Monthly Archives: May 2007

The elevator test

I think this is a nice way to collect your thoughts about a new idea.

If you can’t explain it clearly using this model then the idea probably needs to be simplified.

Just fill in the blanks …

For [target customer]
Who [statement of the need or opportunity]
The [product name] is a [product category]
That [key benefit, compelling reason to buy]
Unlike [primary competitive alternative]
Our product [statement of primary differentiation]

So, have a go.

Let’s hear how you describe what you’re currently working on.

Designing for blind users

In the comments to my recent post about XHTML Scott Mayo asks an interesting question:

“How many complaints you have had about the usability of your website by blind, site impaired or other-wise impaired users. Surely as NZ’s site with the broadest coverage you would have a lot of exposure to such feedback?”

I have to admit that I haven’t had any direct feedback, or any first-hand experience using Trade Me with a screen reader.

I’d be interested to hear from anybody who does.

At TechEd last year we used Trade Me in a demo of the speech recognition features built into Windows Vista, and it worked great.

Amongst all of the other things to consider when creating a new site or page, it can sometimes be hard to get excited about accessibility.

But don’t forget that the single most important visitor to your site is effectively blind (a.k.a GoogleBot).

Design for accessibility and you’ll often get search engine optimisation for no additional charge!

Make it work, then make it look good

Here is a simple rule: if you’re building a web site make sure it:

(1) works; and

(2) looks good.

The order here is important.

What does it profit someone to have a site which looks like a million dollars but which doesn’t actually work?

Here is my theory: the better a given web site looks the less likely it is to actually work.

A recent example …

Both Rod and Nic have raved about their Blackbox M-14 headphones, made by NZ company Phitek.

I figured I’d get me some of that noise canceling goodness.

(and, in case you’re reading this Larissa, this purchase decision was not influenced by sitting beside you this week! ;-)

I had an uneasy feeling from the moment I hit their home page. The main navigation links unfurl onto the page in a very pretty (but otherwise pointless) Flash animation.

The real fun started when I got to the check-out.

There are pretty well understood conventions now for how an online check-out should work. Don’t make me think.

Instead, here is the Blackbox check-out page:

Blackbox Check-out

So, I select the product I want and click the “Go To Payments Page” button.

An error message is displayed: “Please check your personal details”.

Eh?

It turns out that all three steps are contained on one page – with the second and third steps hidden in collapsed sections at the bottom of the form. To get to the second step I need to click on the “Review Purchase Summary” bar, although there is nothing to indicate that it’s a link. It doesn’t look clickable, and the mouse cursor doesn’t even change to a hand when I hover over it.

Then, having made it through the form I get this:

Blackbox Check-out Payment Page Re-direct

Unfortunately, the re-direct doesn’t work. And there is no obvious way to click-thru manually. I can’t get to the page where I enter my credit card details.

The net result: I haven’t purchased the headphones and my confidence in their brand is dented.

I wonder how many sales they miss because of a website which looks great but which doesn’t work?

An idea

Here is an idea that has been bubbling in the back of my mind for a while.

I don’t have the time at the moment to make it a reality, but if there is a smart developer or two out there looking for a project give me a shout.

The problem

It is very difficult to ensure that all of the page in a large and dynamic web sites contain valid HTML, especially as changes are made to those pages over time.

Why?

There are a few reasons:

  • It is very time consuming to manually validate a large number of HTML pages. And it’s hard to make the case for spending extra testing time on this.
  • Dynamic pages change (duh!) so it is difficult to validate all of the different permutations.
  • Pages that require users to post information in a form or login cannot be easily accessed by an automated test script, so are often not validated at all.

The solution

While developing and testing a site, or even just while browsing, we typically visit a large number of different pages.

The proposed tool will run in the background while we use the website and capture the details of each HTTP request and corresponding response. The HTML that is returned can then be validated asynchronously by the tool.

At the end of the browsing session (or even during, if required) the tool will provide a list of the pages that have been visited and a count of the number of warnings or errors contained on each. The user will be able to drill into the details of any page to investigate the cause of the warnings or errors.

This would allow developers and testers to quickly and easily validate a large number of pages, including those that require users to post form information and login, without any extra work over and above what they are already doing.

Required Components

1. A program that runs in the background collecting details of each HTTP request and HTML response

Perhaps this would be a Firefox extension? Or, a Windows application that hosts IE in a sub-window?

The user interface should be very simple (e.g. start/stop button, plus perhaps an indicator of the page count and/or total warnings/errors or a summary of the previous request a la the Firefox HTML Validator add-on (btw, does anybody know of an equivalent add-on which works on a Mac?)

2. An XHTML Validator

This would ideally give equivalent results to the W3C validation tool, which will require an SGML parser (but if this is too painful it could just implement HTML Tidy-like validation for starters)

This could also be extended in the future to validate CSS, JavaScript, and also run standard accessibility tests.

3. Result viewer

A simple web interface, with two views would do the trick:

  • List view
    • Identify each page by URL and/or HTML title
    • Identify pages which contain errors (perhaps using simple green, orange and red light icons)
  • Details view
    • Lists all warnings/errors for the selected page (with HTML snippits)
    • View full HTTP request and response details

Extra for experts

It would be nice to allow the user to compare results for a given page to the results from previous sessions, so that trends can be identified.

