Month: March 2015
The New Deal, they argue, violates this natural order. In fact, they argue that the New Deal and the regulatory state violate the Ten Commandments. It makes a false idol of the federal government and encourages Americans to worship it rather than the Almighty.
Really interesting and thought provoking interview with Kevin Kruse about his new book on Fresh Air – it’s available here – worth a listen for students of history or political wonks, or, like me, the dangerous combination of the two.
Beautiful backdrop for a day of snowbound rugby. First games of the year with teammates new and old.
“Optionality is the property of asymmetric upside (preferably unlimited) with correspondingly limited downside (preferably tiny).”
Reading Antifragile has changed my outlook on many, many things – but the idea of optionality especially has been cropping up in unexpected places. Here, watch this highlight reel:
One thing almost all of these outstanding plays have in common? Besides outstanding athleticism and an egg-shaped ball, all of these scoring opportunities are notably opportunities gained through optionality: with the exception of the very first play, all of these tries were scored by players who not only positioned themselves to have a number of options, they also executed those options wisely.
In Taleb’s terms, they were able to create a situation with a huge opportunity for upside (gaining points) and very little exposure to a downside, since they were well-supported by multiple team mates at any given time.
When he said “Optionality can be found everywhere if you know how to look,” I wasn’t expecting to find it on the rugby pitch!
In January, I had an opportunity (through Catchafire) to work with the science education nonprofit Science from Scientists. They had recently set up a Google Analytics property on their web site, and were looking for a volunteer to get things running properly.
Working with their Director of Web Services, I developed:
Today, I’m happy to click the “Project Complete” button at Catchafire, setting Science from Scientists to sail, equipped with a batch of customized data delivery utilities and the educational resources to make use of them in the future.
You can see my Catchafire profile here.
It’s always a funny thing when you find a problem you weren’t expecting – especially when spending time with usage data, taking a moment to blink once or twice and consider why something looks odd can really bear dividends.
When doing a fairly standard rundown of the support statistics for our in-app support, I noticed that, despite making up about 40% of our userbase, our Android app users were submitting as many support requests as our iOS users. This meant that an Android user was almost twice as likely to contact support as an iOS user.
This seemed strange – I did some digging. Was the Android app more difficult to use? The app store rating for the Android app was actually higher than that of the iOS app. It was also noteworthy that the Android users accessed the in-app FAQ about half as much as iOS users – perhaps for some reason Android users tended to speed past the FAQ and go directly to support? Perhaps the FAQ wasn’t displaying properly?
Like anyone feeling stumped, I brought the question to the team, hoping someone would find some insight where I didn’t – and it turned out that our Android application in fact offered more points of access to support than the iOS app – that is, the Android app offered folks a chance to reach support at points of failure and error messages, whereas the iOS device did not. All of these additional access points did not require a customer to go through the usual flow of FAQ before reaching out to support.
Mystery solved. We’re increasing the number of access points to support in the iOS app.
Working on the mobile apps has revealed to me again and again that the lower the barrier to entry is, the better you’ll be able to hear from your customers. They have a lot of valuable things to say – given the opportunity, they’ll help you to make better things.
If you’re keeping track, yes, this is the second story about working with the mobile team where I end up increasing the number of incoming support requests. Yes, I am the worst.
Simon Ouderkirk 