Tag Archive for 'Psychology'

Disconnect

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on October 20, 2010
in Random
. 0 Comments

I know you want to start working on your Start-Up right away. Who doesn’t? You have a great idea that is bound to earn you millions as soon as it makes it out of your garage, so the obvious choice would be to start working on it immediately. And, as usual, the most obvious choice is probably not the best one.

While it might send you flying into a panic, wasting some time when a project first begins is quite satisfying if you don’t let your instincts shame you into regretting it. While I officially started working on RunOrg this week, one of the first tasks I got out of the way was to finish Half-Life 2 again in a single session. Needless to say, I was so tired by the end that I was starting to see stupid things:

This is a joke. We don’t really support cross-dimensional transhuman dictatorships.  Don’t listen to me, I’m just crazy.

Spending one or two weeks doing nothing productive before you start working on that Start-Up has its benefits:

  • You’ll have time to rest and sort your thoughts out. You’ll start working with a sharper, fresher mind.
  • You can use that time to deal with small forever-postponed details, thus improving marginally your life in the following months: seeing old friends, buying a new shower head, optimizing your bank accounts…
  • By the time you’re waist-deep into your project, you won’t have any regrets about not taking a vacation. If you’re anything like me, this is absolute pure gold for your morale.
  • A lot of the so-so solutions you thought up before will dissolve into oblivion, to be replaced by better ones later on.

Of course, all of this will be for naught if you don’t first get rid of that nagging feeling that you should be doing something. Yes, I know your fate and financial independence lies in your hands alone, but that doesn’t mean you should rush head first into an uphill battle. A quick vacation improves productivity better than the typical «insert more caffeine» strategy.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s some Cake on my todo-list.

RunOrg (aka: Muahahaha!)

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on October 15, 2010
in Random
. 3 Comments

There was a 900-hour countdown on this blog. The hardcore fans who stalk me on LinkedIn already knew. For the rest of you, here it is:

As of today, I leave the warm safety of being a full-time, well-paid employee and take my first steps down the road of Bootstrapped Start-Up adventures. And I’m giddy like an Evil Overlord who just had his new Death Ray delivered by UPS. I guess I could technically call myself a CEO, but there’s only three of us so far, so the delusional titles will have to wait.

The Project – RunOrg

We’re building an online tool that helps associations, unions, organizations and communities manage their members, contacts, activities, events, knowledge and online presence.

  • Members : the people who matter. Know who they are and what they want. Let them join for free or for a fee. Send them emails or let the automatic notification system do its job. And let them communicate online.
  • Contacts : everyone you talk to — players from other sports teams, spectators who enjoy your acts, city officials… Remember who they are and how to contact them. Let them sign up for a newsletter and comment on your latest events.
  • Activities : anything your group does on a frequent and regular basis — weekly dance lessons, daily meetings, Saturday night poetry sessions… Keep your members informed, know who participates, send reminders and collect feedback.
  • Events : anything exceptional — a Grand Gala, yearly elections, matches against other teams, even the birthday party of a respected member… Manage participants and spectators. Keep track of who buys the food and who books the hotel and who purchased the train tickets.
  • Knowledge : never lose important information when a member leaves. All relevant information can be posted online in a wiki-like format and easily searched through later on. A simple and effective privacy system keeps critical information safe.
  • Online presence : set up a web site, write a multiple-author blog (and turn interesting wiki pages into blog posts), publish a member directory, let new members join online and keep the public informed of your upcoming events.

Obviously, we won’t be the first tool in this category, and we’ll be going against free competitors. Why would RunOrg be different?

Bad answer #1 : if he wasn’t afraid of people, the hacker inside me would answer that we intend to write godlike code and bring together a baroque triumph of technical prowess. I remain deeply convinced that our users don’t care about code quality as long as the interface is usable, the data is secure and the features are delivered on time.

