Making software smarter sometimes pushes customers away

A colleague and I were talking about how MS Project tries to anticipate, intuit, and proactively rearrange your project plans for you--and how often this goes wrong and just ends up frustrating us to the point of doing what we were doing at the time: looking at a simple gantt chart I'd built and shared with her on a competitor's product (in this case smartsheet.)

We have to be careful about how we try to make software "smarter". Done wrong, we can make the user feel too dumb to use it and drive them away.

37signals is famous for (among many other things) their approach of deliberately trying to "underwhelm" the competition by doing less, saying no to most feature requests, and keeping things so simple, so clear, so easy-to-use, so mission-focused that it does its job REALLY well and that's it.

Think about your phone. I was talking with a gentleman the other day who'd just bought a smartphone and realized after a week it was way too much for him; he was complaining about how hard it was to find a phone that was literally just a phone.

It's okay to put all kinds of sophisticated intelligence in our software. Enterprise-class problems are complex and require a solution that fully addresses each need. But we need to keep in mind the old Naisbitt idea of High Tech/High Touch and ensure we spend at least as much brain power on making it usable and friction-free. "Smart" shouldn't just mean logic and rules and number crunching on the back-end; it should mean we've arrived at the simplicity on the far side of complexity in our interface. Sometimes it just means let me do it myself, thank you very much.

Just Add Water

So I'm in the grocery store looking for some household cleaner and come across Arm & Hammer's Essentials. At first glance it looks like they are selling an empty bottle.

Then I notice the tiny little extra bottle attached to the empty one that apparently contains the real cleaning agent. It dawns on me that all the other "full" bottles on the shelf are trying to sell me water. Hmmm.

I would imagine this product (although not a new idea, really) kind of upsets the apple cart in the cleaning solution industry. It changes the game and makes all the other guys look bad. I may be wrong, but I'd think selling water + special sauce is fairly profitable vs selling just your concentrate. But it was bound to happen. Better to be the first one in than play catch up on this.

So here's a company that deliberately put out a product that would cannibalize its profits. But it positions itself as the brand that's on the side of the consumer--not other cleaning solution suppliers--and that's significant. Customer trust and loyalty go way up. And there's now kind of a dark cloud floating over other "full bottle" brands that wasn't there a few moments before. But the point is that the consumer still ultimately gets a full bottle of cleaner--but cheaper.

It made me think about some advice I got early on as a new consultant: a good consultant comes in and solves a problem. A great consultant comes in, solves a problem, but does it in such a way that she/he teaches you how to solve part or all of that problem on your own in the future. There will probably always be some special sauce that you have as a consultant that your client will not--even if it's just the perspective you have that comes from dealing with multiple clients across many industries over several years or the skill or "touch" you've built up over time that can't be faked (watch a good drywall guy and you'll know what I mean).

So here's the takeaway:

1. If you're a business using outside consultants, ask yourself if she/he is leaving behind some capability with your internal people. If not, find another consultant.
2. If you're a consultant, ask yourself what is something that you do that you charge for that you could transmit to your client over time and start letting them add their own water.

Imagine a plumber or an electrician that comes to your house to fix a problem, but rather than just diving in and taking care of the issue while you're off checking email or something, they offer to show you how to fix it so you can save a $100 trip charge if that problem ever comes up again. In my book, just the offer would be enough for me to designate that person my plumber or electrician for life.

Jason Fried from 37signals has been talking about similar ideas for a while now. I'd encourage you to watch or listen to as much of his content as you can. And just boil your service offering down to its essentials.

Spening Too Much Time on the Backlog

Spending Too Much Time on the Backlog
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Books mentioned at UTC CTO P2P Forum

I mentioned two books at the recent UTC CTO P2P Forum--both from the company 37signals:

The first is Rework which just came out and is already a bestseller. This is more focused on running a business.

The second is Getting Real which is their first book and talks primarily about how they build software. You'll find Agile principles all throughout both books. Enjoy!

