ex

If you liked that video, then there are several more found on YouTube by searching for RSA Animate, including ones covering Freakanomics, The Secret Powers of Time, and Left Brain, Right Brain.  There is also another company, Common Craft, that does something similar.  They have a line of videos “In Plain English”.  For example, below is one of “Blogs in Plain English”:

One of the skills I wish I had was the ability to create whiteboard videos like the examples above.  Being able to explain complex problems, solutions and ideas visually is a powerful ability.  One of my goals in the near future is to improve in this area, hopefully getting to a level where I am half as good at explaining concepts as RSA and Common Craft.

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The main difference is that the Nook is an open system while the Kindle is not.  The Nook is powered by the Android OS, so theoretically you can program whatever you want that works ok within the device UI, and devs have added programs like Pandora to the e-reader successfully.  The Kindle is running a closed OS so the only way to add new programs is if Amazon adds them to the device.  Both devices have a web browser and the Nook also has Sudoku and Chess, which actually work surprisingly well utilizing the color touchscreen.

Much more important than the OS is the support for book formats.  The Nook is an open platform that supports a wide variety of ebook formats.  As a Nook owner, I can go to dozens of online bookstores to purchase ebooks and load them on my Nook successfully.  If I had a Kindle, I’d have to purchase exclusively from the Amazon.com bookstore.  Even better, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of libraries across the country that offer free ebook rentals.  I can go to my local library’s website and check-out ebooks for 2 weeks, load them onto my Nook and read them, checking them back out if I need more time.  That alone is a huge money saver and allows me to sample a wider variety of books than I otherwise would.  You can also lend a book that you’ve purchased to a friend for 14 days; you just send them the book and they can accept it on their Nook and have 14 days to read it, during which time you have no access to it on your device.

Beyond the present benefits of multiple bookstore options and free library rentals, there is also future proofing when using the Nook instead of the Kindle.  If I buy a book for my Nook, then I can use that book on future ebook platforms that are also open.  If I buy a book for a Kindle, then that book is locked into the Kindle platform.  If future ereaders come out that are much better and I want to buy one, I would lose all books that I had purchased for my Kindle, which is very unfortunate.  By buying a Nook instead, I’ve ensured that I will be able to read those books I do buy for it for many years to come.  Since I buy mostly non-fiction books, that is very important so that I can re-read books in the future or refer back to parts of them at some point.

I know I’ve argued the benefits of the iPad and iPhone OS, a closed system, before and that may seem opposite of what I’d argue given this post here, but there is a big difference.  Content.  The iPhone OS is so great because of the App Store and the wide array of great Apps and developer support for the system.  When comparing e-readers however, the content is the same.  For the most part, both offer the same books, so it comes down to which gives me more flexibility for purchasing and borrowing the books as well as which allows me to transfer the book that I purchased to a wide variety of devices both now and in the future.

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To play Bananagrams, each player draws 21 tiles and creates their own scrabble-like board with those tiles.  When a player uses all tiles successfully, every player draws another tile.  This repeats until there are no tiles left and the person who is first to create a successful board with all of their tiles wins.  The key factors like quick anagramming, expert knowledge, and use, of 2-letter words and knowing how to play the harder letters are still competitive advantages in Bananagrams.  Gone is the pain of waiting for other players to slowly play their turn; this is turned upside down by the need to play as fast as possible simultaneously.  Now players are in a race instead of taking their entire alloted time every turn to find the best play.  Bananagrams also has no scoring; Qs are not worth more than As like in Scrabble.  No scorekeeper is necessary, nor is a board, paper or hourglass.  Bananagrams can be played when you only have a short time period to play a game; the better you are, the less time you need to play.  The tiles are all that you need to play Bananagrams, making it very portable and easy to play anywhere.

There are tradeoffs, of course.  The strategy in how to play the board, not opening up double/triple words/letters, for your opponents is gone.  And there is no bonus for making a 7 or 8 letter word.  Bananagrams is a different game from Scrabble and both are fun and competitive in their own way.  But by solving many of Scrabble’s pain points, Bananagrams has positioned itself as a great alternative to Scrabble.