Bad answer #2 : every member of the RunOrg team holds or recently held a position of responsibility in an association or community, and frequently interacts with other people in such positions in other associations. This is where I would insert the standard blathering about how we intimately know the needs of our customers, how we eat our own dog food to make sure it tastes good, and that’s why our product will rock your socks off like no member management tool ever did (I swear there’s a sock rocker feature in the design blueprints). That’s not the case for all of our competitors, but several of them are as familiar with the issues as we are.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my daily prayer to Seth Godin and Kathy Sierra. I’ll be right back.

The Revolution

Good answer : the challenge of building a tool for associations, unions, organizations and communities is neither software engineering nor interface design. Software engineering is for computers, interface design is for users, and RunOrg is for groups. What we need to be doing is social engineering : making sure that in addition to being friendly to the computer and useful to the user, the tool encourages behavior that helps the group thrive and discourages behavior that has a negative impact on the group.

Make sure you pre-order our $299 RunOrg™ neural implants, which send stimuli directly into the pleasure centers in the brains of your members to keep them acting in the best interest of the group. Surgery not included.

Just kidding. Or am I?

Failing to see the needs of associations and groups as deeply rooted in social behavior leads to mistakes being repeated over and over again, both by service providers and by group leaders. The high turnover rate in these groups imposes some hard requirements on any long-term software strategy. Members spend most of their time not participating in the community, so involving them enough to keep the community alive is a real challenge. There’s a fine line to be walked between spamming members to death and boring members to death, and it’s easy to create tools that turn that line into a line of negative width.

We’re in the business of helping communities thrive. We do it by writing software that recognizes that communities are more than lists of members, activities and events. For every feature, we ask ourselves how it can help members get involved in their community, both online and offline.

What’s Next?

The RunOrg project will begin its Beta phase at the end of November 2010. It will be held in French, although an English version is possible if there is overwhelming demand for it. You can pre-register (or simply keep in touch) by sending me an email (victor@nicollet.net) or from the project home page.

The first commercial version will be done by the end of January 2011, and beta participants will get nifty bonuses to thank them for their time.

The current project site is hosted on a small laptop in a small room at home, so it might break down unexpectedly (we’ll move to professional hosting next week).

Until then, you can read the RunOrg/blog (in French) to learn more about our project. You could also follow us on Twitter (@RunOrg) or join our Facebook Page.

The Outstanding Economy

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 25, 2010
in Strategy
. 2 Comments

Not so long ago, this world was a world where everyone died within miles of the place they were born.

If you wanted to have dinner, you could eat stale bread at home, or you could eat stale bread at a friend’s home, or you could eat somewhat less stale bread at the village inn or tavern. If you wanted to eat something really outstanding, you would go to a large city and spend what probably amounted to your life’s savings to eat a meal by a top chef. And you would be happy because it had meat in it. And spices. Then, the industrial revolution happened, and its main accomplishment was that it turned masses of people living in the country with access to plain, bland commodities into masses of people living in the cities with access to plain, bland commodities. It also had a very interesting side-effect: it sparked a century-long downward trend in transportation costs.

In 1610, even the richest merchant in Western Europe could not get their hands on a plain mango, because mangoes only grew in the east indies and were months away by ship or caravan. Until the advent of refrigeration, most of the western world knew of mangoes only in their pickled form (this led to the apparition of «to mango» meaning «to pickle» in some parts of the US).

In 2010, advances in refrigeration technology (fruit last longer), air travel (fruit travels faster) and cultivar development (the main cultivar of mangoes, Tommy Atkins, was picked because it provides the longest shelf life) mean that everyone in the western hemisphere can buy a fresh mango for the equivalent of ten minutes of work at the average wage.

On a local scale, inhabitants of major cities have hundreds of restaurants available to them for dinner, conveniently placed within an hour of their home by car or public transportation.

And of course, using the internet, anyone has access to any piece of information available online, and can buy unique hand-crafted pieces from an equally anonymous person on another continent.

