Category: Work

What a Way to Start a Book!

“The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means – crucially – a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Anti fragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them – and do them well. let me be more aggressive; we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.”

From Antifragile

November Reading Goals

After touching base with Jeremey and Ian, I’ve decided to follow their recommendations (respectively) and read the following in November:

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (272 Pages) and
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (544 Pages!)

I’ve decided to put Just Enough Research on the back burner, since these two books alone represent 0.74 Infinite Jests (versus October’s mere .574 Infinite Jests) and November involves a lot of travel for our hero.

October Reading Goals Recap

I almost made it – I finished Microinteractions, Elements of UX and Lean UX. I am only about halfway through Gamestorming. I do have an excuse – I picked up and spent some time in the excellent Just Enough Research, part of the Book Apart family. So, I’ll call it a draw.

Here are my thoughts in the order I read the books;

– Microinteractions: I was concerned that my lack of professional experience with UX topics would make this one a bit out of my reach, but to the contrary I found it really interesting, and it has certainly changed the way I think about the tiny pieces of software and websites, and the way these pieces change my experience. I would recommend it to anyone who works with websites or software, regardless of your area of focus.

– Elements of UX: This book, while thoughtful and certainly full of really important and structural high level thinking, was not for me. I lack the necessary grounding and experience to get the full value. It was the same experience as reading the third of fourth book in a series independent from the others – I could tell I was not getting the full story, the full impact. So, I would certainly recommend it, but probably not good if you’re just dipping a toe into design and UX.

– Lean UX: Probably my favorite of the books I finished in this list, Lean UX isn’t really about UX per se, but more about approaching that sort of Work from a different angle. As a step forward in management and product development, I liked it an awful lot. This may be because it ties into the sort of thing think about already, have some work experience with already, so the lessons and thoughts are especially tangible and pertinent.

– Gamestorming: Despite only getting halfway, have already started using the games and thinking in this book – my team at Automattic will be putting together our annual roadmap in January, and we’ll be using some of the creativity building games to help approach the next year with open minds. Game storming is mostly a collection of brainstorm games, with a short explanation of how to use them – if you work with other humans to make things in any capacity, you would get a a lot out of this book.

While I failed to meet my book goal in October, I did meet my page number goal, so I feel inspired. I am going to only choose three books for November, including the rest of Just Enough Research. I have reached out to my colleagues Jeremey and Ian for recommendations – stay tuned!

Don’t Confuse Your Success for Customer Success

DataTNG
Data is awesome. Scientists have known this for a while now, but now we have Big Data, which some are going so far as to call a “Natural Resource” – watching a site like Growth Hackers only confirms that we are more interested in our data, and what it can tell us, than ever before.

This is a cautionary post. I love Google Analytics. I take great pride in being a part of a data-informed company, and I think solid data analysis and the drawing of insights from that analysis has a place in any modern business.

That part we can all agree on. That part is easy.

 

What I want to distinguish here is the difference between your success as a company, and the success of your customer. It is harder to focus on customer success when your data provides actionable insight that could trade their success for yours. I don’t mean to preach to you which one you should prefer: I’m a pragmatist, I can appreciate that sometimes to keep the doors open you have to make compromises. I’d encourage you to be honest with yourself, and simply recognize when you’re acting for your customer, and when you’re acting for yourself.

Maybe some examples would help illustrate what I mean.

  • Pop-up ads were gone for a while – remember? But now they’re back. Visually disruptive ad campaigns are the easiest example in this category. They may lead to more clicks, to additional ad revenue, but they are clearly not leading your customers to success. They are on your site to engage with your content and your products – obscuring those things with an external (or internal!) ad is putting your success ahead of theirs, plainly.
  • Opt-out or cancellation buttons and screens that include passive aggressive or semi-threatening language are becoming popular – “I don’t want to maximize my income.” “Leaving now may leave you at risk!” – these are, again, plainly putting a win for the company ahead of a win for the customer. You may minimize loss, but you’re not only putting aside hospitality, you’re being a bit of a bully. url
  • A/B Testing is a huge part of growth engineering and data collection. A button placed differently, a header image removed or altered, testing adjustments to see what converts, what leads to more traffic. Try to construct your A/B tests with customer success in mind. Their success is not usually tied as closely to conversions and page views – I can’t tell you what their success looks like, but they sure can!
  • When defining your Goals in a tool like Google Analytics, the same sort of thinking applies: yes, knowing the path your customers take to the final purchase confirmation page is important, but it is also worth considering the (much larger) group that does not convert. Identifying where they drop off, and using a tool like Qualaroo to find out why they leave, would help focus on their success.

Keep collecting data. Keep drawing actionable insights from it, but remember: the data doesn’t tell the whole story. Additional conversions, decreasing customer churn, these may look great on a quarterly spreadsheet, but you need to dig deeper to see if they are really giving your customers the best experience they can have.