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Reasons for justification next time you want to propose adding customer review to your client’s website:
Why You Shouldn’t be Afraid of Customer Reviews

Technorati Tags: advertising, customer, review, site, social

Posted by Flickr User Steve Rhodes.

Technorati Tags: google, advertisement, ad, maps, train, bayarea

I refer to Streeteasy.com every time I see an apartment listing with potential. It is simply the best place to find background information on the listing and the building. I just noticed the site actually tells me that an apartment is Sold and not simply Unavailable or In Contract:

When I clicked onto the individual listing page, it list out how much the building sold for:

I already know that one of the perks for the subscription package is the closing pricing on apartments. Didn’t know they give them out for free! Yay.

Technorati Tags: streeteasy.com, streeteasy, apartment, listing, sold, price

I love shopping online. Not only because I love to shop, but shopping online is becoming a much more pleasant experience than shopping in-store. According to Forrester, US online retail reached $175 billion in 2007 and is projected to grow to $335 billion by 2012. I contributed greatly to this growth. In the past 6 months, the majority of my shopping activity happened online. Cat litter and books from Amazon, camera from circuitcity.com and shoes from Zappos.com. So, what’s so great about shopping online?

I finally decided to ditched my Sony T7 for a real camera a couple months ago. The T7 was amazing, but I could use a more advanced camera. After some research on CNET: it finally came down to four candidates:

Canon Rebel, Canon S3, Canon G9, Sony H50

After a lot of online research and peer recommendation, G9 seems like a wise choice. Yet, before I fish out $600 for the camera, I missed the in-store experience. I want to be sell. I want them to tell me why I would love this camera and why I must buy it. I went to CircuitCity, hoping they would sell me like they did online. Compare to all the interactive tools, price breakdown and forums to help me choose the right camera on their website, all I got from going to their store was merely poor customer service. Two CircuitCity stores and none of those sales people spend more than one minute with me.

Amazon is another site which provided me with great purchasing experience. The customer review tool on Amazon is particularly helpful since it surfaces bad reviews. There are many other sites with different shopping enhancement features: Live Chat, Rating, Reviews, Free Return, Extensive Information, Comparison etc. None of the above can fully exist in store. In the old days, the sales rep usually provides most of them. They will help us compare products, tell us any information we need to know about the product or review a product for us based on their usage experience. We have no benchmark against their service before and what they provided seemed really helpful. However, if you look at the product page of any major e-commerce website today, they are like the shopping expert we all need.

As retailers pour money into creating the best online shopping experience, it might just out perform the old in store purchasing experience.

Technorati Tags: retail, shopping, experience, ecommerce, online, purchasing

mini pigs

I had been hanging out a lot on GetSatisfaction.com lately. In addition to the numerous cool ID gems that site offers, it really is becoming very useful for me.

The site lets users submit a problem, idea or discussion around just any company.

One of my first posting was about BrightKite. BrightKite Beta is invitation only for now, but it’s sort of like a location based twitter with video and photo capabilities. After minutes of using, I receive friend requests from people whom I don’t know enough to add to my friends list. The site only provides two options: Accept or Reject. I rather not accept people I barely know since the application is tapping into where I am, yet reject seems a bit harsh. After discovering BrightKite and finding out BrightKite is participating actively on Get Satisfaction, I posted a request for an Ignore functionality. Within an hour I received a reply from someone within BrightKite noting that this feature is already planned for the next release. Woohoo!

Now all I wish is AT&T have an employee registered and listening so I can rant all about the poor reception on my iPhone at home. Wait no, I mean NO reception.

Very interesting thread going on in the comment area of “The World’s Most Innovative Companies” over at Business Week. It originates from a reader, Andre, who argues that Apple does not innovate but adapts to whatever is out there. The discussion evolves into an interesting debate of innovation vs. adaptation. The underlying question is – does a company need to invent to be considered innovative?

Technorati Tags: adaptive, innovative, business, week, apple, innovation, invention

Below is a presentation by Stephen Anderson at the IA Summit 2008:

The presentation really hit home for me and coincidently, a lot of what he said has been on my mind for a while. Although I wasn’t at the presentation, I got a good sense of where he’s trying to get at. I herein wants to emphasize two points in his presentation.

