Quick Update

By Cody in Commentary, Successes, Business, Applications

Sakuzaku’s Getting Press

Sakuzaku has been busy the last few weeks negotiating some new projects and putting the finishing touches on a few that are nearing launch. We’ve also been making some press. We’ve been featured on 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise blog, as well as had one of our posts ripped off wholesale by the global usability consulting firm Etre.

• Sakuzaku on Signal vs. Noise
• Etre’s plagiarized version of our post
• Chris Messina found Addressful!

(Etre’s post now has less plagiarized content than originally and properly attributes us, following a call to their office in London.)

Twhither

We’re currently waiting on the Twitter folks to add Twhither to their whitelist. Now that the SXSW hubbub has died down, we’re expecting a launch any day now.

Jobs

We’re still on the lookout for a software engineer and graphic designer. Head on over to our Jobs page for more details.

This Is Important. Do It. Now.

By Matt in User Science, Commentary, Business

We received an email from the Wall Street Journal recently as part of a campaign to encourage their subscribers to complete a survey. Everything is wrong with it, and it’s a great example of how not to solicit feedback from your customers.

See for yourself:

First, there are some obvious but minor offenses: The visual design is terrible. What’s with the bright blue text? And the light blue background on the logo? If you’re going to send HTML email, do it with style. And couldn’t they have merged our name into the form letter? But there are some more fundamental problems here which we’ll address.

Dear Newspaper,

Please pay attention to these rules of user engagement:

Be polite.

It’s a no-brainer, but people respond much better and more often when they’re addressed nicely. Being blunt and businesslike may be an efficient way to do business, but when you’re bargaining for your customers’ valuable time and giving them nothing for it, you should at least butter them up a bit.

Ask or encourage, don’t demand. “We’d appreciate it if…” or “Would you like to help us…” is much better than “Please do this.” Note that the word ‘please’ here doesn’t do anything to make the request polite — it just makes it sound even more superficial and curt, since everything else about the letter screams rudeness.

Write from my point of view.

This letter is all about what the WSJ wants, and it operates under the completely erroneous assumption that what I want corresponds with what the WSJ wants. Ha.

I, quite understandably, want my business to be successful, want to finish this last piece of code, want to respond to these emails, figure out why my USB hub isn’t working, finish writing this blog post, to get to the bank before it closes, and to make a quick dinner. I could care less what the WSJ wants. This letter is like the annoying friend who comes whining to you when they, very reasonably, get fired for being late every day and losing an important file one too many times, but who isn’t there for you when your mother dies. The WSJ is asking me to do them a favor out of the goodness of my heart, but they don’t even bother to acknowledge that there is, without a doubt, a hundred more important things of my own that I could be doing.

How could this be improved? Simple: ‘We understand that you’ve probably got more important things to do, but completing this very short survey can really help us improve our service to you.’

Offer reward.

Why should I spend ten minutes on your survey? What’s in it for me? How about $10 off my next year’s subscription? This rule is the more concrete corollary of the previous one.

If there’s no promise of anything but a “Thank You!” page waiting at the end of your survey, don’t expect heavy participation.

Sometimes, even the illusion of reward is enough — automatic entry in a drawing, for example. People know they probably won’t win your sweepstakes, just as they know the chances of winning big at a slot machine or on a lottery ticket are small, but there’s a chance, and everybody loves chances.

Don’t deadline.

Your users are busy people. Giving them a deadline and expecting them to complete your survey by then is just asking to get ignored. It sounds imperious and as if you don’t care at all about the fact that the recipient probably has many other deadlines that they consider far more important.

Of course, there does have to be a deadline — you need to cut off submissions and aggregate the data eventually. Handle it like this: First, set it more than eight days in the future (much further, in fact). Second, just don’t tell your readers when it is. There’s no need to create a false sense of urgency with brusque statements like “Please complete it by October 22nd.”

Make it quick.

Ten minutes is a long time, and exactly the sort of length that seems too long to bother with. And it’s probably not even accurate. Anything above two or three minutes is actively discouraging participation.

If your survey does take more than a few minutes, though, there’s no reason to lie. Like the deadline, just leave it out your estimated time. Better to risk people leaving in the middle of a survey than not starting it all.

Explain yourself.