Too Many Choices

When you only had access to a handful of options, you could become knowledgeable about each one. You could know how good was the food at every restaurant in town, because there were only five. You could have an opinion on everything, and if you didn’t, you could ask your friends, which is how reputations spread.

As the number of options increased, the reputation system could not follow because there are too many alternatives for any individual or tight social group to handle. This led first to the apparition of reviews (a trusted third party specializes in having an opinion on everything, and shares it with everyone), but the number of product categories has increased (meaning you now need a reviewer reviewer to determine whom you can trust) and they now differ on several variables (weight, battery life, size of the app store, price…).

So, we end up subject to the availability heuristic (people only remember and discuss exceptionally good and exceptionally bad things) and satisficing (people will settle on the first thing that’s not too horrible).

There are two obvious strategies one could follow from here. One is the classic approach to marketing, which you probably experienced on a daily basis for decades: create something that isn’t exceptionally bad (so it isn’t knocked out by the availability heuristic), advertise the hell out of it so that it’s the first thing people try (and settle on it through satisficing), and watch the cash come in. If you can set up a subscription-based system with lock-in, that’s even better. This is a great strategy for conquering a new market, but it’s extremely inefficient at stealing market share on existing markets.

The other strategy relies on creating an outstanding product—something that is so exceptionally good, the availability heuristic will kick in and customers won’t even remember there were any competing products in the first place. While this strategy can be used for conquering new markets, the classic approach is cheaper because it can afford using a cheaper product. On the other hand, the only way to steal market share is to create something that is obviously and undoubtedly better than the alternatives.

So, it’s a matter of outstanding vs. satisficing. What side are you on?

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Picture credit: Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky under Creative Commons.

Seven Community Profiles

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 24, 2010
in People
. 2 Comments

There are many different ways in which an individual might belong to a community. Some of them are passive while others are active, some of them chose to belong there while others simply never chose to leave, some of them care about the community while others only care about whatever the community stands for. To anyone who has to work with communities, an overview of the various profiles of community members is essential.

1. The Passionate

He’s the meat and potatoes of your community, passionate about its final purpose and willing to share that passion with others. In a Neighborhood Association, these are people passionate about living there and willing to improve everything they can. In a Board Game Club, they are the people who love playing board games and always try to get their friends to play with them.

Cater to the Passionate, for they have the perfect balance of doing and sharing—if either is missing, your community will soon turn into chaos or silence. Their main interest in joining the community is finding like-minded people to discuss their shared passion, so that as long as you keep a fair proportion of  passionate members, they will be happy enough to stay.

2. The Socialites

Above all, the Socialite enjoys being part of social circles. The purpose of the community is just an excuse for meeting other people that have something in common with you. She joins a Poetry club because they she to meet people and Poetry is a good topic to start a discussion—but she will feel no obligation to stay on topic.

The Socialite is both an asset and a time bomb. Her tendency to network with everyone is an excellent way of keep conversations going, help new members integrate with the group quickly, and connecting to people outside your community for help or for finding new members. However, unless properly channeled to a dedicated «off topic» time or place (a forum, a dinner), she might bore people who joined the community out of passion.

3. The Devoted

Every community needs people to work on the bloody details of making it work—when everyone else is having fun, these people meet and toil and work so that the sessions happen on time and the new members are given all the useful information and the web site is online and there’s chocolate cookies and fresh lemonade waiting for everyone after the training session.

It is essential to find any new members that might turn into Devoted, to quickly grant them responsibilities that will help channel their energy. But be careful: people in positions of responsibility within a community have the power to change it. Some of the Devoted often have strong ideas about how the community should work, and such things are best discussed beforehand.

4. The Obsessed

Just like the Passionate, the Obsessed are madly in love with the purpose of the community, but they do not share it with others because of their timidity or lack of interest in human communication. In solo activities, such as Computer Programming, the Obsessed just keep to themselves (sometimes emerging from their cave to rant on a discussion board or join a club «to see what it’s like») but team activities, such as board games or sports, force them to join a group so that they can engage in their passion.