Software is like Tic-Tac-Toe

We just taught our three-year-old son how to play tic-tac-toe. I was in the beginning stages of the very lengthy porcess of putting him to bed the other night, and we were taking turns drawing on a little refreshable drawing pad when I drew a tic-tac-toe board. We played a few games. Then it was his turn to draw and he decided to draw a "better" tic-tac-toe board with more lines on the playing board so you would have to get five in-a-row to win instead of three. I chuckled because I remembered doing the same thing as a kid. But it occurred to me that traditional tic-tac-toe where three in-a-row wins was, in fact, the best (and maybe only really usable) version of the game. There is an optimal point where you hit "enough" and putting more complexity into the game makes it worse and sometimes not even worth trying to play.

The company 37signals has been an advocate of this same idea in software for some time: a given application should be about getting certain things done. The developers should find the easiest, fastest, most intuitive way to do just that and stop. Adding more lines (in this case, lines of code) to the game does not make it better. It buries the core functionality so that the software becomes too complicated, too hard to find the function you need in all the drop down menus, too much of a hassle. And we wonder why user adoption is so hard. I think the winners are those, like 37signals, who find that point of "enough" on the curve and deliberately stop while they can.

The genius of Ken Burns

I've just finished watching the Ken Burns film Thomas Jefferson. In my mind, Mr. Burns is the preiminent historical documentarian. In the special features section of the DVD I found two short films on him and his work. Here are some notable excerpts:

Listen to the photos
One of Mr. Burns' trademarks is taking a still photo and either zooming in or out or panning across it in some way while the viewer hears an audio track. It's now even called the "Ken Burns effect" in filming jargon. There's a whole lesson in just this point on embracing constraints (see a chapter on this in 37signals book). But Burns says he would stare at a photo and "listen to it." He elaborates by saying the trees in the photo had a rustling sound, the boat going by, the people walking and chatting in the background all would have been making sounds. He even goes so far as to ask, "What did the dust sound like?"

Find an emotional connection

My work is not just interested in the dry dates and facts and events of the past, but the emotional archaeology--and I call myself an emotional archaeologist--because we know that's the glue that makes these complex past events stick in our minds and in our hearts and become permanetly a part of who we are now.

This is very similar to the approach author David McCullough takes to his work.

History is

History is, not was. We're never going to change what happened...But the way we engage our questions now about it tell us who we are right now. (now quoting Harry Truman) The only thing really new is the history you don't know.

Meaning accrues
When asked about the length of his films in general and his slow, gliding shots in an era of quick frenetic cuts:

We realize that all meaning accrues in duration. The things that we are all proudest of, the work we've done, the relationships we have, accrue in duration. It's the things we've given our best attention to, and we realize in the end the only thing we have is our attention.

Thinking with your hands

I was listening to a TED podcast this morning from a gentleman from IDEO. He described a design session where an IDEO team was meeting with surgeon's to discuss a new surgical instrument they would like developed. Someone from the design team left the room and in a few minutes returned with a dry erase marker taped to an empty film canister that was taped to a clothes pin in the rough shape of a gun. The designer gave it to the surgeon's who passed it around and begin offering very constructive feedback on how the device should sit in the hand, how it should be shaped, what it should do, etc. IDEO calls this behavior "thinking with your hands" (and this eventually turned into a real device).

It typically involves making many low-resolution prototypes very quickly. Often by bringing many found elements together in order to get to a solution...And so this behavior is all about quickly getting something into the real world and having your thinking advanced as a result.

This dovetails precisely with the Getting Real approach advocated by 37Signals. Tom Peters has been an advocate of this for years. And it explains why the Back of the Napkin approach of visual thinking works so well.

IDEO takes this idea seriously and has "protyping carts" around filled with Play-doh, tape, Legos, colored paper, markers, etc. ("the stuff we all had in pre-school") so desingers can begin prototyping objects whenever they want. They also apply this approach to designing a service experience through rapidly jumping into role-playing various scenarios.

Seth Godin and Cosmetics

My wife is legally blind and often comes to me with a handful of frosted glass cosmetics jars of every shape, size, and color as she's getting ready in the morning asking what each of them are. I'm continually amazed at how specific (and frankly creative) many of these products can be.

