The ZURBlog is where we discuss interaction design and strategy.

We had an amazing event last Friday with a great turnout, delicious food, and an animated discussion with Dave Sifry. Dave spoke at ZURBsoapbox about the lessons he learned from founding Technorati and starting OffBeat Guides. He shared some truly great points about building great products and growing start-ups. You can find a copy of the full podcast below.

The crowd at ZURBsoapbox focused in on Dave Sifry.

Use data, not your own ego

Technorati was an ego project for Dave. As both the product manager and customer for Technorati, he decided to build the site as something cool to satisfy his own needs. He would think of features to add and the team would run with the ideas he proposed.

There were no analytics or any data measurements of how these features were converting customers. Dave used a loose measurement of how many people were writing him emails about the new feature or how many people were talking about it on the internet.

Technorati lacked the discipline of evaluating if new feature ideas would help them achieve their conversion goals or simply satisfy the person who came up with the feature.

"It's not about what Dave thinks should be added to the product, it's about what the data says about the feature. "

Jeremy and Mark getting excited before John starts talking.

Understand your
business model

Technorati was founded by Dave in order to build something cool. It was a search engine so the natural way to monetize it was ad revenue. The team found that people using Technorati to search were looking for blog ranking, compared to people who searched on Google for information on a wide variety of topics and products. As a result ads did not work very well on Technorati.

The first step, Dave says, is to figure out your business model and sell your services around it. Then you set a conversion goal and test the conversions to see how well you're performing.

If you're planning beyond 6 months, you're just guessing

Investors love five year plans, Dave says, but the reality is that if you're planning feature functionality one year out you're wasting your time. Ideal time for planning features is 3-6 months. Going further that 6 months you become inflexible to changes in the marketplace.

A product is like a pregnancy; no matter how many people
you throw at it, it still takes 9 months.

A smaller team, Dave says, is always better for a young product. It's easy to throw people and resources at issues which arise. The key to a successful product is to find as few people as possible to deliver the product. Adding more people to a project just slows down the product. A talent pool ratio of three designers/coders to one business person is the best makeup for a start -up team.

Be of service

After Technorati closed their funding Dave had one question facing him: If Technorati succeeds what would I be most happy to see from the business? The answer which he had was: Be of service. Dave mentioned that all of us want to be of service to something more than just ourselves. All of us want to change the world. The job of a business, he says, is to make money, but if you're making money and being of service to the world you know you're on the right track. Hence, before any new feature is added in Technorati or OffBeat Guides the same question is always asked: Are we being of service to our customers?

Measure your virality

Viral is a strategy you can understand if you can measure it. The key is to make your customers into product evangelists. To move your customers from sub critical mass to critical mass you need to measure your virality.

"If I put out a tweet, how many people will retweet this information? How many people will pass on the message you give them? If your coefficient of virality is 1.0 then you're growing fast. If it is 2.0 you're growing insanely fast."

There are tools to measure all these things, the trick is to make sure you have a good handle on these metrics.

More Info

Nearly a year ago, we told you captchas had seemed to become a necessary evil for websites. Between the spam and the abuse, web forms just aren't secure, and it felt like the only way to combat it was with those nasty captchas.

Captchas have always felt like a cop-out. As a business, you're passing your own business problem onto users. Moreover, the way in which the problem is passed onto users is half-assed and can cause loads of confusion.

Fundamentally, that's just wrong.

About the Study

I hate to say I told you so—wait, no I don't—but, according to a recent study by SEOmoz, captchas could be costing you conversions. Here's how their case study broke down:

1. It was performed across 50 websites, each ranging from one to five years old.
2. The study was done over six months, splitting it evenly with captchas on for three and off for the other three.
3. Each form was used to collect common contact information (name, address, etc).
4. Every successful, failed, and spam form submission was recorded and tallied for the numbers you see in the study.

The Results Are In

The results, shown in the graph below, weren't that shocking to us considering we've all been in the same position with captchas before and had at least one failed attempt in our lifetimes. See for yourself.

Results of three months of testing with captchas on across fifty sites.

