Monthly Archives: September 2007

#7: Hire people smarter than you

When we recruit new staff we encourage managers to hire people who are smarter than they are, with more energy and better ideas.

If this sounds strange, consider the alternative.

We value energy, optimism, flexibility, positivity, creativity, and humour.

We especially like people who are discontent, and who are prepared to take the initiative and fix the things that they think could be done better.

Just about everybody working in a senior role at Trade Me has done their time in the trenches. This isn’t an accident. We encourage people to hire their replacements.

Great people earn the respect of their co-workers through their efforts rather than by their position in the org chart.

Related posts:

Other posts from the Trade Me Manifesto series:

#6: Talk straight

We can’t hide.

When we make changes to the site they are immediately visible.

When it is offline for any reason, people notice. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is.

When we change our pricing or add and remove features this affects users, so it’s fair to expect they will have an opinion.

We should expect to defend and justify every decision and action in public – in the newspapers, on the television, on the radio and on the messageboards.

We should expect anything we write in an email or say on the phone to be published.

But, this doesn’t mean we should be quiet.

We like “The Cluetrain Manifesto”.

We choose to be part of the conversation.

However, we don’t feel we have to smother every discussion with our 2c worth.

We much prefer that people criticise us directly than do it behind our backs (where we may not hear).

When we’re talking to customers we shouldn’t pretend that the website is better than it is. We should take the opportunity to understand what we could do better (see #4: Empathise).

We believe that openness and honesty creates a culture of trust.

We can’t hide, so we shouldn’t try.

Related posts:

Other posts from the Trade Me Manifesto series:

#5: Make people feel safe

Without the trust of the community, we wouldn’t have a business.

As Sam says: “Trade Me involves people sending money to sellers they have never met for goods they’ve never seen.”

When you put it like that it’s hard to understand how Trade Me works at all.

We hate to hear about people being ripped-off.

We do everything we can to make Trade Me safe for everybody.

We have found that the vast majority of people are good and can be trusted to do the right thing where we make this easy for them.

We have no place or sympathy for the small minority who can’t and won’t.

We employ a full-time Trust & Safety team who take great pleasure in tracking down these people.

We engage the help of everybody using the site via the ‘Community Watch’ scheme.

We work with a number of external agencies to make sure that we are informed as soon as possible when something looks dodgy.

People are sometimes surprised to discover that people have been sent to prison and even deported as a result of these efforts.

As the audience has grown our responsibilities have become even broader. For example, our ‘Safe Computing Centre’ contains lots of useful information about keeping computers protected from viruses and spyware and how to spot fake (phishing) emails.

It’s easy to forget that many people are not aware of these risks.

We know there is always more we can and should do to make people feel confident about using Trade Me.

Related posts:

Other posts from the Trade Me Manifesto series:

#4: Empathise

We spend a lot of time attempting to understand what people are trying to achieve when they visit Trade Me.

We go out of our way to spend time with users.

We organise events where sellers can get together and share tips with each other.

We invite people in to see what we’re working on. We ask them what they like and what they don’t like and why.

We keep an eye on the message board to see what people are saying (see #6: Talk straight).

We ask people if we can spend time with them and watch them use the site.

Whenever we do this we always learn a lot!

Another even more effective way for us to understand people is to track what they actually do (see #9: Measure everything).

We understand that we are only successful when we solve a problem.

We love Steve Krug’s book “Don’t make me think”.

We focus on the things we should build rather than the things we can build (after all functionality is an f-word).

Our #1 job is to get out of the way!

We try to be obvious.

A big part of this is using conventions that people already understand:

  • Our logo is in the top-left and links back to the home page
  • We use lots of tabs to represent navigation options
  • Links are blue, underlined and contextual
  • Buttons look clickable
  • We are careful not to break the back button
  • Etc, etc

We use big fonts because they are easier to read and they force us to use fewer words.

We try to keep unnecessary noise to a minimum. For example, there are no banner ads on the sidebar on the login page.

When we plan new features we just try to do what people expect us to do.