At the same time, I'm reading Tribes--Seth Godin's new book. Seth is one of my favorite authors and a common theme of his (and Tom Peters for that matter) has been to find and dominate micro niches (or some small territory along the long tail) rather than taking on Ma Bell. Basecamp or Highrise from 37Signals (one of my favorite companies) is a much better bet today than trying to take on Word or Excel.

So that got me thinking: if Revlon can sell a cream for women of a certain age to place just around their eyes--only at night--how many possible creams/lotions/potions are there? And if they can do that with their market, why can't I do something similar with mine? How many ways can you slice and dice your target market? And after you've done that, you're sure to find at least one of those micro market niches is underserved at the moment. And Seth would say there's a "tribe" waiting for you to be their leader.

The Final 1%

My wife and I recently sold our modest town home in Baltimore. We spent about three weeks preparing for the sale by doing all the things we'd wanted to do while we lived here (i.e., painting, putting carpet in the family room downstairs, etc.) as well as by throwing out and donating a ton of stuff we realized we no longer used or needed. It was impressive to see what a big difference these relatively small steps made in the home's appearance and livability. What's interesting is that the sales price was in the low $300K range and it only cost us about $3K to fix the place up.

Now maybe real estate is totally unique and the lessons learned from this sale can't be extrapolated to other environments. But it certainly should give one pause to think that putting in that last one percent of effort and attention to detail could perhaps make the difference between making the sale or not. Or, like in our case, making the sale in one day for a bit more than list price.

I think I'll take a look at my next project deliverable a bit differently now and go over it carefully one more time before turning it in to see if there's anything I can throw out or get rid of or "paint". Incidentally, I've got to thank a recent 37Signals blog post for pointing me to a recent Semeiotica blog post re: the "smallest effective difference" which addresses the above phenomenon from the perspective of molecular biology and psychology.

Anyway, when we were done with the above improvement my wife and I looked at each other and asked why we hadn't done it months before! I probably also need to take a look at other areas of my life where I might be able to make a very small investment in order to enjoy an improved quality of life.

Two Quick Tips

I'm finding it much easier to work with "Page Breaks" in Word vs. "Section breaks > Next page." The latter seem to go away when I update my Table of Contents or Index references and/or turn on the paragraph marker viewer (I'm not exactly sure which). However, the Page Break seems solid.

Also, Highrise has yet to get the printing right. I tried to print a contact I knew I had to call and the "Tasks" section shows bullets but no text.

Highrise and GTD

Just a quick post to reinforce a great feature of Highrise--the new light weight CRM system from 37Signals. If you're into David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) approach to time and life management and are familiar with how he suggests you categorize your tasks by context, you'll love the Tasks feature in Highrise.

First off, you get a drop box of intuitive time frames to choose from that make it super quick to determine the "When it's due" part of the task. Then you get a second drop box of commonly used categories and the ability to create your own (I've added "After Work" and "During Lunch" among others in my list). These categories or context cues are then placed in small black boxes in front of each task making it easy to scan very quickly.

Three Days: Product Overhaul or Just a Meeting?

I've been posting about the new CRM solution from 37Signals called Highrise and complained how the "Cases" feature was only available to premium accounts. Apparently a lot of others didn't like it either. So today, three days after launch, Signals sends out an email informing everyone they're giving cases to everyone, dramatically increased storage limits, even created a new user category and corresponding pricing structure. Their ability to take the pulse of the community and respond quickly and iterate is impressive. Imagine a "big" company doing that...naw, I can't conjure that up either. I'm willing to bet in most companies it would take three days just to find an open slot on everyone's calendar to have a meeting about if we should consider modifying the product.

It reminds me of Tom Peters' example of Paul Paliska's Professional Parking Service, Inc. in The Tom Peters Seminar (page 139). Essentially, Tom showed up to speak at a luncheon at a very busy Orange County Marriott and despite all the traffic and people he noticed everyone was parked in very short order. He complimented Marriott on it during his speech only to learn afterwards that Marriott hadn't parked the cars--Paul's subcontracted parking service had. Tom mused that since Paul and his crew were so focused on and good at event parking they probably got better insurance rates than "giant" Marriott. So he posed the question, "Who's really the big fish in this picture?"

