I’ve had these for a while, and have been meaning to post a pic here:
I love them!
Next time you see me ask me for one of my moo cards.
All of the background pics come from Flickr. It’s always interesting to me to see which design people choose when I let them pick.
:-)
One of the hardest things to get right when you have a new product or service is pricing.
It requires a beautiful mix of art and science. And, even when you think you have it right something changes and it’s probably all wrong again.
I’m no expert. Far from it. But there are a few tips I’ve picked up over the last few years of watching people who are much better at it than me.
1. Experiment
When you stick to one price you only find out about one point on the demand curve. So, don’t be scared to change the price.
There are lots of ways that you can do this. You don’t have to pick just one.
Some examples:
2. Step away from your rational brain
Look around and see that most prices end in a 9. The reason this works is not rational, and can often be difficult for smart technical people to get their heads around, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing
3. Remember “Goldilocks”
You know the fairy tale – the little bear’s porridge is too cold, and the big bear’s porridge is too hot, but the middle bear’s porridge is just right.
Seth Godin calls this “triangulation“.
Think about how you can provide different price points. If you currently have only one price point think about how you can introduce a new variation of your product at a cheaper price, and another (with additional features or benefits) at a higher price. The idea is to use these new options to make your existing price look “just right”, so it doesn’t necessarily matter if not many people actually choose them or not.
Obviously this is not a full list.
What other evil tricks pricing techniques have you seen or used?
If you’re interested in the behavioural economics of pricing I recommend a book called Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. I have a free copy to give away courtesy of Fishpond. To go in the draw just add a comment below – the best pricing suggestion wins.
Related links:
I’ve signed up to receive our power bill via email.
So, I get an email telling me our latest bill is now available online.
Here is the page I’m redirected to.
It’s not the bill.
It’s a landing page full of noise.
See how long it takes you to find the link to the bill.
(click for larger size)
There are actually two links. Neither of them exactly jump out at you.
I never even noticed the link in the top-right until I took this screen shot. This is not especially surprising as this position is so often used for advertising that people will just block it out.
It’s reasonable to assume that the link would be somewhere in the body of the page, but as you scan that area everything which looks vaguely like a link says “Find out more >”. More about what, exactly?
Why don’t they link directly to the bill, I wonder?
Or even better simply include the important information (e.g. total amount owed and due date?) in the email itself and let me avoid this hassle altogether.
Is online billing about making things easier for customers or creating opportunities for the marketing department?
From Wordle, via the Ponoko blog, here is a visualisation of the tags I’ve used in the last 5 months of using del.icio.us:
The latest bookmarked pages are shown on the right hand side of this page (for those of you reading on rowansimpson.com).
If you want to follow me on del.icio.us, my user name is rowan.simpson.
PS: does anybody know of a nice way to sync between starred items in Google Reader and bookmarks in del.icio.us?
As mentioned on The Panel this afternoon …
Art
John Bird and John Fortune on market sentiment, market salaries, structured investment vehicles (a.k.a. dodgy debts) and rewarding greed and stupidity:
Life
US Treasury chief makes case for bailout
“US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has taken his case for an unprecedented US$700 billion bailout of financial markets to the American people, saying it was needed to prevent further damage to an already fragile economy.”
They picked it!
It’s over four years now since we got back from living in the UK and I still miss their show.
How often do you floss?
Honestly!
For me it’s one of those things that I know I should do, but which I don’t actually do nearly as often as I could.
Validating HTML is the same.
We web developers all know we should, but so often don’t.
Why?
Is it because we don’t think standards are important? I know this is true for a small minority, but I don’t think this is the reason for most, because I think smart developers and testers understand how having valid code makes life easier for both them and the people using their sites.
Is it just too hard?
When we were migrating Trade Me to .NET we decided we would take the opportunity to improve the quality of the underlying HTML as we touched each page. The intention was to validate all pages using the free tools provided by the W3C.
But, as we quickly discovered, this is no trivial undertaking.
It’s fine when you’re working with a mostly static page. But, as soon as you’re working with a dynamic data driven page the number of different variations of the page can quickly become overwhelming.