Related posts:

Other posts from the Trade Me Manifesto series:

#3: Let the server run the business

About 450,000 people visit Trade Me every day. *

During a month they collectively view over 1.1 billion page views (that’s around 434 every second on average and many more than this at peak times!) *

This represents over 70% of all domestic web traffic in New Zealand. *

Despite these impressive numbers we don’t have many of the things normally associated with a big business.

We don’t have stores or warehouses full of stock.

We don’t have an expensive sales force.

We don’t have a big marketing budget (see #1: Create great websites and people will tell their friends).

We have chosen businesses that scale and grow like only internet businesses can.

We prefer to let people participate.

All of the content you see on Trade Me is created by our users.

This scale is only possible because 99%+ of our customers interact directly with our servers and not with us.

However, this is not to say we’re not available to help.

We reply to thousands of emails and hundreds of phone calls from customers every week. We’re proud of the quality of service we provide to these customers, but we’re also proud of the fact that most of our customers are able to do what they want to do on Trade Me without having to deal with us at all.

If only the same was true of other businesses: “your call is important to us …”.

* Traffic stats in this post from Neilsen NetRatings for August 2007.

Related posts:

Other posts from the Trade Me Manifesto series:

#2: Be like electricity

A great website needs to be like electricity:

  • Always on
  • Fast
  • Obvious

We invest in people and infrastructure to ensure that the site is always available and as fast as we can make it.

It can always be faster.

Every time we find a way to make the site faster we see a corresponding increase in usage. This suggests there is latent demand. In other words, people would use Trade Me more if it was faster still.

We realise that many of our users have very slow internet connections, small monitors and old browsers. Creating a site that is usable even for these people is a major driver of loyalty.

We like Peter Blake’s mantra: “Does it make the boat go faster?”

We’re not scared to remove functionality from the website where it’s just getting in the way.

We realise keeping things lightweight and simple often doesn’t come naturally, so we try to bake this into our processes.

While complex technical solutions are often more interesting they are also generally much more difficult to get right. We prefer to not take this risk. We try to keep things simple and clean up as we go.

We agonise over seemingly small details to ensure that the site is easy to use (see #4: Empathise).

As Albert Einstein said: “Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler”

Related posts:

Other posts from the Trade Me Manifesto series:

#1: Create great websites and people will tell their friends

How did Trade Me get to be so big?

One user at a time!

Everybody using Trade Me today was introduced by an existing user.

We believe there is nothing as powerful as word-of-mouth.

Competitors have spent a large amount of money on advertising campaigns trying to accelerate their growth. Many of them are no longer in business. None have achieved anywhere near the same rate of growth as we have by spending more-or-less nothing on marketing.

We prefer to spend our money on creating better websites.

With this approach it’s important we’re patient. It takes time for word to spread. As Rachel Hunter said, “It won’t happen overnight but it will happen.”

There’s also a flip side to this to be careful of: people tell their friends when you piss them off. We try not to do that!

For example, people don’t like pop-ups or animated ads, so we don’t allow them on the site.

Related posts:

Other posts from the Trade Me Manifesto series:

Trade Me Manifesto

What is it about Trade Me that makes it so successful?

Is there a secret formula? And, if so, can we bottle it?

The success of Trade Me is a simple combination:

  • A good idea
  • At the right time
  • And then great execution

The first two are difficult to replicate (but not impossible).

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to focus here on the third part.

I’m calling this the Trade Me Manifesto.

There will be 10 short posts, based loosely on a document written by Sam a while back which was itself based on Google’s Corporate Philosophy (as an aside, this is where their famous ‘Don’t be evil’ motto comes from). And also incorporating a bunch of the material pulled together for various presentations we’ve done about Trade Me over the last few years, starting with my presentation at the first Webstock conference.

These are not trade secrets.

All of the ideas are very sensible and obvious, although not as common as they might be.

A lot of this was written when I was still working at Trade Me, so I say “we” rather than “they”. I figure that the audience who will probably get the most value from this are Trade Me staff, so it seems appropriate to leave that as is. I hope this doesn’t cause any confusion.

Many of these ideas are things I’ve posted about previously, so where appropriate I’ll include links to those posts too.

It’s probably not an exhaustive list, but hopefully you can apply some of these things to the ideas you are working on.

If you want to follow along bookmark this post and I’ll update with links as we go, or subscribe to my RSS feed.