The Obsessed don’t care about discussing their passion, they just wish to act. They’re a nice bunch to have around, but too many of them can turn any community into a quiet wasteland and turn off new members.

5. The Clueless

The Clueless join a gym because their wife asked them to. They join a church group because they parents asked them to. They join a knitting club because they’re curious, but that curiosity fades after a few days. These are people who do not care about where they are, what they are doing or who they are doing it with. They come to one session in three and you couldn’t find their phone number even if your life depended on it.

Most of the time, the Clueless are members who joined only recently, and don’t really care about the community. Find them quickly, keep an eye on them, and let them vanish on their own.

6. The Role Models

When a member is exceedingly charismatic or skilled (and not completely obnoxious about it), other members will look up to her with respect and admiration. They are usually older members, who have been with the community for a while and are known to everyone. This implies that the community is old and large enough to support them, which is often a good sign that it’s in good health; role models may leave, but they sometimes come back and are remembered by those who have become the new elders.

Having Role Models is a very good thing, because they give members a new reason for being part of the community: staying near the role model. If you have a few admirable players in a sports team, the other team members will enjoy their presence as much as they enjoy the game. Cater to the Role Models, and prevent them from becoming obnoxious about their superiority.

7. The Moderators

Some members are recognized by others to be wise, honest, independent and beyond reproach. This gives them the authority and leverage to moderate any issues that might come up between the other members, and teach any new members the lessons they need to be accepted in the group.

In medium-sized communities, moderators are the key to the continued stability of the community. In large-sized communities, their natural authority vanished because there are too many members for a natural consensus to exist on their status. In these cases, it becomes necessary to supplement their natural authority with an official title—but be wary of the risks: an official title does not grant legitimacy in the same way that natural authority does

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Daily Budgeting

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 15, 2010
in People
. 2 Comments

For the average person, buying one $900 television set every ten years is a reasonable spending, and buying the latest $900 television every week is outrageously unreasonable. The problem with infrequent costly purchases is that they don’t happen often enough to let people intuitively sense whether they’re overspending. They’re simply not on the same scale as everyday purchases.

To help me decide whether an expense is acceptable or not, I use a scaling technique that lets me see the actual cost of every purchase on the same scale as an amortized daily spending budget.

Daily Spending Budget

Every year, the average American income is $31,410 (€24,660 in France). If that average person split their income over the 365 days, they would have a spending budget of $86/day (€67/day). A large percentage of that will be spent on housing (rent/mortgage), credit card payments, various taxes, and utility bills. Another part of that is hopefully saved for retirement, college tuition or emergencies.

To estimate your current daily spending budget:

  1. Add up your monthly payments and savings. Every cent that leaves your account on a predictable, monthly basis, should be counted here. Multiply by twelve.
  2. Add your yearly taxes (estimated, if needed) to the total.
  3. If you have any annual spending (such as a yearly subway card or a magazine subscription), you can also add it to the total.
  4. Subtract this total from your yearly disposable income.
  5. Divide the result by 365.

The result is the amount you can use every day for variable or exceptional spending: food, movies, music, video games, brand new television sets, iPhone applications…  sounds small? It is.

When evaluating this budget, don’t take into account expected future changes (such as a long being repaid in full or a raise that’s going to happen). You should be extremely careful about basing today’s spending strategy on future events (that might never happen).

Amortized Daily Spending Budget

The standard spending budget doesn’t help, because most exceptionally large expenses exceed that daily budget anyway. So, what I do is amortize those purchases by spreading their cost over several days, and automatically subtracting the daily amount from my daily spending budget.

Quick example:

Jane has a $23/day spending budget, and she buys a $900 television on Monday. She could try amortizing that television over a single month, but that would cost her $30/day, which exceeds her daily budget. She could try amortizing that purchase over two months, which would cost her $15/day and leave her with a $8/day budget—too small. So, instead, she decides to amortize the television over three months. This only costs $10/day and leaves her with a $13/day budget.

