I use many compasses in my startup, but the first and most important of these is happiness.  We all start companies in a quest for control over our own happiness.  We want to control our income to open more doors in life, or control over building the product just right, or control for when and where we work.  Ultimately, we want to be happy, so happiness should be the central idea that the rest of the business revolves around.  Let’s discuss a few examples of business decisions where happiness can be your compass.

Writer’s note: I wrote about this topic previously, explaining why I had designed my business in the way that I did.  This post is meant to be a more generic exploration – it’s not necessary to read my previous attempt at articulating the concept.

B2B vs B2C

Selling to businesses is fundamentally different from selling to consumers.  An enlightening exercise is to think about pricing: how much are consumers willing to spend on an intangible software product?  Typically, not much.  Lower pricing means that you need a lot more customers to build that million-dollar business while simultaneously lowering the amount you can spend acquiring an individual customer.  Scalable marketing becomes paramount.  Bootstrapping becomes harder.

Here are some contrived examples of how this decision may impact your day-to-day life:

• After convincing a lead to purchase your product, your lead has to convince her boss
• You’re trying to get on TechCrunch
• You’re trying to get on LifeHacker
• Your leads visit your website multiple times over a period of months before deciding whether to purchase
• Your leads glance at your app page for a few seconds while waiting for the movie to start before deciding whether to purchase
• You go to a lot of industry events and conferences
• Your business depends on your customers telling all their friends about you
• You spend a lot of time cold-calling leads

Further reading on this topic:

• How B2B Product Marketing is Different from B2B
• How Sales Complexity Impacts your Startup’s Viability
• The New Breed of B2B Buyer (there is also a part two and three)
• The Self-Service Limit in B2B Sales (my favorite section of part three)
• Meet the New Enterprise Customer, He’s a Lot Like the Old Enterprise Customer

Sales Model

A lot of startups seem to stumble into a sales model.  They often copy the strategy of a highly visible success story, blindly following their hero’s strategy without understanding why it works.  Others build a product and then guess what their customers would be willing to pay for it.  Handing off this decision to chance is a mistake, because your average selling price  has a huge impact on your business.

Joel York says it best in his excellent blog post Three SaaS Sales Models:

This grid compares your average selling price to the cost of acquiring (CAC) and servicing (TCS) a customer.  It illustrates how pricing impacts the rest of your business.  For example, if you price your start-up low, then it is absolutely essential that you utilize cheap marketing tactics to keep your customer acquisition low, and that you engineer your product so that new customers are onboarded automatically, with no expensive manual work.

Here are some contrived examples of the impact pricing has:

• You spend a lot of time trying to attract cheap traffic through inbound marketing tactics (blog posts, podcasts, etc)
• You spend a lot of time talking directly to customers, understanding their problems and providing comprehensive solutions
• Most of your customers come from adwords
• Most of your customers come from cold-calling and emailing
• Your mailbox is flooded with support requests from your ‘free tier’ customers
• You spend months on a single sale

Further reading on this topic:

• Three SaaS Sales Models
• SaaS Customer Lifetime Value Drives SaaS Company Value
• Which is Better: Many Customers at Low Price-Point or Few at High Price?
• How to Price Software Without Just Rolling the Dice

Market Positioning

In their hugely influential book ‘The Discipline of Market Leaders’, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema argue that all market leaders, regardless of their industry, can be classified into one of these three categories: Operational Excellence, Innovation, and Customer Intimacy.  Basically, you can offer a product at the lowest overall price to the customer, a string of innovative products, or world-class support.  Many markets have room for leaders in each of these categories, so if you’re in one of these markets, the choice is up to you.  Each requires tuning the operations and culture of the company in a different way.

Some contrived examples of the impact market positioning has on your company:

• You spend most of your time talking to customers in person or on the phone, understanding their problem and offering tailored solutions
• You hire the best programmers, give them expensive laptops and free lunches
• You develop a frugal, do-more-with-less attitude at your company
• You get mentioned in a lot of ‘amazing customer support’ blog posts
• Your amazing product is being copied by your competitors – but you’re not worried because you’re about to release an even better product
• Your low prices are resetting customer expectations and putting your competition out of business

Further reading on this topic:

• The Discipline of Market Leaders
• Circuit City Goes Bust: Zappos Flies High — Why?
• The Anatomy of Operational Excellence
• Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef
• Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon

Take Away

Each of these three decisions – B2B vs B2C, pricing strategy, and market positioning, help you to narrow down the myriad of choices available to your company.  They are tools, effective in helping you spend your brain power where it matters.