Why are you conducting this survey? “To help improve The Wall Street Journal” is too vague. What about your services are you improving? Why should I care? Again, this ties in with writing from the recipient’s point of view and thinking about what’s in it for them. Just referring to your survey as an “important project” doesn’t necessarily make it one to me. You’ve got to convince people what you’re doing is important, and every bit of communication you have with your customers is a valuable opportunity — make the most of it and don’t make them regret they gave you their attention.

If all you’re doing is running an annual survey to ensure the relevancy of your advertising and there’s really nothing interesting or exciting about it, well, there better be some nice prizes.

And besides, everybody loves to talk about advertising — you might be surprised at the responses you get by allowing your users to sound off about it.

Be brief.

You can be friendly, honest, and sufficiently explanatory without being overly verbose. Leaving out details like deadlines and completion times can help. Ask nicely, offer reward, and let people do your survey on their own time, on their own terms.

The rest is results.

Lunch With You: Mike Lee

By Matt in Interviews, Systems, Business

Mike Lee makes an impression. Several, actually.

The first: this guy is in an aloha shirt and he could break me in half with his pinkie finger. The subsequent impressions, taken in over Brazilian barbecue for over three hours, make you realize this guy has a lot of big ideas and opinions. So, it was our pleasure to have him and his wife Mary inaugurate our “Lunch With You” series when he visited Honolulu recently.

For those who don’t know, Mike works at Delicious Monster, whose flagship product Delicious Library is a best-selling library management software for OS X. The app allows you to scan in all of your books, movies, music, and video games (using either your iSight camera or a custom barcode reader) and keep them organized, automatically pulling in cover art and a plethora of other data from Amazon. It keeps track of to whom you’ve lent what and is kind of addicting for those crazy about organizing.

We asked Mike a number of questions that we’ll paraphrase his answers to here.

The Delicious Monster team has just begun the Library 2.0 private beta, after about two years of work. Leopard has caused the team a lot of work — nearly every change they make has caused problems and incompatibilities that require bug fixes and adjustments. Mike said, “We spent a year working on what was going to be Delicious Library 2, then delayed it a year after deciding to go Leopard, all the while cramming in features. It’s almost like we skipped 2 and are shipping 3.” He said it’s been frustrating for them. But, such is the nature of building software for an evolving platform, said Mike, and it’s the most difficult part of working at a commercial desktop software company. But it’s not just Apple — all of the cover art and metadata for the software comes from Amazon, making the software’s functionality subject to Amazon’s whims.

We asked some technical questions. Delicious Monster uses Subversion for version control. The team doesn’t do any automated unit or functional testing. Mike’s opinion is that all the testing in the world won’t make your software free of bugs, and there’s just no way to account for things you can’t account for. A serious insight that we definitely concur with and that we see a lot of people missing is the importance of planning for but not implementing the plan for ‘what if’ scenarios. There’s a good chance that those things may never even happen. Citing his boss Wil Shipley, Mike put it well: “If we ever get to the point where we have so many users that this is actually a problem, we will be so rich we can pay someone else to deal with it, while we sip rum on a beach in Tahiti.” Take care of the real problems today, and don’t worry about what’s going to happen if your servers are hit by a flaming tornado filled with sharks during an earthquake, or three hundred people with the same name sign up for your software.

Being coffee shop hounds ourselves, we wanted to know what it was like to work out of one every single day (Delicious Monster works out of Seattle coffee shop Zoka everyday). Mike said it has its ups and downs. There’s no office overhead, it’s cheap, and it’s brought some great publicity. But it doesn’t take long to get sick of the menu, the intrusive atmosphere, and the not really having an office.

Getting back to Delicious Library, Mike admits that the app has its detractors, many of whom ask the obvious question: “What’s the point?” Well, if you don’t get what the point is, then there probably isn’t one for you. But the fact remains that Delicious Library is selling extremely well, meeting the needs of a niche market that includes families, collectors, and, interestingly, Bible scholars, each with lots of different media that needs organizing. In Mike’s opinion he thinks it helps that Library is so well put together and the competition isn’t, but also that their competitors are few and far between.