The main benefit of this system is that it turns a $900 price tag that is fairly vague and difficult to compare into an easily compared daily cost (such as «you’re spending almost 50% of your daily budget on this television for the next three months»).

At the end of each day, add up your total spending for that day (excluding any purchases you are amortizing). If you didn’t spend all your money, use it to pay for purchases that you are amortizing.

On Tuesday, Jane spends $1 on coffee and $8 on lunch, leaving her with an extra unspent $4. She decides to subtract that from the television purchase. The daily cost of the television is now $9.96 (she paid $14, which leaves $886 to pay over the next 89 days).

Should you overspend, carry the balance over to the next day. Since the cost of your amortized purchases is already taken out of your daily budget, this means you pay for those purchases even when you overspend.

On Wednesday, she pays for her friend’s lunch for a total of $20. This exceeds her daily of  $13.04 so the negative balance is carried over to the next day.

When you overspend so much that your budget for the next day dives below zero, it means your purchase is too large. Ask yourself whether it’s worth it, and if it is, amortize it over one month.

On Thursday, Jane has a budget of only $6.08, but in addition to her $8 lunch she decides to buy a beautiful $30 sweater. Not only does this exceed her daily budget, but it also exceeds her $13 budget for the next day! She needs to amortize the sweater over one month. The sweater will cost her $1/day (her new amortized daily budget is $23 – $9.96 – $1 = $12.04). Also, out of the $8 lunch, $1.92 are carried over and deducted from the next day’s budget: $10.12.

If you’re currently amortizing several purchases, and you underspend, start paying for the purchase that has the lowest amount left to amortize.

On Friday, Jane decides to be excessively frugal, and only buys a $3 salad from the cafeteria at work. This means she has a $7.12 surplus from the day, which is used to pay for the purchase with the lowest non-amortized value : the sweater.

On Saturday morning, her outstanding amortization debt consists of:
→ $856.12 over 86 days ($9.95/day) for the television
→ $21.88 over 29 days ($0.75/day) for the sweater

This leaves her with a daily budget of $12.30

As you can see, if you overspend, your amortized expenses start clogging your daily budget to the point where you have to amortize the purchase of a $10 lunch over an entire year. If that doesn’t knock some budgeting sense into you, I don’t know what will.

This approach can be used in a weekly version instead of a daily version, but it’s harder to notice when you’re going over budget if you only catch up with your expenses once every seven days. I would suggest using the daily version anyway, even if you only compute the values weekly anyway.

You can download an Excel Spreadsheet to help you compute your daily budget easily. It should be compatible with OpenOffice. Let me know if it gives you any trouble!

The Five Minds of the Software Designer

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 7, 2010
in People
. 3 Comments

The design of software user interfaces requires five different ways of looking at things. Some very amazing people manage to do all five (for instance, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini, former User Interface Evangelist at Apple). For the rest of us, we need to identify which parts of software design fit our minds and find people with complementary skills.

—

The «Need» lens

A brainstorming expert, easily comes up with new feature ideas, some of which might actually be feasible. Might be a creative genius or simply someone who listens to existing users and potential buyers a lot. This man or woman is the starting point of any software design endeavor: they hold a complete high-level vision of what needs to be achieved, though they do not know the details of how it will be achieved. Without this lens, everyone else will just run around in circles.

The «Architecture» lens

Deeply familiar with the structure of the software, this person can instantly determine the consequences of a butterfly flapping their winds in form A over the thunderstorm in screen B. The architect is your sole line of defense against painting yourself in a corner. Without this lens, teams discover two months into development that they have to display the user’s birthday even though the program never asks for it.

