers via phone is a disaster waiting to happen.

Email

Email is great when talking to friends, doing basic customer service, sending out system announcements, and surveying your customers, but can become a nightmare to manage a helpdesk. Imagine for a second that your service is big enough that you require more than one support rep. You could either use a group mailbox or login to the same email account. When one person is working a request, they need to make sure it gets marked as “read” – otherwise the other reps might contact the same customer when its already been worked. If you decide not to work one and read it, you need to make sure to mark it as “unread” – otherwise you will definitely forget to come back to it later. Ultimately, email is a good way to start with email, but should eventually be phased out as you scale your service.

Ticketing System

Ticketing systems can be great when they’re full-featured, but can also be problematic when they’re not. My company has an overly-complex ticketing system that does not facilitate the customer interaction. Some of the better ones I’ve seen out there allow you to facilitate all communications with the customer via the system – which is extremely powerful. This way, you do not have emails from a customer all over your inbox, voicemails from them on your phone, and messages from them on the forum – all about the same issue.

Ticketing systems are extremely powerful if you plan on going back and doing analysis of the tickets. By having that data available, you can dig through past data and pick up on trends. Any trends you find can be used to support my philosophy above - fix those problems so you never have to answer a question about them again.

Forum

Nowadays, using forums (A.K.A. message boards) to do support is becoming commonplace. Great examples can be found in open source projects such as WordPress, and products with great communities like ExpressionEngine. Some choose to host their own forum, and some choose to use services like GetSatisfaction and UserVoice – which are both great. If you have a very active user community, forums can allow users to support users, which of course allows you to keep your support staff at a minimum relative to comparable companies opting for siloed support methods (email, phone, etc).

Forums can also allow users to search for answers to their questions before they ask the same question again. Since most support requests you will receive are repetitive, this can be extremely beneficial. See 37signal’s “Answers” site for a great example of searchable, crowdsourced help.

One thing to keep in mind is that forums are not the end all be all. Forums must be paired with one of the other methods described above when “private” tickets are necessary. Examples of “private” tickets are billing questions, password problems, and other things that cannot be discussed in a public forum.

Contacting them back

Now that we’ve laid out the most common options for users to contact you, how do you want to contact them? In most of the methods above, you can either have an automated reply or greeting telling the users what information you need to contact them back, and how you will be contacting them back. If you think you can support twice the number of people via email that you can via phone, then make a rule that you will only email them back – regardless of how they contact you. It goes without saying that you should reply back within the forum or ticketing system if that’s how a user contacts you (but I said it anyways).

Tracking and Analysis

Remember the more data you have about the support requests, the more analysis you can do in the future.

Conclusion

While results will vary depending on the nature of support requests and the nature of your product or service, my findings are likely to hold true. If there is one thing you take away from this essay, it is that you should not pick a support model and stick with it forever. Your needs - and the needs of your customers - are bound to change over time as you scale.

"If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they..."

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 22:40:00 -0500

““If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it, so I had to go and create it, and then show it to people, and say now what do you think?””

- Steve Jobs, per John Sculley

"Courage to constantly question the ordinary in search of surprising, long lasting experiences."

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 13:21:14 -0500

“Courage to constantly question the ordinary in search of surprising, long lasting experiences.”

- Bang & Olufsen’s Vision

"I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life...."

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 18:47:00 -0500

“

I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.’ I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that’s very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, 'What will I think at that time?’ it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That’s the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

”

- Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, in 2001 on his “Regret Minimization Framework”

Follow vs. Friend

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:35:00 -0500

Our online world was dominated by mutual connections before Twitter came around. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have all operated under this model:

Person A invites person B to connect
Person B gets an email, clicks the link, then clicks accept
Person A and B are now connected to each other

Twitter flipped this on its head and allowed you to connect to someone without them connecting to you - better known as “following” someone.

On Facebook, you connect with who you know. On Twitter, you connect with who you want to know.

Some thoughts

Connections on Facebook seem to be much more meaningful and useful when you think of it from a psychological perspective. Friends are much more meaningful to an individual on a personal level - they are people you have actually met. From a graphical perspective, friend-based networks form a web, where follower-based networks form a hierarchy. One is a popularity contest, where there other is simply a network.

Wheat vs. Chaff

When I open my Facebook news feed, there’s a high likelihood there is something in there that I care about (wheat). However when I open my Twitter stream, there is a whole lot of chaff. Most of it is either people whose business lives I am interested in, or news. Rarely do people I know post to Twitter, and if they do, they typically tweet about news or insights, as opposed to personal things. I follow accounts that either belong to people I know, or otherwise post interesting things (such as @techmeme). It’s almost like Facebook and LinkedIn are my personal networks, and Twitter is my news reader.

Follow = Spam?

I rarely get a friend request on Facebook from someone I do not know. Contrast that with Twitter where I get followed by people that I don’t know every day, who a) want to try to sell me something, or b) are hoping I’ll follow them back so they can build their following (typically self-proclaimed “social media consultants”). That plays back into it being a popularity contest.

What do you think?

Share your thoughts on Follow vs. Friend in the comments. It’s an interesting topics I’m constantly thinking about when working on social/professional networks.

Wikipedia to add article feedback

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 12:12:00 -0500

Wikipedia to add article feedback:

While Wikipedia is one of the most trustworthy sources for historical information, it’s also prone to opinion and politics. The Wikimedia Foundation just announced plans to add “Article Feedback Tool” to their articles, making it simple for readers - who rely on information being accurate and neutral - to quickly identify if a page is a trustworthy source, as voted on by others.

The “Article Feedback Tool” will allow any reader of an article to quickly and easily assess the sourcing, completeness, neutrality, and readability of a Wikipedia article on a five-point scale.

If implemented properly, this is a big win for Wikipedia readers. We will immediately be able to tell if an article is worth our time, without wasting our time.

Is this the first step to Wikipedia going social? Would more people contribute to Wikipedia if you could login with Facebook Connect or Twitter accounts?

"Sometimes people think that a simple description of a product means there isn’t much there. But..."

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:14:00 -0500

“Sometimes people think that a simple description of a product means there isn’t much there. But really it’s the opposite. You have to be able to distill down what you do in a way that your customers can easily understand the value proposition. It’s hard, but it’s also a business necessity.”

- Michael Arrington, TechCrunch

"When you buy something cheap and bad, the best you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it...."

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 15:16:33 -0500

“When you buy something cheap and bad, the best you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it. When you buy something expensive and good, the worst you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it.”

- Redfin blog

"So while I don’t expect Twitter to master its own destiny as far as the decentralization of the..."

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 09:41:00 -0500

“So while I don’t expect Twitter to master its own destiny as far as the decentralization of the medium goes, I do support the idea, and I hope that Twitter as a business can coexist with the need for the world to have a free, open, reliable, and verifiable way for humans to instantly communicate in a one-to-many fashion.”

- Alex Payne, former lead of Twitter’s developer platform

Twitter’s growth curve is unbelievable.

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 09:25:32 -0500

Twitter’s growth curve is unbelievable.