Think Stick!

What’s Moah up to these days?

As I mentioned in the previous post, I recently left my Product Designer position at Carbonite (I know the resume isn’t updated, I will!) and my green card application through another mean is still pending. Once that comes back, I will be able to start my company or get involved with any funded or unfunded early stage start up of my choosing. So I am really looking forward to that freedom. But to achieve that freedom, I cannot work for any employer at the moment.

I’m helping Alex Moore of Baydin to design a really awesome Email Game. It’s meant to help people who are not good with email but want to get better. It’s designed to make email less painful and more fun for people. It’s meant to help people (like me) who haven’t developed a good discipline to deal with the inbox overflow. It’s currently in Alpha and we’re getting great feedback and surprising emotional response to the game from our alpha testers. If you are one of those daring souls that love to play with pre-release software, follow @emailgame on twitter and let us know there. We will  dm you with a link in a week or two.

I also want to give back with any free time I have left over. I am also available to help startups with any UX design challenges. I can give feedback on your design or suggestions and also share low cost DIY usability testing techniques.  If you are a bay area startup and will like to meet me in person, I’m here until August 3rd. Startups are my passion and I want to live, breathe and drink startups. As I said, I can’t charge you for all the visa reasons.  But this hiatus won’t last forever.  Find me on twitter.

Scobleized : Startup Visa and more

You may have gotten to this blog from Scoble’s latest post. Here is the video of his interview.  If you didn’t get here from his blog/video, I was at a Mentorship Mixer event last night and was interviewed by Scoble to talk about Startup Visa.

I wanted to add a few more context to the conversation on what I’m up to and why I’m supporting StartupVisa.  I recently left my Product Designer position at Carbonite (I know the resume isn’t updated, I will!) and my green card application through another mean is still pending. Once that comes back, I will be able to start my company or get involved with any funded or unfunded early stage start up of my choosing. So I am really looking forward to that freedom. But to achieve that freedom, I cannot work for any employer at the moment. I think it’s a great trade. If you want to know more about what I’m up to, read this next post.

But there are many other MIT graduates like me who are working in companies that sponsor their H1B visas since they graduated. We all graduated in 2005. The 6 year limit on H1B is coming up pretty soon for many of us. The current immigration policy makes it hard for them to keep working in US. I understand with the current economy and the unemployment rate, some people may be resistant to doing anything about this.

And then, there are ones who want to start their own startups. They moonlight and work on their projects on the side while having a full time job. But they cannot get up and quit their full time job to dedicate 100% to their startups and raise funds and grow a company for real. That’s why I think Startup Visa is going to make a difference. This type of visa doesn’t take any job from any americans and if successful, they are going to be creating jobs for many.

I have to say Scoble is a great journalist. He really had a genuine interest in people’s stories and he got me talking about the topics I’m pretty passionate about, startup visa, women in tech, etc. I’m looking forward to having more conversations like this. I’ll do one more follow up post based on the conversation we had about under-representation of women in tech and start ups. Hold me to it!

Translating JFDI. Data driven startups talk by David Cancel.

This month Lean Startup Boston Meetup had David Cancel of Performable to talk about Analytics and A/B testing. Here are my notes. The actual slides from the talk can be found here. I just want to note down my translation of what was presented and the surrounding commentary that you can’t find in the slides.

Talking, Reading & Dreaming are all worthless. Just start DOING! or more closer to “Just F’ing Do It.” Hence, the post is titled “Translating JFDI”. [This is a good wakeup call for me since all my life, I have been conditioned to read and absorb as much information as I can by personality and training. And it’s good to remember it doesn’t matter how much you’ve read, analyzed, discussed unless you have done it and actually helped your startup.]

The single most important thing is “Does anyone give a shit about your dumb idea?” [There were good commentary on how you know if anyone gives a shit. The recommendation is just to start talking to people: anyone on the street, your mother, potential customers, not just startup obsessed hackers. You will know if people care by how engaged they are. How much they let you bother them by going out of their way to discuss, sending you feedback, letting you record their screens or phone calls.  David noted that this is really hard for many engineering type people since we are all more or less introverts.]