If you have pages which require authentication (either on the server or in the application), or requires a user to post information into a form, it becomes more or less impossible. If the validator can’t reach the page directly you have to save a local copy of the HTML and upload this manually to the validator.
Who has time for that?
Even when you do make the effort the results often confuse more than they help.
Validators are (almost by definition) pedantic, and as a result do a generally poor job of differentiating between things that make a real difference to users and things that, while strictly and correctly identified as errors, are not so critical.
And, there is no easy way to keep track of the errors that exist on a page over time. So, when you’re presented with results it’s difficult to identify those errors which are new or to easily exclude results you’ve seen before.
This is not so bad if you have a page that is normally fully compliant, but a much more common scenario, unfortunately, is working on improving a page that is full of invalid code. In that case it’s a nightmare.
The tools really don’t make it easy.
So, what do we do? Continue on wishing we could be more diligent, but lacking time and tools?
I think we can do better!
A while back I wrote about an idea I had for solving some of these problems.
I was stoked when one of the smartest developers I know put his hand up. Over the last couple of months we’ve been working on turning this idea into a real working tool. And now we have something to show you all…
We’re calling it Wingman.
It’s a Firefox browser plug-in, which automatically sends the exact pages you visit to the server, making it trivial to validate.
And, it’s a website which organises the results, making it easy to identify the errors you’re interested in, and to spot trends so you can fix things as soon as they occur.
Plus, it’s designed to get smarter as more people use it, by aggregating information about what types of errors are commonly ignored across all users.
In time we imagine a system which runs various different types of validation, including potentially hooking into validations services which are hosted outside of Wingman itself. But, for starters, we have implemented a simple HTML validator, based on the service created by validator.nu. CSS and Javascript validation are the next obvious candidates, but we’re really interested to hear your ideas for what other things we could include in this mix – for example, a spell checker, a test for basic SEO rules, or an outbound link checker are three ideas that have been suggested to us already.
Today we’re opening up a free invite-only preview of the service, so we can start to see how people might use a tool like this.
If you’d like to have a play please register on the site. We’ll be sending out the first group of invite codes shortly.
I’ll look forward to hearing what you think!
From: http://www.savagechickens.com/2008/09/deadline.html
One of the dilemmas with building something for yourself, rather than for a third-party, is you are never really forced to commit to a delivery date.
Or, at least, there is nobody else who will be angry with you when you run late.
For those of you in this position: how do you create a false sense of urgency for you or your team?
I’m interested in your ideas.
This series from Bokardo is excellent:
Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them
I especially like #10 from Part III: Failure to see the larger war…
“Techcrunch is not word-of-mouth. Getting Techcrunched or Slashdotted or getting Dugg…is like being involved in a drive-by shooting. I’ve also heard it described as getting seagulled…they swoop in for the attack and are gone in a second.”
Rather than chasing that sort of fleeting glory, he recommends instead building an audience that really cares one user at a time.
You should read the whole thing. It’s full of advice that is much better than anything you’ll find here.
I can’t believe that this isn’t already more common:
“The Green Microgym, which just opened last week, is a 2,800-sq-ft neighbourhood gym that generates a significant portion of its own electricity through the sweat-producing efforts of its members. … The Green Microgym uses a combination of solar and pedal electricity for a chunk of its energy needs.”
– via Springwise
I’ve always thought that they should have monitors on each bike and a display at the front of the RPM classes showing the total amount of work that everybody has done – a kind of leaderboard to spur people on.
Displaying the number of watts generated would take that to a whole new level.
Perhaps gyms could offer discounts to members who were net generators of electricity?
Or, maybe they could make you earn your warm shower, literally?
What do you think?
Yesterday it was announced that Wellington would host two of the quarter-finals in the 2011 Rugby World Cup.
Here is the announcement from the Minister of Sport, Clayton Cosgrove (emphasis mine):
“In terms of hosting major global sporting events, Rugby World Cup (RWC) 2011 is like New Zealand’s ‘Olympics’. It is the third largest sporting event in the world. An event of this scale and significance offers every city and town a rare opportunity to realise a wide range of benefits across the sport and business sectors, as well as the community.”
