This is part 4 in a series about what’s going to be on the agenda for 2009. Today, I’m talking about the onslaught of free and it’s implications.
Via Chris Anderson, I find out that Amazon’s hit-list o for 2008 reveals that the best selling MP3 album of 2008 was free. That’s right, free as in lunch.
Licensed under Creative Commons, NiN still made $1.6 million in revenues off it. The revenues were voluntary. Consumers could have downloaded it, legally, from any file sharing source, but many chose to pay anyway, to support the band.
Come July, Chris Anderson’s new book FREE hits the stands. I have no idea whether it’ll be another iconic hit like The Long Tail, or stay niche. I’ve pre-ordered it at any rate and look forward to the read. It’s looking not-so-niche right now, as SvD’s Adam Erlandsson mentions it in an article on the outlook of free (in Swedish, very decent layman reading, btw).
Free if you can dominates our thinking about new ventures online, but it’s likely the pressure to convert will rise considerably during ’09. If free is a budding religion, venture capitalists are the Spanish Inquisition.
Plenty of viable models are based on free. Gmail is free, with ads, and so is Google App unless you want to get rid of the ads, or if you’re a company and like words such as QoS, SSO and Integration in general. Spotify charges nothing if you can live with the ads, but for ~$10 / month you’re ad free. Skype is free for the basics, but more advanced services costs money. The Open Source movement is increasingly looking to a model where individuals get it free, and corporations have to pay, but are given support in return, and it turns out they don’t mind.
It’s likely that ad-driven models are going to be weakened this year as ad-spending drops. Smarter companies will have to go further into Freemium models to be sustainable. And if you haven’t already, read Better-than-free and the see how it can apply to your business.
Here’s what I think is happening; free becomes a token of quality and pay-ahead becomes an indication of crapware. Good luck.
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All posts in my series of predictions for 2009;
This is part 3 in a series of post about what’s going to be on the agenda for 2009. Today, I’m talking about the how the financial turmoil changes the web landscape during the coming year.
The year is starting slow, and it’s going to be anything but white hot. The financial difficulties is going to throw many decent companies into despondency and we’re certainly going to loose some of them. In some cases it’s going to be a much needed weeding out of sub par services, in others it’s going to be a sad loss. Consolidation will be the word, and a lot of invested time is going to change hands.
More notably, is that when people have less money to spend, they’re going to be more picky about where they spend it. It’s anything from big to small – I’ll probably cancel either my Spotify or my Raphsody account. Maybe I’ll stick to one morning newspaper instead of two. Nothing big unless drastic actions are required, but my small stuff is the entire business of some companies.
When I consider the implications of this depression on Interaction Design in products and services, I can’t help but feel positive. Increasingly, it’s going to be the decisive factor when user decides what to let go of. Feeling good about the brand, and having a good user experience is going to be important when the choice suddenly becomes limited. Value for money, or time, transcends content mass or user base in 2009.
Mediocre services and devices are going to fall hard this year. Those who try to be everything for everyone are going to be losers and those who specialize and focus their offerings and interfaces are going to be winners.
Footnote: Om Malik wants to say goodbye to mediocrity, focusing on bad talent and bail-out plans. It’s a nice rant & call to action. I’m all for it.
[...] companies that are in survival mode don’t do anything that would make them go from being mediocre to being great — because they are too busy just surviving.
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All posts in my series of predictions for 2009;
This is the first in a series about what’s going to be on the agenda for 2009. Today, I’m talking about the importance of shipping in e-commerce, and how neglected it is.
Lately, I’ve been murmuring barely audible invectives about the ridiculous state of online shopping in Sweden. Although you can buy most anything, it’s usually faster just to go out and buy it, at least if you live in or near one of the major cities.
When I realize that I need something, I want it right away. I seldom want it next week. This is regardless of whether it’s something important like prescription medicine or a vanity item, like an Uglydoll from Modpop. Most of the time, “right away” is not going to happen because in this wretched country, speedy home delivery isn’t considered essential to business.
A quick review of Swedish online vendors reveals that although many can deliver within 1-3 days, they don’t advertise it. It’s hard to find any retailer that actually uses delivery time as a USP. There are a few notable exceptions, such as my favorite for movies (I do on occasion still buy physical media) Discshop.se – orders made before 16.00 arrive the next day.
If you want same day delivery, you’d better be in the market for flowers, since florists are pretty much the only ones catering to the spontaneous crowd.
Why is this? Studies show that buyers feel that shipping costs in general are “unfair”. Just upping your prices and having free shipping is apparently a winning strategy, because not only are people greedy, they’re stupid too.
Another notable pattern emerges if you read the delivery info on most shopping sites. Vendors aren’t taking responsibility for the last leg of their sale, they’re handing it over to post-monopoly partly-goverment-operated Posten, and seem to take little interest in their product once it leaves their door.
Shipping outside of established routes or practices in Sweden is not cheap. It’s is a low volume market with few operators. We have high VATs and the cost of manual labor is staggering. To add injury to insult, we’re also spread out thin across a tall country. But none of this should stop vendors from providing the option of speedy delivery to the people who are willing to pay for it.