In the graph, blue shows successful conversions, green indicates a failed submission, and red shows spam submissions. At first glance, the results are striking, but note the scale and the y-axis—we start at 600.

Still, we're looking at 7.3% lost opportunity because of a single element on your page. And while some spam got through without the captcha, we can't help but wonder if a powerful spam filter like Akismet could help decrease those occurrences. We use it on our own blog here and have had wild success with it.

It's worth noting that in a similar situation, a single change to a web form button brought in an additional $300,000,000. What's this mean for us and captchas? Well, in other words, that 7.3% of failed conversions could be costing you thousands of lost conversions and who knows how much lost revenue.

So, What Now?

We had plenty of feedback in the comments of our last post. The consensus has been that we have captchas, and they keep out the spam, but they are really a pain for users and not the best solution—but what else do we have?

The best solutions so far has been using what's called a "honeypot," a form field hidden to users like you and I, but visible to the typical spam bot. They're called honeypots because, like bees to honey, spam bots flock to any form field. There are numerous variations out there, and the premise seems quite sound. But can we count on this holding up in the future?

Not likely. We're sad to say that spam is inevitably here to stay. However, designers, developers, and businesses can make huge differences by solving this problem in better ways that don't create bad experiences for users. The business reasons alone should make such solutions even more appealling.

Our suggestion? Take notice, don't (mis)place problems on your visitors, and don't forget to use design to creatively and effectively solve your business problems.

If your product is a representation of your company, then your UI (user interface) is a reflection of how your business is run.

Building Great Product

Yesterday our post on mission statements took us to a conceptual level higher than ZURB's sweet spot of building great products. We're not a business consulting firm, but defining a "mission statement" is important for communicating the strategic goals in order to build a solid product.

Over the last couple years we've been tweaking our design strategy framework to help businesses build better products. Its been a great tool for keeping things focused, but it's also difficult for many people to immediately understand how it solves product development problems. Let's explore this concept further from an organizational perspective.

Drawing a Picture of the Problem

A few weeks ago Luke Wroblewski gave a ZURB Soapbox lecture on product excellence. A key concept of his talk emphasized that great product development happens from the "outside in." To summarize, great products happen when companies observe and use customer insights to drive product innovation. Most people would agree that this concept makes sense—so why do companies struggle to use customer insights?

Below is a quick sketch diagram to visualize where product development breaks down in a company. We'll state up front that these ideas are broad; there is a myriad of potential problems every company faces when building products. The key takeaway from this post is that a company's product UI can highlight where the business is having organizational issues.

This product development diagram highlights the conversations (arrows) that different business units have within a company. The customers reside on the outside of the circle and the UI is in the inner circle surrounded by business unit conversations.

Two Key Issues in Product Development

In many businesses the interaction between the engineering, marketing, and business teams are unstable or one group's voice is too dominant. Take Google for example. The engineering teams have a dominant voice in the conversation. It's an engineering strategy they've implemented to be data driven—which for free products is fine, but as margins and revenue in specific product categories become more important, then the voice of marketing and business teams must play a larger role to improve the products. In most of their products, the UI lacks refinement and user satisfaction.

Another big challenge businesses face is translating the conversations they are having with customers into meaningful action items to improve product development. Customers have an uncanny ability to give companies a healthy mix of horrible and good ideas (to no fault of their own). This balance is typically weighted in the "horrible" category, but a company with a strong vision will be able to laser in on "good feedback." The opportunity lies in translating and conveying those ideas to the product development team.

What These Problems Expose

In most of our consulting engagements, companies ask us to fix their UI. On a surface level, it's very easy for us to make quick fixes that have a huge impact on a business. Many immediate interface problems are universal and not necessarily tied to the business. However, the challenge most businesses face is iterating on our feedback. The reason? Companies struggle to support continual development because its business units (which may even be just a couple of people!) can't work together to nail opportunities. They get stuck.

Improving your product starts by looking at the interface (UI) and determining what parts are broken in your organization. This will help your company look at your product "outside in."

One of the toughest business problems start-ups have is agreeing to a common goal. In corporate circles we often summarize this exercise as "creating a mission statement". The exercise is meant to provide guidance for employees to empower them to make better decisions for the company.