Making a good product isn’t enough, especially in the competitive and crowded retail space.  Bananagrams was strategic here as well.  If the game came in a standard board game box, it would have been buried on the shelves next to a dozen other word games.  Instead, the maker created a unique banana casing for the game, which allows the game to stand out on the shelf.  It also takes up far less room, which is a plus for retailers, and as such often enjoys placement on aisle end caps.  Consumers pass by the aisle and are likely to notice the banana shape of the game and are interested in what could possibly be in the package.

Additionally, the unique packaging and positioning as a banana allows the makers to easily expand their offerings to other games packaged in the shape of other fruits like apples and pears and attract users who have played Bananagrams.  They have created a brand around a line of fruit-shaped word games; I don’t even know who makes the games, as they don’t need to rely on building up their name as a brand.  The packaging does it for them.  Through a combination of strategically creating an alternative to Scrabble and brilliant packaging, the maker of Bananagrams has created a hit word game that is selling fast and enjoys high visibility in the crowded word game market.

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Groupon.com is a coupon site that offers one great deal per city per day.  The catch is that nobody gets the deal unless enough people claim it.  So if you log into the site and see a great deal that you want, then you have incentive to share it on facebook, twitter, email, etc to try to get more people to claim the deal so that the threshold will be met and you will get your coupon.  The very way the site works guarantees that users will spread the word.  This has lead to the site growing quickly and it seems like every week another Groupon clone is launched.  The downside to this strategy is that it’s easy to duplicate for new competitors; they just have to offer a better deal and get the first few users and then the deal will spread exponentially bringing users to the site.

Facebook Games tend to understand the importance of incentivizing users to encourage friends to join.  You make more money in Farm Town if you have others harvest your crops and plow your fields.  To get a larger farm, you must have 8 friends become your neighbors.  Family Feud gives you 5,000 points if you post your fast money on your wall or invite friends and at least one friend helps you to get over 200 points.  And even if you aren’t inviting friends, many of the games are constantly posting updates to your wall to broadcast how much fun you are having playing the game to your friends.

Notice in both of the above examples that you don’t HAVE to bring in other users to benefit from the service.  That is important, because if users get no utility from a service unless their friends join and participate then that severely limits the chances of the site taking off and the number of users who will use the service.  You don’t want a chicken and egg situation when trying to attract users to come to your site and actively participate.  Social networks both enjoy the benefits of user incentive to bring in friends and suffer from the chicken and egg problem.  The exponential growth possible is what led to the massiveness of the popular sites like MySpace and Facebook (now at 400 million users!), but there are dozens of failed networks that never got traction because users abandon the site if enough of their friends don’t join to give them utility.

There are also sites that do the opposite, and users are actually disincentivized to spread the word and bring more users because more users lessens their experience.  A new type of auction site has popped up where users buy bids for a price, say $0.60 each, and each bid on an item increases the item price by only $0.02.  So if an item starts at 2 cents and gets 200 bids, then it’ll be sold for $4.02.  The winner gets a great deal while the site got $0.60 * 200 = $120 for the bids.  The problem is that the incentives for the site and the users are directly opposite.  Users want less users on the site so they can buy the items for less bids and less money.  The site wants more users on the site so they get more money from lots of bids.  These sites can grow and be successful, but they’ll have to do it without the exponential growth from users spreading the word that sites like groupon enjoy.

When designing products or considering which of multiple ideas to pursue, ponder if there is a way to align user incentives with your own.  That is, see if you can make it beneficial to the users for them to drive traffic to your site.  The products or services that you can create that can do this may be able to take advantage of the growth that comes from users evangelizing your product, giving them a better chance of surviving and thriving.  You want your product to provide utility to users immediately, but provide even more utility as the user base grows.