The «Process» lens

Knowledgeable about the day-to-day design of user interfaces, this team member should fill in the details of how the high-level objectives should be achieved: what does the user see? What can they click? What must they fill in or select? What happens when they do thi–oops. A strong ability to identify corner cases is essential so that no design holes are left unchecked. Without this lens, the team can create a list of friends, but they will not make its columns sortable and they will not handle empty lists gracefully.

The «Implementation» lens

Experienced in the art of software development, this veteran sorts suggestions into impossible, hard and easy based on how hard it is to implement them, then proposes cheaper alternatives based on existing technologies and components. This should be someone actively involved in the actual implementation,  skilled in both technical problem-solving and human-to-human communication.  Without this lens, everyone else will think up beautiful designs that take years to complete.

The «Simplification» lens

A perpetually unhappy, lazy person, always eager to complain about how long it takes to perform a task or how difficult it is to understand a certain concept. When everyone else just takes the current design for granted, this team member is not blind to its flaws, and points them out until the others listen. This is the mind behind Amazon’s «one-click checkout» and GMail replacing «Are you sure you want to delete this» with «Deleted. Click here to cancel» Without this lens, the software will work, but will be difficult to manipulate and understand.

—

What about me? I’m excellent when it comes to Architecture and Implementation (due to my technical background) and have an acceptable aptitude for Process and Simplification. I’m downright mediocre when it comes to Need (I guess you could summarize this as AI/PS/N to imitate the Briggs-Myers personality type system). So, I tend to seek out people who are adept at identifying needs and good at imagining processes and simplifying designs.

An interesting observation here is that four of the five lenses don’t require any implementation experience at all, and from my experience, implementation skills are seldom accompanied by an aptitude for Need and Simplification. Could a software design career be good for you?

For those of you who are doing software design: what are your lenses? Do you see anything missing? Would you like to have a self-evaluation poll to help you identify your aptitude with these five lenses?

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How do you Carve an Elephant?

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on September 6, 2010
in People
. 4 Comments

And the answer is:

Look at the stone and remove everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.

This is obviously a joke: such advice is completely useless when applied to elephant carving. Why? Because the hard part about carving an elephant is precisely to determine whether a given inch of stone looks like it’s part of the final statue. Once you get over this difficulty, the act of cutting the stone is a mere implementation detail.

On the other hand, elephant carving is an excellent technique in situations where cutting the stone is hard and finding the elephant is easy. All you have to do is find huge amounts of stone and be willing to remove anything that does not fit.

I went to a wedding this week-end (stranding a lonely @TheGirlPie in the comments section of this blog, sorry girlie!) and took pictures. Hundreds.

What I could have done: upload all the pictures to Facebook, remove the pictures where people who don’t like to be seen making funny faces are making funny faces and finally tag everyone to validate my social existence through the number of Facebook friends I have.

What I did: remove the ugliest half of the photo album, then remove the ugliest half of what remained, and so on until only a handful of pictures remained. Badly framed or blurry pictures died to bring you this information. In fact, all the pictures that weren’t exceptionally well-framed and well-focused were suicided à la Staline. I uploaded those that remained and again removed all those that looked bad when resized by Facebook.

And then, I removed another batch and uploaded the three survivors here:

Keep in mind that I’m a very bad photographer, with no training or experience or talent. I used a cheap point-and-shoot camera that’s designed to make recognizable pictures of people and things, not beautiful pictures. But the odds were on my side: out of hundreds of pictures, a few had to be good.

All I needed was the time to take hundreds of pictures, and the willingness to throw away 99%.

Sounds easy? Sure.

Have you carved out all the unnecessary lines in your resumé, or are you trying to impress the recruiter with the sheer size of it ? (hint : you won’t)

Have you carved out all the boring text and slow passages of your latest article, book or blog post? Or are you afraid of accepting that the time it took you to write them was wasted?

Have you carved out all the arcane options and awkward features from your software? Or are you in love with your work?

When you’re the one making the stone, carving elephants is simply accepting that most of what you did is worthless and should be thrown away. Being outstanding is throwing away everything that isn’t.