As always, your comments are welcome.

I look forward to hearing what you think.

Enjoy!

Rowan.

The Trade Me Manifesto

Right column navigation

It’s a brave person who challenges design conventions…

“Traditionally navigation on the web either appears on the left or at the top. Right hand navigation has somewhat been frowned upon. However, more recently this trend seems to have been changing with more websites adopting it. I think this is partly due to blogs, which seem to have right hand navigation by default. However, it has always struck me as strange that the convention is towards left. If you think about it there are a lot of good reasons for right hand navigation…

  • It puts the content first visually
  • Your cursor naturally hovers near the scrollbars on the right
  • We are familiar with right hand navigation from tabs in books
  • We know from usability research that whether navigation is on the left or right, it makes no difference in the time it takes to complete a task

Overall I am hugely in favor of right hand navigation and I am glad to see it becoming more popular.”

From: Emerging Design Trends

What do you think? Agree or disagree?

Doing the hard yards

Is it bad form to quote Fake Steve Jobs now that he has been outed?

Either way, here is an interesting quote from his blog:

“Yes, there are smart people at Google. Smarts are about one tenth of what makes a business work. The rest is just shitty stuff like dealing with customers and partners and fixing bugs and reworking code and doing all sorts of lousy grunt work — stuff the little whiz kids don’t want to get their hands dirty on.”

From: Squirrel boy gets his turn in the clown chair

Reconditioned?

I just wrote this …

I was living in the UK during the Rugby World Cup in 2003 when England became the first Northern Hempishpere team to win.

(As an aside, I was also living in Australia in 1999 when the All Blacks got beaten by France in the semis and Australia went on to win. All Blacks fans will be pleased to hear I’m planning on staying in NZ for the next six weeks!)

One of the things that kept me sane in the land of Jonny Wilkinson during those dark days was Inky.

I’ve talked before here about his weekly missives.

Steve, a reader from the US, has pointed out to me that Inky’s updates have dried up since the end of the Tri-Nations.

I find it hard to believe that at the start of the World Cup Inky doesn’t have an opinion to share.

Can anybody help?

If you’re reading Inky, we miss you!

And then, this in my inbox …

He’s back, and he’s reconditioned.

Yay!

Outsource everything

In the spirit of The Four Hour Work Week …

I reckon there is a market for a local business providing really top-notch local executive assistant services – i.e. somebody who you can call to arrange stuff or sort things out, and help with all of the things that you struggle to find time to do: like booking holidays and other travel, making dinner arrangements (including babysitters), dealing with tradespeople when something breaks down, clearing the mail, paying bills on time, reminding you to buy flowers when you should, etc.

What else could be on this list?

I would be happy to pay for something like this. But I wouldn’t use them enough to justify hiring somebody full-time or even part-time. A time-share model would be excellent.

This is not an original idea.

So, does a service like this exist already in New Zealand?

Consumer Unfriendly

Sometimes people don’t know what is good for them.

Here’s an example:

You cannot replace the battery in the iPhone. Because of this Apple have been able to make the iPhone much lighter and thinner than it would be if the design needed to incorporate a removable battery cover and place the battery in a position where it could be easily removed. As Steven Johnson points out, Apple are betting that a smaller phone with fewer moving parts is worth the trade off.

Another one:

You cannot use HTML formatting when describing stuff you are selling on Trade Me. Everybody wants their listing to stand out, so this is commonly requested. However, when everybody can make their listing stand out no one actually stands out – it’s just an arms race. Trade Me prefers a consistent layout where information always appears in the same location. The alternative is eBay, where every listing looks different and typically looks like a bomb just went off with different fonts, multi-coloured text and animated graphics everywhere.

Can you think of others?

Colour Blender

Here is a nice tool to use to create a simple colour palette for a website (courtesy of Rob Howard):

http://colorblender.com/

Simply enter the details of one colour that you like and the tool will suggest a palette of other complimentary colours to use.

Here is another tip: if you have a photograph or logo as part of your site design you can pick out one of the colours from the image to use as the starting colour.

For example, the palette I use on this site is based on RGB 239/227/181, which is one of the colours in the photo in the header.

Enjoy :-)