I do not enjoy Facebook — I find it cloying and impossible — but I am there every day. Last year I watched a friend struggle through breast cancer treatment in front of hundreds of friends. She broadcast her news with caution, training her crowd in how to react: no drama, please; good vibes; videos with puppies or kittens welcomed. I watched two men grieve for lost children — one man I’ve only met online, whose daughter choked to death; one an old friend, whose infant son and daughter, and his wife and mother-in-law, died in an auto accident.
I watched in real time as these people reconstructed themselves in the wake of events — altering their avatars, committing to new causes, liking and linking, boiling over in anger at dumb comments, eventually posting jokes again, or uploading new photos. Learning to take the measure of the world with new eyes. No other medium has shown me this in the same way. Even the most personal literary memoir has more distance, more compression, than these status updates.
1. Learn how to write emails
2. Price is not agile
3. We are not professional testers
1. Learn how to write emails
The people who sign up for your web apps are often early adopters. As a group, early adopters have one important thing in common. We like shiny stuff.
Because we sign up for a lot of things (for ‘testing purposes’), it’s not that unusual for us to receive the error message, “This email address is already in use” due to the fact we already signed up for your app after reading something about it on Read Write Web a few months before.
So, when you send us an email telling us about the exciting new features in your new RidicoMoniker web app, you’ll have to remind me what your app actually does.
2. Price is not agile
When you send us an email telling us that such and such feature is now ‘free’, you think you’re making us an offer we can’t refuse. What you’re actually telling us is that you’re failing, you’re going to go bust and lose all of our data.
Price isn’t something you can tinker with in the same way you can tinker with your microcopy. You can’t do rapid iteration with your price point any more than you could do it with your name. Pricing is a strategic decision, not a tactical one.
3. We are not professional testers
I have no idea what to do with your app. If I had any idea what to do with your app, I would have already found you. I have a favourite tool for all the things I know how to do. This means you’re going to have to teach me something.
(Oh, and if you’re one of those puritanical do-one-thing-and-do-it-well apps with a transcendental UX? It’s late 2010 and your moment has passed unless you are extraordinarily charming. I will admire you on SwissMiss and add you to my mental pattern library. But I’m rarely going to use you.)
It’s fairly obvious that people learn at different speeds. So, your 30-day time-limited trial is worthless. Besides, I only signed up for your app as part of my procrastination routine and I’m really busy this month.
A two-minute flyby screencast of your wonderful features won’t do anything except help me work out how to use your confusing UI. And, actually, I’m pretty good at working out how to use your confusing interface because I’ve had a lot of practice in that kind of thing. But WTF am I supposed to do with it? None of your apps are free, except to you.
Teach, don’t show. Stop reading all those crappy marketing blogs and hire an Instructional Designer for the day.
Note:
This whole post comes because of this. Who the frig are these people? Monitis, you suck at writing emails.
It started out well. You and a friend were talking about a topic of interest to you both, sharing your opinions, listening and collaborating on thinking things through. But something went wrong; you don’t know exactly what. Now you’re arguing, the tension is thick and the stakes are high. He thinks you turned it into a power struggle over whose right and–well, frankly you think he did. . .
Simplifying a lot, try picturing thinking as travel through a maze comprised of branching options. . .
Sometimes you’re conversing over the walls, talking to people who made different choices at the forks and ended up somewhere else. . .
I’ll call this Shoptalk. It’s like a conversation between two car lovers comparing notes on their rides without feeling a need to agree that they should have the same cars or tastes. There’s a warmth and respect even at a distance within the maze. You could call it “agreeing to disagree,” but that emphasizes the disagreement. . .
There’s another kind of conversation I’ll call Affinity and Beyond. You meet someone in the maze, someone who, by whatever paths has ended up in the same corridor as you, facing the same forks and choices. . .
In this kind of conversation you meet on common ground with common goals and a common quest. The affinities are strong enough that you venture forth together beyond your current assumptions attempting to develop one line of reasoning between the two of you. . .
With Shoptalk you don’t try to find or stay on common ground. The differences between your positions are irrelevant and need not be addressed. If anything, they’re to be celebrated: Vive la difference!
With Affinity and Beyond, the differences are the focus, and the juice is in addressing them together and working it out.
‘Working it out’ being, here, a synonym for ‘arguing’. It’s certainly tempting to think we argue more with people we’re ‘on a journey’ with. But it, most often, doesn’t feel like that.
This seems to be as good an image of arguing as you’ll find anywhere:
Some people like arguing. This is confusing to people who, erm, don’t:
The single most frustrating thing about people who actually like arguing is the fact that they, as a group, are the least capable. People who like arguing are, in general, very bad at it.
Launchlist is “your one stop website checklist,” a simple web app used for checking that a website’s standard-compliant and ready to go. Fill out your details, answer some Yes/No questions and away you go.
And this (click to bigify and read the comments):