Choices made in one of these decisions can impact the others – for example, if you are a customer intimacy company, then you probably can’t afford to offer lower prices than your competition.   Pick the decision that you feel strongly about and let it narrow down your choices from there.

The post The Optimizing for Happiness Business Plan appeared first on Software Smitten.

• It’s harder to get funding
• Starting a company is an emotional roller-coaster which becomes much easier when you have someone to share the experiences with
• There is an overwhelming amount of work to be done

All of these are great reasons why it’s harder to start a company by yourself then with a partner.  But harder doesn’t mean impossible – in fact, there are far more companies started by single founders than I could list here.  But let’s look at ten of them, to appreciate the breadth and diversity of what a solo founder can accomplish.

Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni

Peldi took the startup world by surprise in 2008 when his company, Balsamiq Studios, became profitable exactly three weeks after launching, and he blogged the details of his financial state for the world to see.  He quickly skyrocketed to internet celebrity, and popped up in podcasts and interviews across the web.

Peldi has grown the company to 11 people in 4 years, and if the company pictures on his website are any indication, he’s having a blast.  His seems to be the best kind of lifestyle business: passionate customers, industry respect, comfortable growth.

Jane Wurwand

Wurwand founded Dermalogica in 1986 to offer consumers a product based on skin health, rather than beauty.  Consumers responded: the product line is wildly popular.  Dermalogica now pulls in more than $200 million in sales from 51 countries across the globe (source), and lays claim to being the leading professional skin care brand.

Jason Cohen

Cohen bootstrapped Smart Bear Software to over a million dollars in annual revenue before making a profitable exit.  Along the way, he penned a popular blog where he continues to write on startup issues.

After selling Smart Bear Cohen launched a new startup, WP Engine,  this time making it a joint effort.

Jeff Bezos

Bezos hardly needs an introduction – he is, after all, the founder of Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer.

Bezos left his cushy Wall Street job to, as he’s described, stake a claim in the Internet gold rush.  Amazon.com went IPO 1997 and has done very well since then:

Dinnis ‘Chip’ Wilson

Wilson founded Lululemon Athletica in 1998 because he was frustrated with the cotton clothing available for his yoga practice.  He brought his expertise in technical athletic fabrics to bear on the problem, and the apparel that he produced soon become coveted across the nation.

Wilson exited Lululemon in 2005 when he sold his shares in the company.  He ranks as the 9th wealthiest Canadian and 401st in the world with an estimated net worth of 2.9 billion.

Sam Walton

Walton is best known for founding Wal-Mart.  He bootstrapped his company with money saved from his time in the Army and by raising money from his father-in-law.  He is also renowned for his pioneering efforts in retail, and is included in Time’s list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century and has received The Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Forbes ranked Walton as the richest man in the United States from 1982 to 1988.  His legacy continues long after his death, as Walmart continues to do very well.

Teresa Vidger

Vidget founded Temporary Housing Directory in 2001 to help people who had been displaced from their homes due to an insurance claim or corporate relocation find temporary housing.

Vidget launched the company so she could tone down her hectic schedule and spend more time with her son.  Yet she has grown the company to 38 employees and $31 million in revenue (2009).

George W. Jenkins

Jenkins founded Publix Super Markets in the midst of the Great Depression.  He raised $1,200 from friends as seed money, and ten years later expanded to build Florida’s first supermarket.  The “food palace” featured a paved parking lot, an automatic door opener at the entrance, and air conditioning.

As of 2011, Publix held over a thousand stores and, 151,500 employees and sales of $27 billion.

Pierre Omidyar

Omidyar is the founder of eBay.  The service started in 1995, and made its public offering in 1998.  According to Forbes, Omidyar is worth $8.2 billion as of September 2012, making him the 141st richest person in the world and the 42nd richest United States resident.

Fred Smith

Smith wrote a paper for a Yale economics class outlining overnight delivery service in a computer information age.  It’s rumored that he received a C – but the paper became the basis for FedEx.  Utilizing an inheritance and VC backing, Smith founded Federal Express in 1973.