But while Library is the only thing Delicious Monster is focusing on at the moment, they don’t seem to have any shortage of ideas. What else is the team thinking about? Pinball, human slide-puzzles and Pokémons on the iPhone. We waxed nostalgic for Sonic Spinball. It’s true — there is no great pinball software for the Mac. Delicious Monster obviously has no fear of peripherals if they help get the job done, having developed a barcode scanner to use in place of an iSight for scanning into Delicious Library. The ideas were flying: Network play, of course, and how about some flipper dongles and customizable boards?

But none of it has begun to crystallize yet. Delicious Monster has their hands full with Library and their professed object is keeping it The Best Solution. This idea — complete dedication to a vision and executing it well — kept popping up and telescoping in scale as lunch went on.

If we got one thing out of the conversation, it was that Mike Lee loves to write software. He says it best himself: “I was born a programmer. The rest is just implementation detail.” Whether it’s working without pay in Wil Shipley’s basement designing the application that won multiple Apple Design Awards or developing a poker program with lemurs for face cards for his wife’s birthday (really!), programming is Mike’s creative outlet, and one that he says he can’t seem to turn off. And he wants to tell you about it. His blog and Twitter feed, named exactly what you think they’d be, are the best evidence of his outspokenness.

Which is not to say he lacks other passions. Mike’s email signature pegs him as the “Delicious Monster Majordomo. He’s as likely to be programming beside [the Delicious Monster team] or cooking them dinner. He serves as bodyguard and confidant, jester and enforcer.” He’s in love with lemurs and wants to save Madasgascar. But he first and foremost thinks of himself as a software engineer. We got the impression that he understands the economics of being a productive human being.

When I asked whether he had thought about helping Madagascar directly, making the move from computer scientist to natural scientist, the answer was instantly and unequivocally “No.” He’d obviously thought about this, and immediately compared his approach to work to that of a diesel-electric locomotive. Much as the diesel and electric components of the engine do what they are designed to do and pass on the output of their work to other pieces of the system, Mike wants to do what he’s best at — programming — and offer his resources to the charitable organizations already helping Madagascar.

We talked a lot about charity, actually — Mike was in the middle of a piece he’s just published on his blog with a number of ideas about how to work charity into software development (and everywhere else). Mike thinks working against human nature isn’t just difficult, it’s a bad idea — intelligently leverage the compassion and tendencies of people, and there’s no reason you can’t build a better way to keep spam off blogs or prevent the extinction of a cute ancestor. We think Mike Lee is genuinely interested in applying his skills to have a wider impact on an audience greater than a single piece of software’s immediate user base. It downright gave us some inspiration.

He is, after all, the (self-titled) World’s Toughest Programmer. He said what was on his mind and it’s clear he doesn’t tolerate nonsense. And while the rest of us are too full, you better believe he’s going to finish what’s on his plate. (Literally — we couldn’t possibly finish all that Brazilian barbeque.)

So, Who’s Next?

Would you like us to have Lunch With You? Are you in Honolulu? Will you be soon? Have some good ideas or some insight to share? If we know who you are (or if you think we should), let us know, and we’ll take you out to lunch on us.

Email us if you’re feeling talky.

More Feedback From Our Craigslist Job Post

By Cody in Business

We continue to receive feedback about our Craigslist job post. It seems people either love us or hate us for it:

Your ad is very opinionated without being overtly offensive, which is an accomplishment; congratulations.

Sakuzaku’s Making Waves!

By Cody in Business

We received the following email today in response to one of our Craigslist posts looking for graphic designers. I guess this guy had some spelling or grammar mistakes in his résumé.

What are you guys a bunch of high schoolers? Don’t post shit like this on craigslist. You make us people in Hawaii look bad and unprofessional.

And your coders suck a$$. Bunch of generic cms driven websites that you probably didn’t even code in the first place.

Grr

And this:

I was compelled to post after reading the previous post by Sakuzaku.

What a bunch of ****ing baloney! They sound like they have no clue WTF they are talking about nor do they have a “clue” in business ethics. “Elitist” Highschoolers just scream out from their post.Mac-only designers? LOL how stupid is that?! “Should be in San Francisco but for some reason your in Hawaii?” What is this exactly suppose to mean? If you good you can be anywhere. Like I said a bunch of stupid High-Schoolers who have no clue WTF they are talking about.

tsk~

Apparently some people here are already unhappy we’re not settling for offering half-best. Just wait until we really have something to show them!