Seth's saying about the same things these days. And I expect we'll get more of that with his new book The Dip coming out in May. Excellence comes from focus. The question is how big can one get before you're no longer nimble? Maybe when you can't pass the rework and relaunch your whole product in 36 hours test?

Follow-up on Highrise: Emailing Notes--Where Have You Been All My Life?

Highrise has this feature where every account is given a unique "drop box" email address. Simply include this address in the Cc or Bcc fields and the email text is sent to the appropriate contact as a new note. It then shows up as a mail icon in the contact's overview.

I mentioned in yesterday's post about Highrise that I'd had some exposure to evaluating enterprise CRM systems. When I was investigating various options and interviewed a number of existing users and their managers about the adoption rate of whatever system they had installed, one issue kept coming up over and over again: integration with Outlook.

"My people just live inside of Outlook. They already have to have one or two other windows up for silo systems that allow them to view or perform transactions, when we gave them another CRM window--they just didn't use it."

Even if you try to use Outlook Contacts to keep notes on and set flags for every significant contact you have with a person, it was always double entry: send the email, log that you sent it in their contact notes pane. Even if you use the MS CRM product you still have to toggle the "save this email" off and on. So once again, 37Signals has embraced constraints and found a simple solution where others wrap lots and lots of features and code around it. And I haven't even tried emailing tasks yet...

Now as a caveat I will say this feature is not "perfect." On my first attempt it missed the body of the email and only included text from my auto signature down. After consulting the Help screens I realized the feature was optimized for Plain Text emails (and I insist on using HTML). I switched the format to Plain Text, forwarded it to my drop box, and that did work perfectly.

37Signals Launches Highrise, I experience "just right"

It's here! We can finally give Highrise a spin. After doing a fair amount of analysis on commercial CRM packages for past employers I was really anxious to see how 37Signals would approach this. I wasn't disappointed (except for the price [more on that in a second]).

I logged in and started pulling business and 3x5 cards out of various pockets where I'd been keeping notes and reminders about my upcoming move and had it all into Highrise in about five minutes. Then I looked around a bit and experienced something I rarely get to experience with software: I was done. There were no more pull-downs to explore, no features I'd yet to uncover, no stubborn formatting hacks I had to research on Google to learn how to work around, I came in, did precisely what I needed to do, and that was all there was to do. I was done. Beautiful.

Now, I really wish I didn't have to shell out fifty bucks a months to get access to Cases. But I've run the budgets on other systems and know this is literally pennies compared to most CRM systems. It's just that I'm using it to keep track of our family's move so it's not like I had to compare this with installing a Siebel system. Seems like they should want individuals to use all the functionality so they'll want it at work.

Also, I wish I had the same formatting options in notes that I have in Basecamp.

And finally, I'm going to be really interested to see if Highrise was necessary or if the new features could have been rolled into Basecamp as optional settings.

But overall, good job guys!

Using Basecamp for Requirements Analysis

I'm working on a project now where we're moving from System A to System B and 17 groups within the company will be affected. We naturally set up meetings with each group to explain the motivation for the changes, outline the proposed architecture, and more importantly analyze their current processes and requirements so we can foresee their needs in the new environment and the impact the intended system would have on their workflow and systems. Usually at each meeting we'd have representatives from the stakeholder as well as from the sponsoring business unit who are responsible for the new system--all taking notes.

I wanted the requirements to reflect all of our notes so I set up a Basecamp site for the project and created a Writeboard for each of the 17 groups. I then posted my notes as Version One of the Writeboard and invited the members of the business unit who attended to review/edit them by a deadline (which I posted as a Milestone). This worked remarkably well. Some went in and edited the text while others just added comments at the bottom, but it saved us from having 17 Word files with track changes turned on bouncing around several people's inboxes.

When the deadline came, I simply exported each Writeboard to a network drive and summarized the notes into a requirements document (which I posted in the Files section).

I used this same approach with the project charter.