FedEx’s 2012 revenue exceeded 42 billion dollars, and it had 290,000 employees.

There you have it – ten successful solo startup founders.  Some were breathtakingly profitable.  Some changed the course of their industries.  Some spend more time with their families than they did prior to starting their companies.  But, in summary, they all proved that solo founders can start successful companies.

Addendum: Readers have suggested the following additions to the list:

Gabriel Weinberg

Weinberg and a cofounder bootstrapped The Names Database in 2002, selling it for $10 million in 2006.  He is currently the solo founder of Duck Duck Go, an Internet search engine, and an angel investor.

Sara Blakely

Blakely bootstrapped Spanx with $5,000 of her savings in 2000.  Spanx is now valued at more than $1 billion, and  Blakely is the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.

Markus Frind

Markus is the sole founder of Plentyoffish.com, an online dating site.  He created the website as an exercise to improve his ASP.NET skills in 2003, and it grew quickly.

He ran the company independently until 2007, when he began hiring employees.  It’s estimated revenue in 2008 was $10 million.

Gurbaksh Chahal

Chahal dropped out of high school at 16, in 1998, to work full time on his startup ClickAgents.  Two years later he sold the company for $40 million.  In 2004 Chahal formed BlueLithium, which he sold in 2007 for $300 million.  He is currently working on his third startup, RadiumOne, which is valued at $500 million as of March 2nd, 2012 (as reported on Wikipedia).

The post 10 Successful Solo Startup Founders appeared first on Software Smitten.

Author’s Note: This post is about online Help.  If you need a simple document to distribute to users try this free user guide template.

What exactly is Help?

Help is any method that enables users to answer their own questions.  Unlike support phone calls and emails, Help can be very low-cost because you don’t have to invest time into each individual question that your users have.

There are several types of Help:

1. Static content, like printed manuals and PDFs
2. Online content
3. User-supported communities

Each of these types have pros and cons associated with them (more details below).

The Plan

Now that you have a clear idea of what Help is let’s discuss how you can actually make it.  This is a straightforward process:

1. Identify your goals and special requirements
2. Create a content strategy
3. Pick a tool

Identify Your Goals and Special Requirements

You’ll want to put some thought into what your goals are for your Help.  An easy answer is “reduce support costs.”  What about driving deeper engagement?  Educating users on the topics surrounding your software?  Inspiring a community of die-hard fans?

While you’re thinking about goals you should also consider any special requirements.  These can be:

• Available in 5 different languages
• Pixel-perfect printing, to be bound and distributed to users
• Available offline (such as by a downloadable PDF or a distributed CD-ROM)
• Searchable
• Support for images & videos
• User editable (like wikis)
• Integration with related products, such as Help Desk and Chat

Making a list of these features now will help you to develop your content strategy and to compare the various tools available to create the Help.

Develop a Content Strategy

Most products are too complex to just start typing stuff.  You need a plan for how you’ll tackle (and possibly delegate) the creation of the content.   Generally, you can organize by features, by task, or both.  Then you should consider the content style your Help should have.

Organizing by Feature

Facebook is a good example of organizing Help by feature.  The author took a look at the Facebook application, broke it into various sections (such as Timeline and News Feed), and then wrote Help content for each feature.  This is a good approach if your users tend to think of the features in the same way you do.  It’s not a good approach otherwise.  For example, if users tended to think of the News Feed as their Home Page, then they’re going to be confused and frustrated when trying to find the relevant section in the Help.  Notice that Facebook mitigates this a bit by calling the section “News Feed (Home)”.

Organizing by Task

Most users won’t read through your Help before using your application.  Generally, they’ll only open Help when they have a very specific problem or question, and they want answers as quickly as possible.  Organizing by task will help them find their answers quickly.

Gmail is a good example of this – the author put the most common tasks first and foremost on the page, organizing them in a way that the content is very quick to scan.

Combining Feature and Task

Combining the two approaches gets you the best of both worlds.  Users who like a bit of an education before using an application or feature can get the thorough content they desire, and users with specific questions can find answers quickly.

MailChimp has a good approach to this – note the sections for ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ and ‘Explore the Knowledge Base’.  By the way, Knowledge Base is just another way to say Help.