Don't Let the Wrong Event Sour You on the Mission

The intent is good, but the "mission event" is often stimulated by the loss of a key employee, lack of product focus or a general dissatisfaction with the company. In the end, it's a reaction to something the business should have been doing all along. Most of us have encountered dealing with a corporate mission that doesn't resonate with anyone in the company. And confusion and disenchantment are usually the end result. Remember, your goal is to empower employees to do kick-butt work.

So is a Mission Statement Bad?

No, definitely not. It's critical for success. But it's got to gel with the people in your company before it will ever help you broadcast the right message to customers. Big, long-winded statements that project self-importance or imply market dominance rarely help a company achieve their goals. Left undefined, mission statements can create more chaos than guidance.

Mission statements have to be achievable. They also have to be actionable and embraced by the company culture. Which gets us to our next item: what the heck does "mission statement" mean?

What a Mission Statement Really Is

At some point in your professional life you've probably come across a vision statement, purpose statement, mission statement, mantra or positioning statement. If you're like us, these terms seem a little disconnected from day-to-day business. Most mission statements we've read are not good. Heck, when you see poor results of companies like GM, you wonder what the point of their mission statement is:

G.M. is a multinational corporation engaged in socially responsible operations, worldwide. It is dedicated to provide products and services of such quality that our customers will receive superior value while our employees and business partners will share in our success and our stock-holders will receive a sustained superior return on their investment.

Doesn't GM make cars?!

Let's Make This Real

Because these business "statements" seem vague, we thought it would be helpful to break down the concepts into easy to understand definitions. If employees can't understand the concepts, what's the point of the statements?

Using ZURB as an Example

To make the exercise more valuable we took a stab at outlining ZURB's mission. Below you'll find a concrete example of how ZURB looks at it's business. You could call this a draft, but it should be a working document that is updated as our business grows or changes.

Creating a Metaphor

Lists and definitions are helpful, but they rarely create excitement about ideas. We decided to take these ideas a step further by creating a visual brainstorm of the concepts. After some exploration we used the metaphor of a soapbox car to help us tell a story through each statement. When you map out the terms, you'll see how each one plays off the other.

A close-up shot of the mission statement brainstorm. In this detail we explore the concept of a soapbox metaphor.

After a few passes of telling the story to guys in the office, the flow seemed to resonate even more. Here is a capture of the entire board.

A whiteboard capture of a mission statement brainstorm session. Click on the image to see a full size image.

A Winning Mission Statement

The process of creating a mission statement can seem daunting and a bit prickly if you focus on everything except just getting the ideas down. Getting your team to buy into the mission statement requires some simple language, understanding of the tool, a grounded view of your business and a little bit of politicking. But we bet the need for extensive persuasion disappears when you get people excited about the real company goal. People will rally!

In a recent conversation with a client, we made the suggestion that the company should remove the chairs in the conference room. The suggestion got a little bit of a chuckle, but the reality is that chairs in a group discussion rarely help the team get stuff done. Removing chairs isn't a solution to the meeting problem, but it's a fantastic tactic to improve the quality of most meetings.

Seth Godin has a nice blog post on fixing the meeting problem. Seth takes a broader view of the problem, but ZURB would agree on most of his points. Removing chairs happens to be number four on his list.

So why do standing meetings work?

1. The first obvious reason is that people don't like to stand for long periods of time, so it creates a sense of "moving on to the next thing."
2. Standing gets more blood flowing and this activity encourages participation.
3. Long meetings standing up are tiring, so people will tend to keep them short and productive.
4. Standing encourages people to do something other than talk. Whiteboards become a new opportunity to drive the meeting.

Just to prove the chair point, here is a great example of standing "meetings" from ZURBwired last week. If you watch this time lapse video over the second part of the 24 hours (10PM-8AM), you'll notice there were many standing scrums. There's a great one around 1:30am where a flurry of activity around whiteboards is followed up by individual efforts and smaller scrums (keep in mind this was only one big room- there were other breakout rooms where more projects were being worked on).

If your company has a problem with meetings, start removing chairs. Get your team invested in getting projects done. Tell everyone to please stand up.