Point 1: We always look at competitors’ sites for answers when design as a default step – agreed.
This has really evolved into a standard practice, aka research phase. Don’t get me wrong here, I totally agreed that this phase is needed when getting into a space where we are not be familiar with. We need to understand what others in the same space as us are doing before we get our hands dirty. We need to look for inspirations and see if someone has tackle our problems differently, in a good way. In fact, a good designer should be looking at other sites for inspirations. On the other hand, this default step becomes shameful when we look at what others are doing and apply the exact same solution without giving a second thought to the problem (aka plagiarism). We certainly don’t want to go too far out of the box and deliver something that a user doesn’t understand. But it is important to take in what we have seen from the other sites and determine what really makes sense. Are the others solving the problem correctly or is it simply a cut-and-dried solution? Best practice really is just common practice.

Frankly, sometimes common practice do break. Let’s talk about a site with huge amounts of data, and need a way to organize it. The default way will be to have a first order organization dictated by business and IAs. IAs might also suggest letting people tag things and use a tag cloud as an alternate way to navigate. But rarely does those two intercept. Why? Because we might get garbage fields, or fields that will get us into trouble unless we let people tag by controlled vocabularies, which might be less fun? Is this common practice really the best way?

I usually have a lot of problems which how multifaceted navigation gets designed. Common practice uses clear and reset after a user has selected something. I haven’t seen any test data on it yet, but I really can’t get myself to watch my mom try it.

One website which gets this is Buzzillion.com (which was also mentioned in the presentation). As shown below, when I was looking for a camera, I can identify myself as someone who is getting started.

Their multifaceted navigation is also notable. Instead of relying on technical features of the camera(common practice), it uses intuitive terms, as well as the ability to eliminate features we do not like.

Looking further into it, those pros and cons are actually tags. Click into a product to get directed to a product detail page. When you click on Write a Review, you will be able to tag an item as shown below:

Some are controlled vocabularies, but you can also enter in your own tag. I don’t know how they solve issues of garbage fields, but I think this is the most intuitive use of tags thus far. Tags and categories intercept in a great way to help any users find things efficiently, and will most likely satisfy their needs.

Point 2 – Anything is possible – Agreed
And why are we limiting ourselves to common practice? The technology has came really far, and we no longer need to confined ourselves to work with the computer. We no longer needs to make users learn codes or rules in order to use our products. The final goal is to design something that is intuitive. Intuitive as a term is really overused, but for something to be intuitive in my dictionary needs to satisfy the following:
1) Easy to use and understand to a human being and not in the tech world where we used to live in
2) Allow us to think like or be humans while using it

What does #2 means you ask? My boyfriend’s parents came to visit us last Fall. We shown them Wii Sports, namely Wii Tennis and Bowling. They picked it up in no time, and beat my ass at it! We got into a group competition in less than 10 minutes of playing.

On the web, I guess we are stuck with mouse and keyboard. But is that so? I know a lot of websites are experimenting with webcams, using eye tracking as an alternate navigation. Stephen Anderson asks us to look at our cars, gaming consoles, or anything in our environment that we took granted for.

There are further great points from his presentation and is worth reading. Notes from other bloggers on the presentation:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?671
http://www.poetpainter.com/thoughts/article/ia-summit-2008-inspiration-from-the-edge-presentation

Technorati Tags: inspiration, from, the, edge, iasummit2008, stephen, anderson, inspiration

I recently posted my Sony DSC-T7 for sale on Amazon, hoping it will not be a scammers territory. Unfortunately I almost got scammed again, and they are much more sophisticated this time.

They first contacted me through Amazon. I have to admit my guard was down since the email address was clearly from Amazon.com. Below is the email:

Hello from Amazon.com.

Amazon.com will never e-mail you and ask you to disclose or verify your Amazon.com password, credit card, or banking account number. If you receive a suspicious e-mail with a link to update your account information, do not click on the link–instead report the e-mail to Amazon.com for investigation. Go to amazon.com/phish to find out more.

I replied to her with my personal email address, thinking this will actually lead to a successful sale. Through our email exchange, she indicated that she is buying the camera as a birthday gift for her boyfriend’s son and will like that to be shipped immediately so she can get it in a week. I subsequently received an email from what appears to be a standard Amazon email with her payment information and shipping address.

I was quite convinced by the email until I saw that she wants this shipped to Nigeria. I then went on the internet and search for Amazon scams and realized that a lot of people received the same type of email. Gmail usually hides the email address, but when I click on Show Details, the email address is actually not Amazon but this: amazon.customes@accountant.com. Nice try.