Identify and Articulate the Content Style

Users who look at Help will sometimes be frustrated, sometimes be looking for the answer to a specific question, and sometimes be looking for a general overview to get them started.  But they will always be in a hurry.  Curling up in bed with a software manual and a glass of wine is so incredibly rare that you might as well assume it’s non-existent.  Ensure the user a frictionless experience by writing a style guide for your Help now, before you write a single word.  This will ensure that the various sections of the Help are consistent in style and tone, so users will know what to expect as they explore.  It’s doesn’t have to be long or complicated.  Here’s an example:

Each page in Help will be no longer than 500 words.  Use of headings in varying font-size and weight will help the user skim content, as well as numbered lists and bullet points when appropriate.  In general, pages should include an ‘overview’ paragraph at the top to help the user understand the value to be gained by using the feature being described, then sections for the individual tasks that a user may accomplish with the feature.  Each task section should be “how to” guides that offer explicit, step-by-step directions and include lots of application screenshots.

Pick a Tool

Armed with your goals,  special requirements, and content strategy, you are now ready to start looking at your tool options.  Let’s look again at the three types of Help: static content, online content, and user-supported communities.

Static content

Static content are things like printed manuals or content loaded onto CD-ROMs.  They’re hard to change so they don’t change often.  This can be a good choice if your users like to access Help printed or offline.  They’re not a good choice if you update your content often – probably more than a couple of times a year.  Tools that create this kind of help are called Help Authoring Tools.  Wikipedia has a good list of the tools in this category if you’re ready to start comparing them.

Many Help Authoring Tools can generate your content in both static and online format.  This means you just have to write the content once, and then you can both load the content onto a CD-ROM and make it available online via a web browser.  Be sure to look at samples of the online content a tool creates when researching it – you don’t want to find after purchase that you don’t like its appearance and that it’s difficult to change.

Online content

Online content has all the advantages of websites, blogs, and web apps: rich content, instant availability, and searchability.  All of the examples in the ‘Develop a Content Strategy’ section are Online content.  Online Help content is created by a tool (sometimes called a Help Authoring Tool), and published for users to see.

One of the biggest advantages to online content is that it’s very easy to update.  You can even update the content more frequently than the product itself.  Say, for example, that your team had to release a new feature very quickly, and you didn’t have time to update the Help.  With static Help content you would have to wait until the next product release to update the Help.  With online content you can update it the next day.

Some tools support both static content and online content, and those are usually called help authoring tools.  Most of these tools don’t actually put the content online for you though – they create files that your web browser can display (HTML) but you have to work with the programmers or IT to get the files onto a server where your user can access them.  A few tools will put the content online instantly – Convey is one such tool.

User-supported comunities

Many people consider this the holy grail of Help – users ask the questions, users answer the questions, and you don’t have to do anything!  Unfortunately, these communities can be difficult to setup.  You need a lot of passionate users who like to assist other users.  Here are some questions to help determine if a user-supported community would work for your product:

• Do you have enough users?
• Will enough of them check every day to see if other users have questions?
• Will they respond courteously and accurately?

Most companies find that they have to spent time monitoring the communities and answering user questions, so it’s not quite self-serve.

There are a couple of types of tools that create user-supported communities, including forums and Q&A sites.  Both types suffer from a major usability problem: it’s difficult for users to find answers to their questions.  That’s why you often see the same question asked over and over again.  So while this type of Help sounds perfect it has its drawbacks.  If possible, review the user-supported communities of products that you use personally and think about whether the format would work well for your product.

Popular tools that create user-supported communities include Get Satisfaction (easy to setup, paid plans) and phpBB (hard to setup, free).

Next Steps

So you’ve got your plan – identify your goals and special requirements, create a content strategy, and pick a tool.  If you’ve done this before and have feedback on the plan let us know in the comments.  Or if you have questions feel free to post them, and I’ll do my best to help!

The post The Step-by-Step Plan to Creating Help for your Application appeared first on Software Smitten.

There are a couple of things that most of us have in common in the week between Christmas and New Years:

• We spend time with family
• We eat a lot of leftovers
• We create our New Years resolution list

We love our New Years resolutions because they give us hope for the upcoming year.  This year is a little different for me, because my new year started on October 24th.  That was the day that I became a full-time business owner and my life changed dramatically (it also happened to be my birthday).

