Simplicity Rules

A lot of us Web people do it. We know we need an obvious feature, so we implement something quickly, but it only gets us halfway there. Maybe we realize it’s not a complete feature, maybe we don’t. Regardless, we leave it half done.

It’s pretty easy to pick on MySpace, so I’ll praise them first. For a service of immense popularity, it is bound to be a favorite place for spammers. They have become very good at finding these bad guys and wiping them out almost instantly. MySpace doesn’t even send me a real email to tell me about this MySpace email. Pretty cool.

So, how do I know they are catching so many spammers?

For each message from a deleted spammer, I get an extra message in my box, cleansed of its spammy contents. Instead, each message explains…

The profile you received this message from has been deleted. Either this user deleted their own profile or MySpace deleted it for spamming and/or content violations.

To remove this message click the delete button below.

Thank you.

P.S. If you’re seeing a lot of old messages in your inbox like this, it’s because someone you know who has written you messages has been deleted. If the messages are new, it’s probably a spammer that MySpace caught in the act.

It’s like a mouse that the cat brings to the doorstep. “See what I did!”

This is a halfway there approach. Catching spammers is important to MySpace, so they don’t clutter my inbox. Yet, they clutter my inbox with their trophies.

A few ways to make this all the way there:

1. Delete the messages, too
2. Create a spam folder and move them there
3. Keep a McDonald’s-like tally: over one billion spammers foiled

Whatever they do, they should go the whole way. Halfway isn’t far enough.

Right before waking up on this Saturday morning, I had a dream about bad interfaces. It was short and really just a one-liner. I was talking with my friend Tom when he complained about a web app: “I asked for driving directions and it gave me back stocks.”

Sure, it’s far-fetched and dream-like, but is has a hint of Web truth.

Who needs a real doctor, right? Just type your symptoms into Healthline, or click on body parts at WebMD. These tools are pretty cool, but I don’t think anyone expects them to replace the good ol’ Doc. You wouldn’t hire the neighbor kid to make your website, right? Right?

Those who know me personally probably know I had a bit of a tough January. I had Bell’s Palsy, which is the only one of four possibilities from this Healthline search that isn’t a medical emergency.

If I had seen that list, I would probably have gone to the doctor anyway. When two possibilities include the word “stroke” and another involves a bloody brain, one takes precautions.

I probably would not have ever seen that list. “Facial paralysis” is what I put in a month after. My symptoms at the time were numbness around my mouth and neck pain I thought was unrelated. On WebMD I found Bell’s Palsy because I clicked on “facial drooping.” A lot of people get a droop, but I never had a droop. Neither tool would not have helped me figure out what was wrong with my face.

It comes down to terminology and a willingness to be a little fuzzy with translation. A human, like a doctor or web professional, does a good job of being forgiving, a computer does not. When a non-techy says, “my box thingy is gone from the Internet,” we hear that the location bar is hidden. When I said to the chest-hair-flaunting E.R. doc, “my face is all numb,” he asked the questions to figure out what I really meant.

While it isn’t very difficult to argue against computer diagnosis, I’m really pointing out where it could get smarter. As search engines have become pretty forgiving about speeling, these tools could work to add in symptom synonyms. Even though numbness and paralysis are very different, they can feel the same. And with most interface issues, what the user thinks means more than how things really are.

These health tools are still useful for some things, of course. Just don’t skip your check-up because a web site said your diseases are 404 (geek joke–you don’t have to laugh). At the very least, use Healthline to play a little Disease Jeopardy.

Today would have been Kurt Cobain’s 40th birthday. For a guy who is etched into our memories at 27, that sounds pretty old (sort of like imagining the forever young JFK, who’d turn 90 this year).

The Belfast Telegraph has a good look at Cobain’s short life and his legacy. In 2002, Pete Townsend reviewed Cobain’s published journals for The Guardian.

I was never much of a fan of Nirvana. A parody of their trademark song did make me a fan of Weird Al, who has a knack for getting the music right. So, through proxy, I came to appreciate the band.

Even more so, I appreciate the impact their music had on the 90s, leading away from the bubble gum 80s, at least for awhile. I have to wonder how Cobain would have continued to influence music and culture if he’d stayed alive. How would he have used the Internet? What would he be writing in his blog on the big Four Oh?