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Well now it’s being reported that HP has cancelled the slate and decided instead to create a webOS tablet after buying Palm, who created and owns webOS, last week.  So it seems like HP does understand the market now.  While other manufacturers will have to find ways to differentiate from the other Android slates in the long run: exclusive software, form factor, battery life, and price, HP can build up webOS as a viable alternative to Android and either use it exclusively on their machines if they can get enough developer support, or license it to the other manufacturers to make money on licensing fees and increase attractiveness to developers.  webOS already has some great interface features with regards to multitasking and notifications.

webOS has an opportunity to capitalize on the weaknesses of its competitors: iPhone OS and Android.  iPhone OS’s closed system has its benefits, but it also leaves it vulnerable to a well-executed open system.  Android is an open system that is growing strong, but it does have an issue with fragmentation in the market.  The variety of devices using various versions of Android means that developers building apps for the latest version of Android are only hitting 27% of the Android market.  Even the official twitter app on Android only works on 27.2% of devices.  If Google keeps churning out new versions at such a fast pace, this may continue to be an issue.  In the end, it will come down to the software support; can webOS get enough developer support to create a strong app store.  Even if HP fails at this, they can still compete with the other OEMs using Android for tablets, which is a far better choice than Windows 7 or any other desktop OS.

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For the first week, I’m going to do a double-header, although both are from the mind of the same guy: Chris Dixon.  The first is his website, hunch.com, which is a true decision engine, not a search engine with extra data like bing.  It relies on users adding structured data to provide recommendations on topics that are not factual or black and white.

Anybody can add a decision point such as “Do you want to sit outside?” for a restaurant recommendation.  The algorithm behind the site asks you these questions, tailoring which question to ask based on your previous responses until it can make a recommendation personalized to what you want.  It’s a service that gets smarter, and stronger, the more people use it.  Leveraging Wisdom of the Crowds with structured data and throwing in some personalization based on your activity on the site, hunch can help you make a decision on anything from which cell phone to buy to where to eat lunch today.  I’m a fan of products that get stronger as more people use them, as this ensures they are building in a competitive advantage that will be hard to duplicate because, unlike easily duplicated functionality, it will take time and be hard for competitors to play catch up.

Chris Dixon, the man behind Hunch, also writes a blog at cdixon.org that I read as often as he posts, and I follow him on twitter @cdixon.  His blog covers a range of topics from strategy to economics to startups and venture capital to product design.  Here are a few of my favorite posts on the blog:

• Developing New Startup Ideas – The concept here is that you should not be secretive about your ideas, hoarding them scared that someone will hear them and start a company with your idea.  This post was one of the inspirations for this blog, in which I will be blogging more often about ideas in the future.
• Techies and Normals – The idea is that to have a successful, scalable product, it needs to appeal to more than just techie early adopters and reach the mainstream audience.
• The Next Big Thing Will Start Out Looking Like a Toy – Covers disruptive technology similar to my post on disruptive products
• The Challenge of Creating a New Category – A great topic of interest for me.  It can be difficult to properly execute on a sweet spot product because either users don’t know how to relate to the idea or because it gets related to the wrong category, which totally misses the point and benefit of what it provides.

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A Hackathon brings together employees from various departments to collaborate on building a demonstrable prototype on an idea discussed and fleshed out in the group.  Many times the entire event occurs in one day, so in the span of 9 hours teams are formed, ideas are brainstormed, and prototypes are built and demonstrated.  The idea is to get out of the box of the products you are currently working on and spark creativity by being forced to go very fast, utilizing the more intuitive part of your brain.  You also get to collaborate with employees that you may not normally work with, which may show you different perspectives or give you a glimpse of how some other departments see the products or the market space.  The end result is a demonstrable prototype of the idea, which may have a better chance of getting that product onto the roadmap than a powerpoint on the idea.  Or the product can be launched on its own as a minimum viable product to get customer feedback and iterate on it as necessary.  As a bonus, Hackathons are fun!

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Choice Overload – It may be unintuitive to many, but people have a hard time choosing when there are more options rather than fewer choices.  Many designers, marketers, and manufacturers try to give consumers as many choices as possible, hoping to provide the perfect product for every user.  However, studies have shown that users will consistently choose to make no choice rather than try to choose one from many options.  This is called choice overload.  In general, people would rather have a handful of choices, even if none match exactly what they’d want, rather than dozens of choices that may include a few favorites.  When designing products, it is important to keep this in mind.  For example, if you provide a list of categories to browse, show the user roughly 7 choices, not 20.