I spent the months leading up to the big day putting a lot of thought into what I wanted my company, Red Monocle, to be like.  This is something that I don’t see a lot of other startup founders doing – we tend to jump right into writing code or marketing.  We don’t take the time to establish a couple of basic principles to base the rest of our decisions on.  I think this is a mistake, because you’re much more likely to be happy with where your company ends up in ten years if you know what kind of company will make you happy.

Starting a company is hard.  There are a lot of decisions with far-reaching consequences that you have to make with very little information.  Rather than looking at short-term goals, I focus on a long term goal: optimizing for happiness.  When I need to make a decision I think about the possible consequences of my options years down the line, and chose the option that I think will be happier with.

Below are a few examples of the decisions that I made using this principle, and the consequences to Red Monocle and to my day-to-day life.

Pricing

Pricing a product is one of the most critical and impactful things that a startup founder does, particularly for SaaS companies.  If you set a low price point then need to make sure the cost of acquiring each customer is very low.  You can’t spend your day cold-calling leads if you’ll get $10 a month from them.  But you can if you’ll get $10,000 a month from acquiring a customer.

I chose a low price point for Red Monocle’s products.  The biggest reason was so that I couldn’t do a lot of hand-holding in sales, something that I knew I wouldn’t enjoy.  Another thing I like about low pricing is that I need a large number of customers instead of a small number, which means that if a single customer outgrows my product that’s ok, I’ll lose 2% of my monthly revenue, not 40%.

A low price point means that I spend a large portion of my days on inbound marketing.  I try to create useful content here on the Software Smitten blog and in other places, so people I’ve helped will think of Red Monocle the next time they need a Help tool.

Low pricing has consequences for the product, too.  New customers have to be setup automatically, and the cost to service a customer has to be comfortably lower than the revenue the customer provides.  This puts a ceiling on the product complexity.  Joel York over at the Chaotic Flow blog has an excellent article that explains this more.

Company size

It might seem silly to think about company size when you’re first starting out as a single founder.  But you’ll make different decisions now if you know you want a large company versus a small one.  For example, a large company requires rapid growth, and you’ll likely need to take investment to hire a lot of people.  A small company can grow at a comfortable rate, adding people when revenue can naturally support it.

I envision myself working with a small group of passionate people at Red Monocle in 10 years.  If I wanted to work with a large group than I would need to plan for much more rapid growth.  Rapid growth means that I would be looking for investors right now, and tweaking the rest of my business plan to attract attention.  Instead, I’m working on my product and trying to produce useful marketing content.

Exit Strategy

A mentor of mine told me that every company needs an exit strategy, and you have three options: get bought, go public, or die.  Because my motivation for starting a company was to build products that I would be proud of, this was an easy choice: I’ll have Red Monocle as long as it makes me happy.

Of course, this decision has impacts on the business plan as well.  Going public usually means that you need to build products that the public understand, so you typically don’t want to enter too small of a niche market.  Getting bought means that you typically worry more about getting lots of users and press coverage rather than profitability.

Deciding to have Red Monocle long term gives me the freedom to make decisions based on what I would like to do with my day.

Optimizing for happiness when making decisions enables us be in control over our own destiny, rather than chance.  This year, as you start your business, big project or resolutions list, consider ways that you can regain control over your own happiness.

The post The Optimizing for Happiness Business Plan appeared first on Software Smitten.

Can’t-live-without-it apps

South

If you use Django and you’re not using South then you’re enduring way more pain than you have to.  South manages your schema changes for you, such as adding fields to existing models.  There’s really no reason not to use it.

Django-debug-toolbar

The Django development server prints a lot of information to the console, which is great for checking stack traces.  But you need a summary view to check for trends, and django-debug-toolbar does just that.  The app writes a bunch of information to the page rendered by Django (you configure when it appears, so your users don’t have to see it).  My favorite is the SQL section:

The grayed out area is the sql executed.  It gives you the nice waterfall on the right, and you can expand a query to see a stacktrace of the originating code. Very cool.

Django-registration

Nearly all web apps need a registration component – and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s writing code that someone else has written.  Plug this app into your Django project and poof! – instant user registration.