Comments welcome

What do you think?

Would something like this be useful?

Does something like this already exist?

If you have any thoughts or suggestions comment away. :-)

What’s next?

Now that the formalities are out of the way I can say a bit more about what I’m going to do next.

I start a new part-time role next week with Rod and the team at Xero.

I will be head of product strategy. Rod posted earlier today about how they (we!) are dealing with prioritisation and product development, which explains quite nicely where this role fits into the bigger picture.

I’m excited about this new challenge. It’s an excellent opportunity for me to apply what I’ve learnt at Trade Me to a global product.

Rod has put together an amazing team and I’m going to enjoy being part of it.

I’m also looking forward to having time to get involved in some other ventures either as an advisor or investor. I’ve been pretty quiet in this respect up until now, but I have my eyes open.

Because Xero is in the middle of the IPO process I can’t say too much more than that at this point, but needless to say I will be posting more here in the coming weeks.

So, stay tuned.

Playing with plugs

With young kids in our house every plug point is covered by one of these:

Image courtesy of Trade Me seller chris2111.

Our oldest has been taught not to touch.

Today he was asked ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’.

The immediate response: ‘Play with plugs’

Classic! :-)

Less is more

Set Godin has a great post today.

Here is a taste:

“As long as there’s wiggle room, our desire for more will trump peer pressure to do less. ‘Fight global warming’ is a fine slogan, except it’s meaningless. That’s like dieters everywhere shouting, ‘eat less’ while they stand in line to get bleu cheese dressing from the salad bar.

As a marketer, my best advice is this: let’s figure out how to turn this into a battle to do more, not less. Example one: require all new cars to have, right next to the speedometer, a mileage meter. And put the same number on an LCD display on the rear bumper. Once there’s an arms race to see who can have the highest number, we’re on the right track.”

Go read the whole post.

Then, think: how are you encouraging your customers to do what you’d like them to do?

Moving on

Today is my last day at Trade Me.

In 2000 I was the first person hired who didn’t share a surname with Sam.

After a crazy 18 months I left to go and live and work in London for a bit. In that first stint I’d seen Trade Me grow from 10,000 members to 100,000. Shortly after that Sam and Jess left too. Whether Trade Me would make it was an open question.

Times have changed!

Nonetheless, I have mixed feelings about leaving for a second time.

You sometimes don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. It’s a great crew here and a working environment that I haven’t experienced anywhere else. It’s been an honour and a privilege to be part of it.

On the other hand I’m really excited about the challenges which are ahead.

I’ll talk more about those here in the next few weeks.

Stay tuned …

The NetGuide Awards & XHTML

Pete has posted his annual review of NetGuide nominated sites.

Interesting reading!

I notice Russell is claiming bragging rights for having the only site which is fully HTML and CSS-compliant.

I was a bit disappointed to read this comment though:

“One thing I did notice is the number of sites now using XHTML, but still using tables for layout. I’m looking at you Trade Me. It seems so frustratingly stupid, why go to all the trouble of moving to XHTML and not use it semantically?”

From: Validation the 2007 NetGuide Awards

This time 12 months ago Trade Me didn’t even have a DOCTYPE.

That was embarrassing!

Moving to XHTML (as part of the migration to .NET) was a big job and shouldn’t be underestimated. We’ve removed a massive amount of non-semantic mark-up as part of that process. But we’ve also been pragmatic about it. Where it was significantly easier to use HTML tables for layout we’ve used them. The net result is that our pages are now mostly valid and much smaller than they used to be, but still with a lot of room for improvement.

There are a lot of people who are very passionate about web standards. That’s a good thing. But sometimes I think they approach their evangelism with a little too much vigour.

Give people some credit for the improvements they make.

Remember that they are often hard won.

Don’t confuse better for best.

P.S. It was a good night at the NetGuide awards for Trade Me. We picked up the award for ‘Best Trading Site‘ as well as ‘Best Motoring Site‘ and ‘Best Real Estate Site‘. Full credit to everybody who has contributed to those successes and thanks too to everybody who voted. And congratulations to SmileCity for picking up the ‘Site of the Year’ award. :-)

A conversation about an API

There has been a lot of interesting discussion around my posts last week about the new Vista sidebar gadget and XML feed and follow-up about why Trade Me doesn’t have an API.

Thanks to everybody who has contributed. Be assured that your comments have been widely read here at Trade Me.

If you didn’t already feel free to add your 10c worth.

A couple of things that are worth following up …

Firstly, people have been busy building wadgets of various persuasions and I promised to provide some links:

I’d be interested to hear from anybody who is using any of these? Are you finding them useful?

There are a few others I’m aware of which are still “under development”, including an OS X widget which Ben and the guys at DNA are throwing together. I’ll post more links here as they come to my attention.

If you’d like to build something but need some inspiration, check out the recently released eBay companion for Firefox. A browser add-on which lets people track their listings in the sidebar of the browser like this would be wicked.

