Cooking for Nerds, many of which have been popping up online.  I wanted to share one of my favorites with you.

Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon by Jared Spool

Jared Spool is a leader in the User Experience world, specifically in the quantitative research space. He has been working with Amazon.com for many years, analyzing their traffic patterns and trying improve the user experience of Amazon shoppers. His talk had two major points.

1. He pointed out the interesting things that Amazon does with new features and constantly implementing tiny changes to improve the user’s experience.
2. He also discussed that you can’t do the same things as Amazon and expect to be successful.

Why can’t we all just copy Amazon? In one word “traffic.”

Amazon has had 71,431,000 visitors since December of 2008. They have served 76,000,000 customers since they launched. There are 24 orders placed every second. Does your website have those kind of traffic numbers?

Mine either.

The best example Jared uses is user generated reviews. Most people find reviews to be very help when buying online, and the user reviews on Amazon are highly regarded. So why can’t you just add user reviews on you site? Jared cites research that shows having less than 20 reviews about a product does not actually help people decide if a product is what they want. In some cases it actually reduces the positive perception of the item.

He continues to share that only about 1 in 1,300 purchasers actually write a review. Think about how many online reviews you have writen versus how many you have read. So in order to get those 20 reviews to help the sale of an item you will need to have 1.3 Million people buy an item. Whoa.

I encourage you to watch Jared’s presentation (see below). He is very clever and easy to listen to.

I also encourage you to make sure you are always improving your online products in ways that make the most sense for your particular site. Every site is different, it has different users and those users have different needs.   There is no magic bullet feature for success online. The only way to ensure your success is listening to your users, and continually improving the tools they need to complete their tasks.

Once Buzz was released, people were instantly getting real-time updates from their contacts right inside their Gmail. Not long after, the wheels started to come off. Google?s default privacy setting was the main issues being found by users. The default privacy setting was set to broadcast your most frequently emailed contacts, TO THE ENTIRE INTERNET. Initially this was meant to be a feature so that your contacts could connect with your other contacts. Google has made some changes since the launch, but if you are using Buzz and would like to tweak your privacy setting you can find instructions here.

So with that out of the way, lets get to the topic of this post. Google Buzz is now the prototypical example for why you HAVE to test your product with external users before going to market. Google is a very diligent company, and they are notorious for the level of testing they do on all aspect of their business. Google Buzz is no different, except Google never testing Buzz with external users. Many Google employees tested Buzz for months prior to launch, and they never encountered any privacy flaws. The general public found these flaws in a matter of hours! This further reinforces the User Experience mantra of ?you are not your user.? Not even a collection of some of the smartest people in the world were able to find all the flaws in their own product, but Gmail users were able to uncover these privacy flaws in a matter of minutes.

Until Buzz, Google has been able to steer clear of other privacy nightmares on the Internet *cough*Facebook*cough* but this Buzz fiasco is a PR nightmare for Google. The worse part is Google could have set this product out in limited beta, like they did for Google Wave, and these privacy issues would have been identified, fixed, and the public launch would have gone swimmingly.

So next time you think that your product will be just fine without doing any user testing before going to market, remember Google Buzz. You?ll thank me.

Simplicity is the key to successful living.

This is a more professional and eloquent rephrasing of the time tested K.I.S.S. method:

No, not that KISS -

The K.I.S.S. principle – ?Keep It Simple, Stupid.?

These are both modern interpretations of Occam?s Razor, which states ?entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,? or more generally, ?the simplest strategy tends to be the best one.?

So why am I telling you this? Why am I dragging a 14th Century philosopher, Ace Frehley, and a newly deceased Scotsman onto a blog? Because in our fast-paced, high-tech, always-on society, we forget about trying to solve problems with simple solutions. Too often everyone is looking for a new technology or a new way to solve a problem when we can use simpler solutions that require little cost and provide better long-term benefits.

This philosophy speaks to features of products as well. Just because your product has more features does not mean it will meet the needs of your customers. If you don?t feel confident in your understanding of your customers? needs, you have a larger, more fundamental problem than which features to implement. You need to better understand your users, your customers, and yourself. Don?t just treat the symptoms. Keep it simple, and find out what is really going on. And remember -

Simplicity is the key to successful living.

Oh, and also remember that KISS is pretty sweet too!

I was infatuated with my customer service representative? shocking, I know.

Throughout the call she actually listed to what I wanted, and she said things like, ?this is the deal that most of my customers like,? and ?let me talk to the manager to get us a better deal,? and ?I understand your frustration, I don?t know why they do that.? It might not be obvious at first, but she was talking as if she was on my side. I felt like I had a (wo)man on the inside, a mole, a friend who infiltrated deep into the customer service department just waiting for my call to complete our caper.

Simply, she had me at ?us.?

Too often our interactions with customer service representatives are adversarial and filled with negative results. This sales representative seemed to truly care about my situation. She wanted to successfully sign me up for something, and make me feel good about it.  This was no small transaction either. I was moving from my satellite service to ?advanced digital TV.?  She was very helpful in explaining my options and listening to what I told her. Not once during the call was I afraid she was not listening to what I wanted or that she would not respect what I had to say.

The first lesson here is that customer service is about listening to your customers, and trying to provide a (mutually) beneficial solution to a problem. This representative solved my problem with grace, intelligence, and in under a half an hour! If only all customer service representatives were like this, I wouldn?t have switched from Dish Network (whoops!) to AT&T (double whoops!?).

The bigger lesson is that my experience ? my user experience ? with this customer service representative has improved my overall perception of the company. Although I have not yet had any contact with an actual product, my user experience is already positive. Remember, it does not matter how good your product is ? if the experience of getting to that product is bad, people won?t want to even try.

Customers need to complete a task with your product so they can move on to other tasks they need to complete.  All your customers see in your product is a tool to help them accomplish a goal.

In order to make a successful product, you need to understand who uses the product and why they are using it.  You also have to accept that the product is not being created primarily for you.

How to you find out what your customers want?

1. Ask them ? no seriously, it is that easy.
2. Watch customers use your product.  Record any problems they have and what type of information they expect to see in your product.
3. Test out new features, functionally, and design. Customers love giving feedback, and they will have a better user experience in the future because they feel like they helped make the new product better.

Learning what your customers want does not have to be fancy, expensive, or time consuming.

Remember, you are the expert, but your customers aren?t.

Give them what you think they need, and they will go somewhere else.

Give them what they actually need, and they will love you for it.