And subscribing to this blog.

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It Bears Repeating

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 16, 2010
in Strategy
. 0 Comments

Let me start this post by noticing that the sentence «It bears repeating» can be found on answers.com, categorized as follows:

Answers.com > Wiki Answers > Categories > Animal Life > Wild Animals > Mammals > Land Mammals > Bears > Black Brown and Grizzly Bears > Bears or Bares repeating?

Nice one. And now, for something completely different, if you’ve done any speech writing, you know that a speech should have a central theme, a leitmotiv, a single idea that it tries to get across, and any other elements in the speech are just salad dressing wrapped around that idea to help it come across correctly.

Apple Keynotes are an excellent example, because their leitmotiv is quite obvious:

What is very interesting about Apple keynotes is how obvious their leitmotiv is : they’re great. They’re fantastic. They’re awesome. They’re easy to use. And they only have one message, so that when all those tech editors and bloggers and sneezers leave the conference room, the message just sticks.

Did I mention my blog is awesome?

You might grab the attention of several people. That’s not very hard, assuming that you have the right network or enough money. You can speak to them. Maybe they’re willing to listen to everything you say (as in the Apple Keynote crowd situation). Maybe they’re willing to remember everything you say (as in a typical classroom situation). But they’re not geniuses. No one becomes an expert just because they’ve listened to another expert for a short while.

You can have your audience leave with one idea. One emotion. What is it going to be?

Where Has The Magic Gone?

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 13, 2010
in People
. 3 Comments

Last month, Chris “powerpig” McVeigh uploaded this image to his flickr account:
Picture of Darth Vader riding a chipmunk
Yes, this is Darth Vader riding a chipmunk. In the days of yore, one would say that the image was edited, tampered with, or fake. Today, we say that it has been photoshopped (or shopped). This goes a long way to show how iconic Adobe’s software has become. I still remember the early days of Photoshop 6.0, when the splash screen still showing the 33 authors and 14 patents of the software.

Except that this image is not photoshopped. Chris McVeigh uploaded a video a short while later to explain this fact:

I understand that my chipmunk photography can seem unbelievable at times, and I’m used to getting questions such as “How did you do that?” and “Is it all Photoshop?”

As this video will show, it’s all happening right there in front of the camera. I get no satisfaction out of a composited photo—the challenge for me is to capture the chipmunk engaged in a real and rather extraordinary situation.

The challenge. If you’re in my generation, you’ve been in school at a time when only the nerdy computer users ever managed to print the papers they handed in. And other people looked at them and said «wow, this is so cool, you must have used a computer» with a tinge of admiration in their voice—or was that fear? Back in the 90s, using a computer to print documents was surprising for a 14-year-old.

And now, the magic is gone. Kids look at you in disbelief when you suggest they write their paper, then go back to copy-pasting Wikipedia articles.

People used to be amazed when they saw an actual programmer. Software was some kind of magic resource that appeared in the bowels of huge mega-corporations with thousands of engineers and millions of dollars in budget. A few people had heard about shareware, yes, but those were the exception. When you showed people that you could program computers, they would all go «oooh» and «aaaah» and beautiful young girls would ask to have sex with you (or at least, that’s what the pictures in the pop-ups said).

That magic is gone as well, with the rise of the reclusive anti-social geek stereotype.

And yet… A few days ago, I was commuting in the Parisian subway. Next to every subway door, there’s a map like this one:

plan-de-metro-bonne-definition

Sitting next to the door was a young girl with an HTC smartphone I did not recognize. Her head was literally inches from the map on the door, at a perfect reading distance. And yet, she fumbled around the cell phone interface and launched a subway map application that, for all practical purposes, was just an on-screen version of the map next to her. And then, she fingered the screen some more to scroll her current position into view.

Such a reliance on magic technology can only mean one thing — the geeks have won.