Avoiding Wrong Decision – People tend to be more worried about making the wrong decision than they are with making the right one.  This means that when comparing potential choices, they look to see if one choice is obviously better than another.  If they find that, they are far more likely to take that choice than usual because they know they are at least not making the wrong decision.  For example, if someone is given the choice between a 7 day trip to Japan or a 7 day trip to China, then they may have a tough time choosing and it’s basically a 50/50 decision for them if they don’t have a preference between the two countries.  But if they are given a 3rd choice as well, a 6 day trip to China, then they choose the 7 day trip to China far more often, because they know they at least didn’t choose the worst option.  The 7 day trip to China is definitely better than the 6 day trip to China, so it’s the easy choice that guarantees they did not make the worst decision.

When designing products, if you have a path you’d prefer most users to take but still want to give another choice for those who have a strong preference, then consider making it easy for users without a preference to choose the preferred path rather than get stuck not knowing which one to choose.  You don’t want users to leave your site because they got stuck facing a hard decision.

First Impressions – When people are exposed to something, they instantly get a feel for if they like it or not.  It is possible to overcome this first instinct, of course, but only if they stick around long enough to learn more about it and gather more data.  If a user lands on your site and they don’t see what they expected to see, then they are likely to hit back and try the next site in the google results.  Experts in a field have better instincts than the average user, but you shouldn’t expect the majority of your users to be experts in your product, like you are.  Usability studies, where you have people come in and use your site while recording their impressions, are very valuable for this reason.  You can gain insight into what the average user, not the expert, thinks about your site or product when they first see it.  If you cater your site to the advanced users, then the rest of your traffic may not understand the benefit you are providing and dismiss the site as a poor solution for their problem before they give it a chance.  Instead, you should tune your site to cater to the average user, while providing the tools for more advanced users.  That way you can convert more of your traffic, and then can attempt to convert those users into power users by surfacing the advanced functionality that you provide.

An important thing to keep in mind is that people generally ‘like’ the familiar.  So if your product or service is very different from the conventional offerings, you may get poor feedback from market research simply because the respondents equate different with bad.  You need to adjust for this and may need to adjust how you frame the research in order to get a true sense of whether your product is truly bad or just different.  Getting a minimum viable product out into the market to get real users trying it out and tracking their actual behavior with a different product offering will be more useful than market research on a paper prototype where users are inclined to dislike unconventional products.

To read in depth about the above topics and more, check out Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point author) and The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.

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A great case study for moving users upstream is the Nintendo Wii.  The video game market was well defined and sized and Nintendo wanted to grow the market size.  So instead of catering to the advanced, ‘hardcore gamer’, users they built the Wii to appeal to non-gamers, bringing them into the market at the ground level with Wii Sports.  Millions of people who hadn’t previously played video games were hooked by Wii Sports, which replaced complex button presses with motions that mimicked real life play of the sports.  Those users then bought games like Wii Play, Brain Training and Wii Fit, which are slightly more complex and then moved upstream to more traditional games like Mario and Mario Kart and then on to Zelda and Metroid.  Every user didn’t swim the whole way upstream, which is evident in the sales charts of the games.  But some users will move up each step of the way.

When building your product, ensure that you have a solid foundation for the main use case that users will expect when they arrive at your site.  If you build the standard product well, then users will be happy with your site and return and be open to being moved upstream.  So if you have a new way of providing search for a widget that is better than the competitors, don’t focus only on that improved search functionality.  Build a solid standard search that users expect and then provide ways to surface the advanced functionality and benefits to them as they go through the normal flow.  A portion of the users will move upstream and start to use the complex, or non-standard, solution that you’ve built and you’ll gain more users overall than if you simply allow advanced search and expect users to understand it when they arrive for the first time and scan your page for familiar functionality.

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