The third largest? Really?
In the spirit of Wikipedia: citation needed.
Clearly the Olympics and the Football World Cup are #1 and #2. But, it seems to me there are a lot of other more global sports that could claim third position ahead of rugby:
What about the Commonwealth Games? Surely that’s bigger?
What about the Superbowl? Isn’t that the most watched sporting event?
What about the Winter Olympics?
Can you think of any others?
I guess it all depends how you measure it.
This post from the WSJs “number guy” is worth a read:
When It Comes to TV Stats, Viewer Discretion Is Advised
Either way, I’m sure it will be a big weekend in Wellington when the worlds largest sporting event involving teams of 15 people playing with an oval ball comes to town!
:-)
When I was in San Francisco earlier this year I caught up with Ben Goodger, who I first me when he was in Wellington to speak at Webstock. He kindly took some time to show me around Mountain View and we had a nice Mexican lunch at one of his regular hang-outs.
We talked about lots of things, but exactly what he was working on wasn’t one of them.
He said he wasn’t working on Firefox any more. And, I saw that he was running Visual Studio in a VM on his Mac.
But, I didn’t press him beyond that as he was obviously reluctant to say much at that point.
Today we all find out: Google Chrome
Even before it was officially announced there was a lot of buzz about this. There is already a decent Wikipedia page with a good summary of the various features that are included in this initial release.
Here are my thoughts about this:
The rise and rise of WebKit
The number and variety of browsers that web developers need to consider has grown considerably in the last couple of years – IE7 has become the most widely used browser, although there are still plenty of people using IE6, Firefox has been steadily ticking up, and Safari has doubled (albeit from a very low base) probably on the back of people switching to OS X. IE8 is on the horizon. And, now this.
These are the most recent browser stats I have from Trade Me (from July 2008):
| Browser | Market Share |
|---|---|
| IE 7 | 54.2% |
| IE 6 | 23.1% |
| Firefox 2 | 15.6% |
| Safari | 3.3% |
| Firefox 3 | 0.9% |
| All Others | 2.9% |
Those sites that don’t take Safari seriously at its current level may need to re-evaulate on the back of this announcement, as Google Chrome is based on the same WebKit foundation as used by Safari (and the iPhone).
Steve Job’s decision to open-source WebKit in 2005 is looking smarter and smarter.
Who said the browser wars were over?
Splendid Isolation
The Google engineers have made a big deal in this annoucement about each tab having its own isolated process and memory space and the performance benefits that will come from this design – most notably when one tab dies it won’t take the whole browser down with it.
It’s true that this is one of the big weaknesses of Firefox, especially when it’s running on an OS that doesn’t need to be re-booted too often. :-)
But, I wonder if in time the isolation under the hood won’t pale in comparison to the isolation options presented to users.
By selecting the document options (immediately to the right of the address bar omni bar in Chrome) and choosing “Create application shortcut” from the menu you can quickly and effortlessly create a single instance browser for your favourite web applications.
Over the last couple of months I’ve been experimenting with something similar using Fluid on OS X (another browser which uses WebKit).
I have created separate applications for many of the web apps I use the most: Google Reader, Google Docs, Xero, WordPress, etc.
I’ve found various reasons for doing this…
Because each site is running in a separate app I have far fewer problems with the browser leaking memory or crashing. I also don’t tend to leave Firefox running for days on end as much as I used to, as most of the sites I tend to leave open are elsewhere.
Performance is another. Apps which use a lot of Javascript like Xero seem to run much faster on Fluid than in Firefox. The Javascript environment in Chrome, which they are calling V8, promises to be even faster still.
Fluid also lets you customise each application – with a nice icon (which shows in the dock – allowing you to navigate directly to the site), user scripts (using GreaseKit) and other options, such as whether to display the address bar, which URLs are allowed etc.
For example, with Nik from Code To Customer I created a Xero application with a high-resolution icon and a simple script which shows the count of unreconciled transactions on the dock when the app is running. This now feels much more like a native OS X app.