Unrelated Posts

Bounce Rates : Bait and Switch

Published
by
Victor Nicollet
on August 11, 2010
in Strategy
. 0 Comments

You are a cell phone retailer, and you’ve bought a whole lot of Angbandroid cell phones. These phones are usually not sold to individuals: corporations buy them in bulk for their employees for about $50 apiece directly from the manufacturer. Besides, mainstream attention is focused on the upcoming CryPhone 3 which will sell at $349. And this gives you an idea, because you’re a filthy, conning cell phone retailer.

So, you bait some victims by running ads for a $299 CryPhone 3. Customers start flowing into your shop, and you switch by telling them that the price was so low you’ve sold all your CryPhone 3 models in minutes, and to apologize you will let them buy the enterprise-only, high-quality Angbandroid models for the bargain price of $319.

A lot of people will just leave because they were looking for the CryPhone 3 and no substitute will do. A few will decide that:

  • They’ve come all the way to your shop, they might as well buy something
  • You sold the CryPhone 3 at -15%, so the $319 Angbandroid is probably a good price.
  • The Angbandroid costs more than the CryPhone 3, so it must be better.
  • The Angbandroid is an enterprise-only phone, so this must be an unique opportunity.
  • $319 is within their $349 budget for a CryPhone 3.

Five good reasons for buying the phone, and you just made an 84% margin.

Bait-and-Switch is a type of fraud, and it’s illegal in many countries. The principles behind it are well-known powerful cognitive biases such as bad assessment of sunk costs, price anchoring and  post-purchase rationalization, so they can be applied in many situations that would not legally qualify as a bait-and-switch fraud.

For a real-life example, consider this: Pixmania (an online retailer) advertises low prices on price comparison web sites, such as €48 for a flatbed scanner instead of an average market price of €51. However, delivery costs (which you only discover once you’re midway through the ordering process) are at least €6, which brings the price up to €54—and even picking up the flatbed scanner from their warehouse in Paris counts as a delivery. Other retailers do not charge anything if you pick up the item yourself, so you can actually find that flatbed scanner for €51. The Pixmania trick is too small to count as a fraud, but it relies on the same basic principles.

And then, they started spamming me weekly because I had entered my e-mail address when I started ordering. /me waves a flamethrower at Pixmania.

Bait-and-Switch is dangerous. If your customers suspect that you’re using bait-and-switch techniques to sell them something when they were actually looking for something else, you’re in trouble. Not only will they stop buying from you, but they will also tell everyone who listens to them—god forbid that they should be an influent twitter user. And you should be extra careful because this can happen even if you honestly never intended to use bait-and-switch at all.

Bounce Rates

I personally use bait-and-switch a lot. I don’t really mean to, but that’s just how search engines work.

My page on how Doodle God does Marketing is on the first results page for «Doodle God Easter Eggs», which brings me a healthy number of daily visits looking for such easter eggs. Some of these people are bound to think that I’m a jerk trolling for Google hits when in fact I’m just really good at unintentional SEO (I should start a consulting gig…).

My page on how Magento was pretty secure in early 2009 is literally the first result for «Hacking Magento», and it has been the most visited page on this web site so far. There’s no doubt here that 99% of the people who read that page are looking for a way to hack into a Magento store, and will be pretty disappointed when they find out I didn’t write a how-to guide.

On the other hand, I’m pretty happy that the person who looked for «web sex performer nicollet» yesterday was not satisfied by this blog.

The bounce rate is the percentage of first-time visitors who leave your web site after viewing only one page. If they’re coming from a search engine, this could mean they didn’t like what they found there, because if they did, they would have explored your web site a little further.

My Doodle God page has a 91% bounce rate – only one person in ten decides that the rest of my blog would be worth exploring. The Hacking Magento page has a 83% bounce rate – one person in five. Most people who end up on those pages did not find what they were looking for.

By contrast, the bounce rate on my About Me page is 0% – all the people who end up there (usually looking for “Victor Nicollet”) are happy with what they found.

Then again, who wouldn’t? ;)

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