Books for a Better World, Pt. 1

There are a couple books (literally, two) that I find myself quoting from on a very regular basis. Today, I come to speak of the book that takes about an hour to read and years to fully assimilate.

But before I reveal the identity of this book, a question: when was the last time you started using a new application (for the sake of this blog, “applications” includes web sites) and felt like the architect of said application truly cared about your experience?

Speaking from personal experience, it never occurred to me why certain applications felt “better” and “worse” to use. Nor did I ask myself why frustrating applications had ended up being designed as they were. Now I reflect on both regularly, and the reason is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.

Before I go any further, I should probably throw in fair warning: after reading this book, my reaction to using poorly designed software has changed from a mix of frustration and confusion to simple anger. If I waste more than five minutes finding a basic piece of functionality in an application, this now generally leads to severe annoyance. There is a fair chance that you, too, will revile the authors of your poorly designed software after reading this book. Therefore, if you are a person of action with a strong sense of justice, think twice before reading a text this potent.
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But if you think you can deal with the truth, here’s what you’ll learn:

The premise of the book centers around the fact that users are very busy people who have neither the time nor the will to give an application as much attention as designers think they will. Krug asserts that when encountering a new application, the human impulse is to scan a page in about 1-3 seconds, make a best guess what will get them where they want to go (in Krug’s words, “satisfice”), and muddle along from there. He points out that designers should take care not to waste users’ milliseconds through making unclear links or leave them stranded in an application without a clear sense of where they are. He goes on to do some exercises where the reader sees examples of well-organized sites (i.e., Amazon) and poorly organized sites (buy the book and see them).

What’s more, the book is chock full of pictures and great examples. As I’ve come to know other Internet entrepreneurs within the community, I have found myself repeatedly citing examples in this book, as it seems to take most applications at least an iteration or two before they can get enough user feedback to create a UI layout that makes sense. Without this book and a strong sense of responsibility to your user, an application can quite easily never get things right.

With this book explained, you can now look forward to hearing the exasperated tales of applications that drive me bonkers, like TopStyle. This application earned itself an express ticket to my bad side today when, after handily reporting files with CSS errors in them, it provides no clear path of how to fix (or even view) these errors. Clicking on a specific error in a list of errors just jumps directly to the top of the file that the error resides in, not to the error itself. Brilliant.

Back To Square One

After laboring over this site for the last five months, we’re finally back to step one: writing the business plan. This was the first step in Bonanzle’s infancy, and has again come to the forefront as our development process has reached the point of self-perpetuation. When I think about what the “best” first step to take would have been, I think “write up the business plan” is probably about as good of a guess as any: you are immediately forced to weigh yourself against competition and enumerate what it is that you think you’ll be providing. The catch is that, in all but the rarest cases, what you think your product will be in the first couple weeks is an educated guess at best.

So it was with Bonanzle. I started by noticing a problem in the way shopping worked, and identified a fix to that problem that could extend beyond solving the original problem. The more I analyzed it, the more apparent it became that this idea could in fact extend all the way to creating a new class of shopping experience. The next couple months I bounced between business planners, entrepreneurs, market savvy types, and all people in between, as the idea grew bigger and bigger in its potential.

Taking a notebook chock full of ideas, opinions, research and facts, I feverishly pieced together the plan that constituted Bonanzle’s best opportunity to make a significant impact on the online marketplace. The result? Our original idea.

It has become increasingly apparent through analyzing our competition and my further communications with the always wise Mr. Dalasta that it takes something either vertical or completely offbeat to tempt users away from a gorilla. Despite the pages of potential applications for this site that many well-versed web veterans have brought to my attention, it is my conviction that we need to start by solving one problem, and solving it superbly.3darrow.gif

What then have I gained from these months of analysis? Only everything that will go into the business plan. Even though the idea ended up the same as it started, it has only been through having the idea continuously scrutinized that I’ve been able to determine which combinations of words make eyebrows raise. Put all those raised-eyebrow answers together, sprinkle in the words “weave,” “synergy,” and “confluence,” then for good measure, toss in a couple 3d arrows and flowcharts to represent data, traffic or customers, and you can pretty much sit back and wait for the first couple mil to arrive in the bank. Am I right, investors?

I ? Logo

I question whether logo matters.

Think about it: What aspect of your site/business is more subjective than your logo? At its most concrete level, it may subconsciously communicate some aspect of your business. But from everything I can tell, determining whether a logo is “good” or “bad” is about as scientific as determining if a painting is “good” or “bad.” In this sense, it is true that there is such a thing as a truly great painting and a truly awful one. But 95% of paintings/logos fall in this middle gray area where nobody is qualified to say what is right and wrong. I have a hard time justifying great costs on a collection of a few pixels that fall within the 95% of pixel collections that everyone else has.

Of course, the logo apologist will be quick to retort, that “gray area or not, the logo is the face of your business. It is who you are. It is how people remember you. When people think of you, they think of your logo. ” And of course, those facts are to some extent true.