The logic for the steps the user goes through to register (fill out form, click link in activation email, etc) is contained in it’s default backend.  Don’t like the default logic?  Just create a new backend.  I’ve found the app to be extremely flexible.  In Convey most users sign-up using the default backend, but if a user invites someone else then the invited user goes through a special Invite backend that I wrote.

Django_compressor

Every web app needs a strategy for optimizing its static content, JavaScript and CSS.  Two techniques that everyone should be using are minification and combining of assets.  Together, these strategies reduce the total number of bytes transferred from your server to the client and the number of connections to transfer all assets.  Of course,  you don’t want to combine or minify during development because that would make your life (much) harder.  Instead, use one of the many apps available to help you use these techniques in production.

I like django_compressor because it’s explicit – I wrap assets in my template with a special tag that tells the app that it should do it’s magic if DEBUG is False.  It DEBUG is True (such as on my local environment) then it does nothing.  This is really a matter of personal taste – take a look at your available options and the pick the one you like best.  But be sure to pick one!

Often useful apps

Django-reversion

Many projects need a history feature so users can see previous versions of their content.  This is similar to the ‘Revisions’ feature in WordPress.  If you find you need this feature take a look at django-reversion.  It’s easy to setup and will handle saving the versions for you – freeing you up to focus on displaying the versions.

Dajaxice

I considered not listing this app because although I do use it a lot I feel guilty about it.  The app’s tagline is “easy to use AJAX libraries for django”, which is why I use it – it’s easier than vanilla AJAX.  But it just doesn’t feel right.

Let’s say you have a page in a Polls app that needs to asynchronously update a poll’s title.  With Dajaxice the client-side code could look like this:

Dajaxice.polls.update_title(function() {
    alert('saved!')
}, {'id': 1, 'title': 'New poll!'});

The server-side code would be stored in a special file called ajax.py in your app.  Functions with the @dajaxice_register tag are available on the client:

@dajaxice_register
def update_title(request, id, title):
    #do stuff here
    return "success!"

The things I take issue with are:

1. Dajaxice namespacing on the client.  I don’t like sprinkling the detail of which AJAX library I use all over my app.  What if I decide to change libraries?  This could be mitigated by aliasing the library, or wrapping it in a thin AJAX library of my own.
2. Vanilla Django requires putting AJAX logic in the same place as other requests – in urls.py & views.py.  I don’t mind skipping urls.py but I don’t like having my AJAX business logic in a different place from the rest of my view logic.  Dajaxice thinks this is a feature, because there shouldn’t be presentation logic in a AJAX function.  But I would rather be consistent with the rest of the Django community on this one.

Awesome (but not Django)

Twitter-bootstrap

Twitter-bootstrap has been getting a lot of attention lately, and for good reason: it makes you app look great very quickly.  It’s also easy to configure when you’re ready to invest time into giving your app a unique look.

The post Must-Have Django Apps appeared first on Software Smitten.

Until I saw that the Odyssey’s staff had lined up along the boardwalk to wave goodbye to the party.  The staff had big smiles and lots of laughs, expressing that they had enjoyed our visit and wishing us a pleasant evening.  Their words were complimented by a plate of warm cookies, which they handed out to the deboarding guests.

The deboarding experience elevated my impression of the entire evening.  It’s hard for me to hold a negative opinion of a venue when the last thing I remember is pleasant words and warm cookies.

What are you doing to ensure that the last thing customers remember about you or your product is a positive one?

The post The Magic of Last Impressions appeared first on Software Smitten.

While I love the pictures themselves, a huge part of the joy I get from receiving one is knowing that we’re supporting independent artists.  I like to think of the time and love that these artists put into their work, and unlike popular artists or massive print runs, how each sale is noticed and appreciated.

Because these artists are small and unknown marketing is a challenge – just like any start-up.  Illustrator Elfan Diary is gaining attention by posting videos of himself creating his art:

It doesn’t look like his individual pieces are for sale – he’s probably marketing himself for contract work – but I think this would be a brilliant strategy for artists with online stores.  The peek into how the art is created emphasizes the uniqueness of the pieces, and the skill of the creator.  Every time a customer looks at a piece she bought she would remember the video, so the whole experience gained by the art would be greatly expanded.  I thought of this when I first saw this video, and was looking forward to the experience so much that I immediately searched for a “buy” button.  I’m still disappointed that I didn’t find one.