The reason to just start doing and stop reading and dreaming is because there is no repeatable pattern for startup success. [It’s kind of funny since right after saying this, David recommended reading two books, Startup Lessons Learned and The Four Steps to Epiphany. Obviously it was a Lean Startup Meetup.]

Analytics and A/B testing are also not the answer. No magic bullet here. They just serve to validate your assumptions.

What about A/B  vs. multivariate?  Multivariate testing is completely useless for a startup mainly because you are too small and you don’t have enough data for it to make sense. [For the giants like Google, they have enough data and traffic to use multivariate testing for good benefit.]

Come up with one assumption, Test and then Iterate. Make that cycle as short as practically possible. [The faster you are, the more likely you will get to what truly matters to the success of your startup. There were questions from the audience on what to test. David noted most of the times, it’s the copy that makes the most difference. Try a bunch of different ways to evoke  emotional connection to the visitors. I disagree to a point David made that it’s all about the emotional connection, not about the facts. It does matter how much information they have seen at the time you are asking them to take the next step along the conversion path. But that’s just a hunch. I’m sure we can test that too!]

Don’t start testing on the home page. Start somewhere else.

Always be testing. Just don’t be stupid about it.

Beware of local maxima. [I have always been concerned about A/B testing optimizing for local maxima and never making the jump to global maxima. When Google obsessed over testing small details over and over (aka the infamous 41 shades of blue) to the point of driving some designer away from working there, I cried ‘local maxima!’  David made a great point of how Facebook is making radical changes,  pissing off many users, as an example of how to make the jump from one local maxima to next. That’s a great point and very valuable insight I took out of this talk.]

Remember to optimize for learning, not to just collect data.

Three Must-haves for any startup that wants to be data-driven.

1. Operational Dashboard – Go make it today.  [ Leave it ugly. Do it manually until someone complains. Everyone in the company can see this. For each item on the dashboard, have someone responsible for that number. Master this before moving to the next step. ]
2. Conversion Funnel Analysis [Monitor it after making any change to see how the change affected your business. Don’t make it real time or get addicted to this. Don’t get too jumpy and react. Make sure it’s long enough and figure out how to fix them.]
3. Cohort Analysis [Read more about it on Fred Wilson’s post. Basically, it’s tracking group(s) of people over a long period of time to see if there are changes in their engagement, activity. This is the part I wished the presentation had more details on. I still don’t know much about it.]

Most importantly, decide what you are optimizing for. [This part is not in the slides but I believe is particularly useful. I filled in the details for better comprehension. ]

If you are optimizing for cash flow/profit, you have a clearer view of what to optimize for. $$$$$

If you are optimizing for raising funds, it’s an art of story telling. Decide your story line and get the numbers you need to support your story line.  It might be traction, it might be proving that you can get >1x returns for each customer you acquire or that you have an  enormous market, or how fast you can grow your customer base. Focus on your story and optimize on that number.

Overall, it was a fantastic talk and great discussion among the audience. I highly recommend attending this meetup if you’re interested in this sort of thing. David is a great speaker to listen live. As awesome as his slides are,  you have to be there to get the full value of the talk.

Some tools mentioned during the talk

Kissmetrics and Mixpanel for funnel analysis.

Usertesting for qualitative testing.

Olark for monitoring your visitor and engaging with them. [One advice that wasn’t on the slide was “keep things high touch. Don’t worry about making anything scalable. That’s a problem you will feel lucky to have later on”. ]

User Experience of Quitting a Gym

I’m live posting the user experience of quitting a gym membership.

First Part.
I called the number listed on the card and said “Hi, I want to cancel my membership.” I was asked why I was leaving their gym and explained I’m no longer in their vicinity.