So then I extrapolate to myself : Who am I? I am Bill. How do people remember me? As Bill. What is the face of Bill? Uh, it’s the face of some dude with short blond hair and green-blue eyes.

But even if people remembered me as “Pedro,” with “Sleek black hair and dark brown eyes,” I think I could still succeed in my goals if I had something unique to offer.

So I assert it to be with the logo, and so I save me mucho logo dinero.

Be Better

In the last blog, I discussed the first half of the pivotal question for the great idea: How is your thing different and better? This time I’ll discuss the second half of that question.

To be sure, there are a lot of ways to be different than the competition. An eBay-like site that exclusively sold variously-aged Cheetos would pass the “different” test. Etsy would also pass the “different” test. So the question is, how can one tell if their idea is more like selling variously-aged Cheetos or artist-created handiworks?

The answer: ask around. This is a more difficult task than it sounds like for many entrepreneurs, because many of us introspective, visionary-types are used to listening to ourselves when an important question needs to be answered. It doesn’t help that other common qualities in entrepreneurs include the need for control and willingness to buck the norm. Simply put, most entrepreneurs at some point get used to living in a world of doubters and the short-sighted. So when it comes down to the most pivotal question of an idea’s existence, why would we turn to the same choir that has so regularly tried to stomp our initiatives… until around the point that said initiatives become unfathomably successful?

The first reason is that while people may not be able to imagine something better, they can often spot something they don’t like. Even if they can not absolutely determine why they don’t like an existing offering, asking people questions about their past experiences is instrumental in determining the relative degree to which certain opportunities exist in an established competitive landscape.

The second reason is that, if you’re asking your target audience, you are talking to the people that will ultimately determine your idea’s success. While human nature is naturally skeptical of all things “new” and purportedly “better,” ultimately it is the entrepreneur’s mission to dispel that skepticisim by creating a tangible product that resoundingly fills a need its competitors don’t. Without asking your target market about their needs and desires, what will guide you toward creating that tangible product that manifests your idea?

The third reason is that maybe you’re wrong. Yeah, you. Maybe your idea is variously-aged Cheetos. And if you spend thousands of dollars creating the perfect site for selling these, you will succeed only in becoming thousands of dollars poorer. Gaining feedback about your idea from the people that will ultimately use it is the ideal means by which to determine to what extent your idea needs to be adapted before it hits the bullseye.

Entrepreneurs are ultimately big dreamers and big dreamers are often very protective of their dreams. As such, I have found it difficult as a relative youngster in this game to take the first steps toward exposing my idea to the potential of Valid, Important criticism.

But that’s what this game is founded upon: having an idea, being wrong, and productively responding to that reality.

If all continues according to schedule, I should be able to report in the next week or two how being wrong feels.

Differentiation

It’s the three-inch titanium wall between you and the loot. It’s the ghost you feel on your ceiling in the middle of the night. It’s the $64,000 question challenging your otherwise-grand business idea: How is your thing different and better?

This question has been dancing through my head for weeks. It’s one thing to have an idea that could make people’s lives better. I have those every day, and you probably do too. In fact, talk of “how to do things better” has graced watercooler after watercooler since some business wunderkind had the idea that our lives would be improved if we didn’t drink from the tap. However, barfing out some idea of how things could hypothetically be better is not unique. If only the ideas heard by the watercooler were judged in a void where “degree of improvement” was the sole arbiter of success, then the world might properly appreciate the value of a good idea.

But they aren’t and it doesn’t. My idea kicks eBay where it counts, while providing a service that person after person has agreed they could utilize. But the $64,000 question remains, because the 800 lbs gorilla is often only of peripheral concern to the new business. Big businesses tend to lumber along with scattered focus, and as a result, are easy to be negatively contrasted with a nimble startup if one focuses on the idealistic: “Could I do a certain thing better?”

The crucial gauge of the great idea, then, is no more how it compares to the gorilla than how it compares to everything else. Once I find a site that seems to be trying to do something similar, I ask: How do I compare to what these people are doing? How will I compare to them once they see my idea and start trying to copy it? And of course, how well is this business doing? Quite frankly, this final question is an annoying one to ask, because if they are doing well it means more competition, and if they’re doing poorly it means the need we’re trying to meet might not be as great as anticipated.

From what I can gather, it would seem that there are a lot of “entrepreneurs” who don’t have the tenacity or wherewithal to ask this question, and their site ends up missing the key point of differentiation. For example, Powersellers Unite provides a list of the 20 most successful eBay copycats, er, Internet auction marketplaces. You visit these sites, and you see very little to distinguish them from eBay, save that they €™re willing to make less money with lower or no fees.

It takes tremendous courage, tenacity, and perseverence to honestly evaluate a competing idea and confront the question of why that idea won €™t work and yours will. But it alone is what charges a €œgreat idea € with the power to become €œa great, successful idea. € Over the course of refining my great idea, I’ve focused on learning to be honest about the similarities, and persevere through them with an even greater understanding of where are the cracks in the fortress of competition. There is no second option for businesses that want a realistic chance to succeed.