I can easily imagine this technique brought into software – in fact, 37signals does a great job of this with their blog.  Are there ways you can create more value for your customers by demonstrating the care that goes into creating your products?

The post Creating Value by Exposing the Creative Process appeared first on Software Smitten.

The City dropdown is required, but here’s the catch: it doesn’t have any values.

So after spending an hour filling out an application I can’t submit it.

I really needed to submit this form.  I spent 15 frustrating minutes fiddling with it.  Eventually I realized that I had skipped the ‘Payee is on the application’ radio button option.  Clicking this filled in the city automatically.  It seems as though the designer was trying to save me time – but ended up exchanging 5 seconds of entering my city manually for 15 minutes of frustration.

Most of the time this experience would have been a deal-breaker for me, but unfortunately I didn’t have an option to use a different product.  Most products do not have this benefit.  Are your forms frustrating?  Do your users have other options?

Take-aways:

• Don’t expect users to fill out fields in a certain order
• If order is important, make it obvious that some fields should be filled out before others.  Order is not sufficient.
• If any field is unusable when the page first loads add validation in case the field is not usable when the user tries to use it.  This message should tell the user exactly what she needs to do to progress.

The post UX in the Real World: Form Frustration appeared first on Software Smitten.

How would you describe your profession?

Answer	Votes	Vote Count/Percentage
Technical Writer		8 Votes(66%)
Developer		1 Votes(8%)
Designer		3 Votes(25%)

Total Votes: 12

How would you rate the help system that is provided for the product you work on?

Answer	Votes	Vote Count/Percentage
Awesome		0 Votes(0%)
Gets the job done		9 Votes(69%)
Terrible		4 Votes(30%)
What help system?		0 Votes(0%)

Total Votes: 13

Do you think that help systems, generally speaking, do a good job?

Answer	Votes	Vote Count/Percentage
Yes		7 Votes(50%)
No		7 Votes(50%)

Total Votes: 14

Which feature would most improve help systems?

Answer	Votes	Vote Count/Percentage
Context-sensitive, so when the user requests help they see content relevant to what they are currently working on		10 Votes(40%)
Easy to create and update		4 Votes(16%)
Embedded, so users don’t have to stop what they’re doing to find the information they need		11 Votes(44%)
None of the above, help is just fine the way it is		0 Votes(0%)

Total Votes: 25

Anything you want to add?

Answer
No to wikis, No to pinterest. Stop trying to reinvent and concentrate on content.
Integrate company-produced help content with content from real users
Often times, searchable help is not very refined. It would great if searching for the help topic you want actually produced useful returns on the search.
I like it when a help guide has simple, step by step explanations that I can follow and feel comfortable referring my students to.
A great product doesn’t require documentation!
I see very little context-sensitive help nowadays. Help authoring tools are the worst at providing good help, which is quite ironic.

Big thanks to everyone who participated in the survey! I was surprised by some of the answers – especially the even split on the question of whether help systems are doing a good job.

The post Survey Results: How Do We Improve User Help? appeared first on Software Smitten.

Take this hypothetical project management app as an example.  I can enter a Project:

Next I add a task to my project:

Oops, the software doesn’t want me to enter a due date for the task after the Project’s due date.  That makes sense, but if I don’t remember the Project’s due date, then I have to go back to a different screen in the software, lookup the date, and then try to enter a task once again.  Talk about frustrating.  Let’s save the user that frustration by providing the date in the validation message:

That’s better.  Now the user knows exactly what needs to be done to correct the data and move on to the next task.

Although this is a big improvement, I would rather help the user avoid entering bad data in the first place.  Nobody likes to be told by angry red text that they’re doing it wrong.  Let’s try showing tips next to the fields as she fills them out:

Ah, this I like.  The tone here is less “you did it wrong” and more “keep in mind”.  Most brands would probably want the language to be a bit friendlier, but you can see that this is already much better than where we started.

You may be thinking that is really obvious stuff, and you’d be right.  But I very recently ran across an application with the exact problem that we started out with.  So while there are a lot of buzzwords in UX to talk about, it’s the basic, everyday experiences that deserves most of our attention.

The post Providing Sufficient Information In Validation Errors appeared first on Software Smitten.