If you’re a Xero and Mac user and you’d like to try this out: download the application and user script (the script needs to be installed manually once you’ve run the app – start with Command-Alt-N and follow your nose). I’d be interested to hear what you think of it.
Google Chrome seems to just use the favicon, which looks pretty ugly. Perhaps they could support an alternative link in the header to a higher resolution icon to use in this case? UPDATE: they do, see below.
I’ve even created a Fluid app for the web-based control panel on my home NAS, which broke horribly when I upgraded to Firefox 3.
In Firefox…
In Fluid…
Why are single instance applications important?
Lots of non-technical users don’t differentiate between their browser and the sites they visit in the browser. To them the “blue e” is the internet and Google is the new http://.
How else do you explain the popularity of sites like YahooXtra and MSN NZ, other than that people don’t realise that they can change the default home page on their browser?
For those of you who run your own site, look at your referral logs and notice how many people type your URL into a search engine. If they had a good mental model of their browser wouldn’t it make more sense to use the address bar?
My prediction… look out for icons for all of the different Google apps on a desktop near you soon (or dock if you’re one of the cool kids).
And, if you have your own site, you should be thinking about how to package it into an application.
A little bit of personality goes a long way
I’ve linked to a number of great cartoonists here, including Hugh McLeod, Jessica Hagy, xkcd, Scott Adams, HowToons, and Savage Chickens.
Add Scott McCloud to that list (see: scottmccloud.com).
The cartoon book they have put together to announce the launch and describe some of the design decisions behind Chrome is really well done and well worth a read if you haven’t already taken the time.
Perhaps this is what all technical documentation should look like?
Is there anybody in New Zealand who can do this sort of thing? If so I’d like to talk to them.
Using the engineers who built the browser as the characters is a nice touch too, and I’m sure a nice ego boost to those involved (many of the same people appear in person in this video)
They have also managed to strike a good balance with their user interface.
The blue background differentiates it from other apps and makes the tabs stand out.
They have definitely gone for the “less is more” approach, which is great.
“I have to admit, Google Chrome has one of the simplest — and the least attractive — UIs I’ve seen in a while. I didn’t realize how much I rather liked the color that the icons in most toolbars lend my apps until faced with the Spartan blue tagged interface that Chrome opens with.”
Here’s how the “chrome” part of the various browsers look in Windows Vista (via VMWare):
Internet Explorer 7…
Firefox 3…
Chrome…
When you see these side-by-side you realise how putting the tabs on top is a great design decision (although some credit should go to the Opera team for pioneering that approach).
Also, look out for the “stats for nerds” link on Task Manager :-)
But…
Just because Google builds it doesn’t mean they will necessarily come.
Many of the problems it solves are not problems that many people know they have. Is it really 10x better for those people?
I remember web developers getting very excited when Firefox first launched. Finally a browser to replace Internet Explorer, we all thought.
While that may have been broadly achieved amongst technical types, it’s not true at all for the general population (see: We’re Not Normal).
Firefox 1.0 launched in January 2005 (a long time ago now, eh?) By August 2006 it had achieved just over 11% market share in NZ and, as per the numbers above, has since grown to around 16%. While this is a huge number of users it’s not really the predicted global domination.
I think it was Blake Ross (one of the other original Firefox guys) who said that he appreciated Internet Explorer, because how else would people download Firefox!
He was joking, obviously, but there is an element of reality in that statement.
You could probably argue that 16% is the proportion of general internet population who have ready access to a geek to upgrade their browser for them. Everybody else is blissfully unaware. :-)
What market share do you think Chrome will achieve?
And, how much of that will be at the expense of Firefox?
UPDATE (12-Sept): Ben got in touch with some more information about adding custom icons when creating application shortcuts in Chrome…
You actually can specify larger images to be used in your application
shortcuts when the user chooses the menu in Chrome:
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/webmasters-faq.html#customshortcutsIn addition, you can write script in your page so you can offer UI to
create the shortcuts yourself using Gears:
http://code.google.com/apis/gears/api_desktop.htmlHope this is useful info!
-Ben