This is what I don’t get: Were in the world is my Same Day Delivery? Where’s my Next Morning Delivery? Apparently, it’s nowhere to be seen. I had lunch with a friend today who works at Bring (she also runs Modpop), and I broached the subject with her. It turns out they have a service that tries to mitigate some of the problems, called MyQuickBox. It’s basically centralized drop-off points where customers can pick up their goods. They offer same day delivery at reasonable costs. It’s a step in the right direction.
My prediction: Vendors that are able to set up a kick-ass logistics operations (with partners of course) and start to
- Offer free delivery in reasonable time
- Offer same day delivery and next day delivery at competitive prices
- Advertise their delivery advantages openly
are going to be the big winners next year.
Here’s why: How many times did you NOT buy something online, just because you didn’t feel like waiting?
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All posts in my series of predictions for 2009;
I’m working on payment patterns for Rebtel, which is quite complex what with their service being available in more than 40 countries. One payment service provider for credit cards is Bibit, and right now their hosted checkout page is used. A minute ago, I was testing the current interaction to find room for improvement (there’s lots of room). I submit the payment form to see what happens. Now I’m privately amused and publicly horrified.
One of the address fields is missing, or contains illegal data
Fail.
Did I accidentally add a scene release screener of Quantum of Solace to one of the fields?
Of course not. Bibit, being a technologically driven company, has left the error feedback in the hands of an overworked programmer, who in his infinite smartness (and being an excellent driver in general) decided that this message was outstanding in its correctness, since it covers many eventualities and uses powerful language. In nerd lingo illegal just means “not the way my code wants it”. Last, but not least, it nicely reflects his internal favorite validation regular expression IllegalDataRe.
Now, I understand what is actually meant, and most other people will too, after a second or two of thinking. But even then there is a problem with the message, because it’s too generic and actually doesn’t tell us what’s wrong.
The big issue here is that Bibit didn’t care. They process millions of payments every day but they’re too lazy to construct their single most important interface in a proper way. The example above is just one of a dozen things wrong with its interaction. It’s not badly designed, it’s not designed at all.
I can’t help but wonder what effect this negligence has on their customers’ bottom line. At any rate, I’m happier now than I was a minute ago because at least I got to rant and have a laugh about it :). What’s your favorite bad checkout or input validation?
When you ask visitors to surrender their e-mail addresses to you, make your case well or you’ll end up with too many duds. You should always provide a clear and immediate benefit to your visitor as to why you need this. If the real answer is “We need it for CRM reasons”, you shouldn’t be asking at all.
Reasons your visitors are less likely object to
- It’s your login name
- We need it if you forget your password
- We need it notify you when other users interact with you
- We need it to send you a receipt of your payment
Of these, the first three allows you to ask for an e-mail address early in your relationship, whilst the fourth is on a need to know basis.
Two Damme Tough
When it comes to validation, it’s far from uncommon to add double fields for e-mail input. The idea is to reduce the risk for typos as visitors type their e-mail address twice, and it probably will catch one or two typos. Now take a moment to consider the other aspects of this pattern.
- Some users will type their e-mail once and then copy & paste it into the second field.
- Autocomplete may have been corrupted with a bad address and will Autofail with misspelled address in both fields (this is usually a transient problem but also the cause for much chagrin until diagnosed).
- Some Users simply have their e-mail address wrong in their heads.
- It’s One More Field to be completed before the visitor can move on to what they’re actually after. One more obstacle on the path to instant gratification.
How to validate properly
First of all; Make sure your developers are happy and rested. Secondly, Don’t let anyone waste their time on defining the perfect e-mail validation regular expression – according to RFC 2822, almost anything is a valid address. Read this post if you’re curious for more.
Instead, do this;
Validate the domain part of the e-mail address by making sure there are MX records configured for the domain. This won’t ensure the validity of the recipient, but chances improve drastically. You can take it even further, and basically query the actual mail server if will accept an e-mail for a specific alias. There are several companies that offer this as a service.
Challenge-response confirmation
This is very common, especially when using e-mail addresses as usernames. You send an e-mail, and the user confirms their control of said address by clicking the link in the e-mail or copy-pasting the unique token into a form on your website.
The pattern sometimes fails and common culprits include spam-filters and network congestion. Challege-response confirmation is relatively onerous to your users and requires patience from both parties. Again, there should be a clear reason and obvious benefit to the user for this to be viable.
Feedback confirmation
Sooner or later, collected addresses are going to be used. The feedback from this should be taken into account. A bounce could void previous positive confirmation and the user will be asked to revalidate, or the address simply marked. LinkedIn does this well in theory; If an e-mail sent to my primary address bounces, they’ll e-mail all my secondary ones telling me about it and also asking me to revalidate. In practice however, it’s not very cool – they’ve asked me to revalidate approximately twice every month for some time now, and I’m quite sure my address has been operational throughout.
If you’re going to take one thing away from this post
You can ask for and collect virtually any information, as long as you provide a clear reason and obvious benefit for the user.
Jag jobbar med användbarhet, ofta som konsult. Jag är också en av grundarna till Underskrift.se där alla kan underteckna dokument elektroniskt. På fritiden gillar jag att springa riktigt, riktigt långt.
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