Without explaining what’s going to happen next or asking who I was, she forwarded me to a voice mail number. At this point, I was starting to get confused. I hang up and called again and asked if she intended to forward me to a voice mail. And she said, “No, I will have to take care of it myself but I don’t have anyone at front desk. I will have to call you back in a little bit.” From that sentence, I understood 0% of what her excuse for sending me to the voice mail was.

I wasn’t sure how she was going to call me back if she did not know who I was or have my number. So, I prompted her to take down my name and phone number.

We will see how long it takes for them to call me back.

Navigating New York – Digital Way (Part Travelogue, Part Reviews, Part Tips and Lessons Learned)

Horizontal Attention Heat Map

Nielsen’s group recently published the results from an eye tracking study for user attention for horizontal dimension.

Their main observation is

• Left half of any page gets 69% of viewing time and right half gets about 30%.
• Their recommendation is ‘Stick to the conventional Layout’ for the best results.
• Keep navigation all the way to the left. This is where people look to find a list of current options.
• Keep the main content a bit further in from the left.
• The most important stuff should be showcased between one-third and halfway across the page. This is where users focus their attention the most.
• Keep secondary content to the right.

Brendan Reagan from Grokdotcom came up with his own way to apply that data for testing the page layouts.

Nielsen’s data for viewing time across horizontal dimension by 100 px each is found in the chart below.

I translated this data into a reusable heat map to be shared with UX team at work and I figured I should share it here as well. You can get the full sized png template here.

When I came across ABtests.com, I looked through the samples uploaded and found this sign up page A/B testing by LessAccounting. Original test write up theorized that having the buttons on the left might be the primary contributing factor to 20% increase in conversion rate. His hypothesis is correct if we can believe Nielsen’s data as correct across all sites with left to right reading languages.

Comparing the sums of attention percentage for each layout, we can clearly see the left layout got much more attention. This test is particularly a good A/B test to support Nielsen’s data since all other elements (content, call to action button color, size) remain exactly the same in both layouts. The only difference here is the position of the call to action buttons and more informational bulleted text.

	Call to action buttons are on the right  starting from 700 px to 1000 px horizontally Sum of attention percentage ~20% Conversion rate 10%
	Call to action buttons are on the left starting from 100 px to 500 px horizontally. Sum of atention percentage ~58% Conversion rate 12%

Finding Time to Read

If you haven’t read a book in a while because you haven’t found any time to read in your busy schedule, try this one simple thing.

Read ten pages of a book you always wanted to read before you go to bed. Every day, read just ten pages. If you fall asleep after that, it’s good. If you still have some energy, you can keep reading. The time doesn’t have to be before bedtime. It could be on your commute. It could be with your breakfast while you wait for coffee to brew. But for it to work, you have to do it every day at the same time and just make a habit out of it.

If you do this every day, you will have read 365 x 10 pages = 3650 pages  a year. That’s about 9 books per year, assuming an average book has 400 pages. No matter how busy you are, you can finish 9 books a year. That will put you way above the US average (1 book per year). You won’t feel guilty when next year comes, and you won’t have to make any more resolutions to make time for reading!

You will be amazed how many books you can finish over the years, especially if you have a few extra minutes to extend your  reading time to 15 or 20 minutes a day. Better yet, maybe you’ll get pulled deep into a great book and find yourself unable to tear your attention away from it. Either way, this is an easy way to get started if you want to read but haven’t found time to.

Chrome on Mac with Shareholic & Zemanta

Shareholic is a tool for people who are addicted to sharing the content they found on web through pretty much any communication channel. The list of services they support is quite long but it was pretty easy to customize which ones you want to use. I think just the fact that I’m posting something right now should prove Shareholic’s usefulness.

The second extension is called Zemanta. To be honest, I am skeptical of the quality of its recommendations. I’m hopeful to be proven wrong.

Related articles by Zemanta

• What Is Zemanta? (yearn2blog.com)
• Google’s Chrome Extensions and Zemanta (mobilebull.blogspot.com)
• Google Chrome for Mac and Linux: They’re Here [Browsers] (gizmodo.com)

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