Of course, we can only wonder, so we’re left with the video below, Cobain’s crowning achievement. Sure, it’s Weird Al’s Smell’s Like Nirvana. The legend has it that Cobain realized Nirvana had “made it” when he heard the parody. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think he’d agree this is as good as it gets.

Which of these Amazon homepage designs is better?

It turns out it depends what we mean by “better.” My gut would say the one on the right, because the design is cleaner, simpler. Amazon put it to an A/B test and it turns out the one on the left performed better. Orders dropped significantly when Amazon tested the simpler design.

Greg Linden points to a deck of PDF slides by Amazon employees. It’s a couple years old, but has some more good examples of lessons they learned with hard data to back it up.

For a good overview of A/B testing, something most of us can do, check out Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.

Tara Hunt says community is not the same as a marketing strategy. She shared 10 simple ways to shift thinking.

1. Be a community evangelist. Get feedback and learn what you can do better.
2. Shift your measures of success. PageViews or signups might not be the best yard stick. Find a way to measure true success.
3. Embrace the chaos. Life isn’t always organized and that’s okay.
4. Find your higher purpose. Know what you are achieving through the community.
5. Understand your audience. Who do we serve? Why do they give a damn?
6. INreach, not outreach. Focus on making your current members happy, not getting more members who will come and go.
7. Design to delight. Determine the optimal experience and include little things to make people smile.
8. Be part of the community. Get in there, talk to people, and get to know how they tick.
9. Marketing is not an afterthought. It’s everything you do. If your product isn’t great, marketing won’t make it so.
10. Have patience. There are no overnight successes.

(This is part of the CommunityNext Week in Lists. Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

Heather Luttrell knows all about online advertising. She’s the president of Indieclick, an ad network for online communities. She’s talked to many advertisers, publishers, and community members, and she knows how to monetize without upsetting the community.

Luttrell shared 10 myths and misconceptions about growing and monetizing communities:

1. If we build it, they will come.
2. Member acquisition won’t cost us anything.
3. Bandwidth is cheap and won’t cost any more as we grow.
4. We can add advertising space to the design after we have built an audience.
5. Our audience won’t accept ads.
6. Ads will look terrible.
7. Direct (or indirect) sales will sell our ads.
8. We need detailed data to manage sales.
9. We are getting 1000s of hits. Surely they are worth some ad dollars.
10. Advertising is our only source of revenue.

(This is part of the CommunityNext Week in Lists. Photo credit: Marc Levin.)

Josh Spear and Aaron Dignan believe that a good community has a brand with which its members want to be identified. They call this Brand Utopia and they have six rules.

1. Know what you care about. It helps to be passionate. This will rub off on your community members.
2. Do something worth talking about. If nobody cares, then why bother?
3. Be authentic. Put values before revenue, or your community call you out as a fake… or worse, just leave.
4. Let the community create you. Continual feedback is key. Integrate with the community, don’t infiltrate.
5. Operate within the rules of your universe. Your community makes those rules, so gather deep knowledge of your area.
6. Change the world. Consumer are hungry for purpose.

(This is part of the CommunityNext Week in Lists. Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

Jake McKee wants everyone to go home happy. In a community, that means the members get what they want and so do the hosts. Here are his six ways to make sure everyone goes home happy.

1. Redefine success. It’s more than just membership numbers. Find a way to track real success.
2. Share. A lot. Let people in on your inside story.
3. Constantly adjust. Take suggestions from the community.
4. Skip the NDA. I’d guess this rarely comes up in online discussions, but whenever an NDA is involved, it decreases the amount of real discussion that can go on.
5. Set and maintain expectations. If your site can’t always be free or without ads, it’s important to let the community know.
6. Train your colleages. Share your experiences with the community.

(This is part of the CommunityNext Week in Lists)

SkinnyCorp is the company behind the community-created tshirt website, Threadless. They let the audience in on their major metric for determining their company’s growth (thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the pic).

To achieve their success, they have lived by only Four SkinnyCorp Commandments.

1. Allow content to be created by the community. Every shirt design came from the Threadless community, who also vote on each shirt. The best get made and then purchased by the same community.
2. Put your project in the hands of its community. Most of the new features on Threadless are also ideas from the community, sometimes executed upon in less than one day.
3. Let your community grow itself. Give them an incentive to stick around and they’re bound to tell their friends.
4. Reward the community that makes you project possible. Winning shirt designers get $2,000. As Threadless has become more popular, the amount has gone up.