Secondly, a few of the comments I received warrant a response:

“I think it’s a bit rich to say that you don’t want other people to build things you might eventually build yourselves. I’d be more inclined to accept that argument if you were likely to get to new features. And, don’t forget, while you sit worrying about what you *might* do at *some* point in the future, your users don’t have the features.”
– Nat Torkington

Fair point. We’ve been threatening to build our own listing tool for a few years now without much to show for it. In the meantime people behind tools like Auctionitis have got on with actually building something, which has proved to be a much more effective strategy!

“A cynic might say that the real reason you don’t have an API is because you already own the sector.”

– Nat Torkington (again)

Ouch. Nobody is that cynical are they Nat?

It’s true that “want to” and “need to” are two different things. But, I think this comes back to my point about having bigger fish to fry. Whenever we decided to invest time in some new functionality we are, at the same time, deciding to not invest time in something else. For each thing we do there is a long (infinite?) list of things we don’t do.

Of course there is also an argument to say that an API would help to alleviate this by letting others fry the smaller fish we don’t have time for. It’s unlikely, for example, that we would have ever prioritised the various tools that have already been built on top of the XML feed (see above) but some people are obviously finding those useful, which is all good.

“I think that lots of NZ websites are afraid to offer feeds as they believe that this will stop people from visiting the main site. Those that do offer feeds, don’t provide full-text feeds, for that same reason. The idea is that if you offer a partial text feed it will encourage users to click through and visit the main site, but this has been proven to be untrue.”

– Stuart

I agree it would be great if we could provide more RSS feeds. The “My Favourites” page would be the obvious place to start and new listings within the “$1 reserve” page would be a close second.

The reason why this hasn’t been done has nothing to do with wanting to drive additional traffic to our site. We have lots of traffic already. If anything, would probably appreciate taking some heat off our listing servers. RSS feeds, which are smaller than HTML pages and more easily cached would only help with this.

“Any of us could (and some have) easily talk through the issues raised in Rowan’s blog and come up with solutions to the objections regarding versions, support, development time etc etc.

But I believe it falls into the above category because the underlying issue is simply one of trust.

Do they trust us, the people out here, to build things that will increase their value instead of subverting it.

If you’re basically inclined to trust people, then you’re going to be able to invent a million reasons why giving them a means to add value to your business by building their own is going to work.

If you’re basically inclined to distrust people (at least in this context), you will be able to discover a million reasons why it could all go horribly wrong.”

– Richard Clark, in the NZ 2.0 Google Group

I agree with the first part. I’m sure we could find solutions to all of the road blocks I listed.

But, I think it’s a bit unfair to say that reason we haven’t done this yet is because we don’t trust people. Our whole business is built on the premise that most people are trustworthy. Everyday thousands of Trade Me members send money to people they have never met for goods they have never seen. That requires a lot of trust!

“Do you know of any other NZ web companies apart from ZoomIn that are aiming at consumers and have released APIs?”
– Peter Griffin, via email

A good question? I can’t think of any. How about you?

This is something we’ve been talking about internally for a while, so it’s really interesting to get a broader perspective.

Thanks again for being part of the conversation

A long night

This is a nice quote from Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress:

“I smile these days when I see WordPress referred to as an “overnight success,” if only they knew how long an overnight success takes.”

Trade Me is another example.

Founded in 1999 it became an overnight success in 2006. :-)

Little brother syndrome

Is Crowded House an Australian band or a New Zealand band.

It turns out the answer is: wrong question!

This recently from Neil Finn:

“I have never said that Crowded House was an Australian or a New Zealand band. Fact is, we were from both countries, but either way I don’t believe it matters where we we’re from, it’s only the music that counts and you either like it or you don’t. These are trivial matters but I mention them because some in New Zealand spend too much time worrying about Australia. If they take credit for some of our stuff it’s not that big a deal. We should be calmly confident enough not to care. And anyway, they don’t spend any time worrying about us.”

– Neil Finn, NZ Herald 10th May 2007

I like the idea of calm confidence.

But I guess it depends: do you want to be great or be seen to be great?

I’m Torn

Something for a Friday …

In London we lived just around the corner from the Ealing Studios, home of the famous Ealing Comedies from the late 40s and early 50s.

On Friday nights they turned one of the sound stages into a little comedy club, called Ealing Live.

It was a bit all over the show. Some of the people and characters were brilliant, some were just embarrassing. I found this review of one of their shows on Google, and it gives a good flavour.

(unfortunately it looks like this show is now defunct, replaced with something that sounds much more respectable, oh well!)

Anyway, there is a small point to this story …

By far the funniest performance we saw there was a guy whose character was an Austrian interpretive mime artist, Johann Lippowitz. It was really simple, but clever. And hilarious.

Here is a taste.

Then, the other day I was sent this clip from YouTube and realise that from those humble beginnings he has gone on and made it big. Good for him!

From the 2006 Secret Policeman’s Ball for Amnesty International:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L4zOKqhA_0

More here and here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zajDLCsDxeM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zpKrOxoqec (this one might have actually been filmed at Ealing Live?)

He even has his own page on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Armand

Or, perhaps you just had to be there?