QB

Updates & short takes.

[notaquarterback]

Yes, COVID-19 Will Affect Your User Research

A once-a-century pandemic is going to affect your user research. I appreciate this post which approaches the dilemma around current user research into three central questions: recruiting participants, validity of data, and will the research hold up? I’m not sure those are the real questions depending on what you’re researching at this time.

First, let’s think about why we’re researching in the first place. Ask yourself and your team whether you can’t postpone user research until later. Sometimes, testing is time sensitive. Maybe you’re developing a tool that has major life-saving implications or might reduce significant friction in dealing with an existing product or service. Talking to users during an (otherwise) stressful period of time might help them cope with the fallout from COVID-19, simply by being heard and recognizing there are people doing the work to help.

If you’re running customer feedback sessions where people are paid to provide feedback about a particular service, running sessions right now might make a lot easier to recruit than at a different time.  (Of course, unless those sessions are remote, you’d have a hard time doing them in-person.)

On the other hand, if you’re just asking people for unpaid labor to discuss a tool that won’t have a direct impact, maybe it’s worth waiting until things have returned closer to normal.

Why the COVID crisis is different

Even if someone isn’t directly affected with the virus in their life, few parts of our society — globally — are left unscathed by this emergency. Attempting a semblance of normalcy is admirable, but given the stressors across society, it’s hard to ignore the changes COVID-19 has made to our everyday lives.

If you wrote a research protocol or interview script a month ago, the world you’d be presenting in has been changed differently. Everything from scheduling complexities to navigating the issues that might be affecting your interviewees ability to provide you with the feedback you’re looking for.

Whether your research is valid or not isn’t the right question. You might get valuable feedback from people. Treating COVID like just ‘another’ problem underestimates its significance. Would you try to run user testing with people who just lived through a hurricane or tornado? The logistics of doing so much be difficult, even if you could.

Use discretion

Look, I’m not at your company. It’s hard for me to read this and not want to be glib about people using a catastrophic event to canvass distressed people. All UX research isn’t the same. For every thoughtful protocol that’s well-researched and aimed to dig deeper into an audience to better a holistic experience, are people looking to make a buck and less interested in the impact societal stressors have on people.

It’s true that the problems people have with your website, app or product might be more amplified in a pandemic. Those stress cases might mine research that a protocol can’t ferret out easily. The problem is, now isn’t the time for a lot of people to sit still and give you the feedback you want.

COVID-19 has given me a chance to discover the joys of unsubscribing from dozens of email newsletters, but if there’s anything we’ve learned about this period, things are bigger than our products. Maybe there’s a good reason to press on with your UX research, but if you can wait.

You should wait.

[notaquarterback]

A space to prototype

One of the best things about my career has been giving myself the space to tinker and share my work. One of the things about doing that, is not always needing validation or people’s buy-in to say or do things.

Over time, my work has resonated with different people at different times and I’ve been largely grateful for the feedback that’s come from sharing. Over the past few years, I’ve been largely quiet. In part because I felt like I was saying too much, and not doing enough listening. But I’ve missed having a space to share, tinker, or simply rant about whatever I was doing without everything always feeling transactional.

Tumblr resonated with me for so long, because I had a space to just start doing without obsessing over where the content lived, how it looked, and whether or not anyone was reading. For a long time, it was easier here because there were enough people that you didn’t have to go out of your way to cultivate an audience here, people usually found themselves to the work.

Now, I care a bit less about whether anyone finds their way here at all. I loved having a semi-anonymous space from which to ply my trade. But it goes beyond just talking about UX or whatever, but even just to be able to blog about whatever I’m playing musically, what sort of games I’m playing, or if I watched something cool. 

2019 has been a year where I got back into journaling, and I’ve enjoyed that. It’s been neat to be able to have space to spend each day doing a quick recap of whatever I did - though admittedly, I’ve slacked the past few days - and I think there might be some correlation between being in a relationship and having someone to tell these things to, that made me less inclined to spend time wanting to write about it when in the past that’s all I had. 

In that way, things have come a bit full circle perhaps. Revisiting spaces where I used to inhabit, seeing the growth in real time, and assessing where I want to diverge on the journey moving forward. 

All of these words to say, I want to probably stop overthinking it and just start habitually writing again. 

[notaquarterback]

On Knowledge

I think there’s space for exploration in markets or sectors you don’t know that well. But if I learned anything in 2016, it’s you can’t go invading a sector that you haven’t fully researched or where you don’t have relationships. 

It’s not that what you want to do can’t/won’t work, it’s about success and support. If there’s not a definitive need for what you’re trying to do, there’s not always going to be a market opportunity to launch it. Even if you have the money, you need institutional knowledge so that you don’t waste a lot of resources making big mistakes that you wouldn’t have made with more acute understanding of what you’re tackling.

For me, this was more apparent when I tried to launch a podcast network. I’ve never been to a podcast conference, I don’t talk to many podcast makers. It’s one thing to record audio and do podcasts (As I have for years) or even to listen to them. It’s another thing entirely to try to generate interest and support for a platform for others when you don’t really align or partner with people already doing the work. The smarter play would’ve been to connect with people already doing it and either support their efforts or learn more before trying to jump straight into the pool.

I also learned with this with tea. The difference there, is that I found I had the knowledge necessary to pull it off. I just realized in the process of launching a tea brand that I didn’t want it to be my primary thing and that the work involved in launching required that it become essentially a big part of my professional situation. Once I realized that, I took a step back from the entire idea because it just didn’t make sense for where I am right now.

The last thing was the card deck I developed. It was probably the most well-received of the three projects. (Actually, tea had a better reception.) But in terms of its lasting value, people see the prototype on my desk or remember me showing it to them over the summer. Unlike a lot of my projects these days, it’s tangible and I felt like it was rewarding to make something and see it come to life. I’ll run another set of them later this year, because the entire process in the grand scheme of things wasn’t that difficult, it’s mostly about doing it not for money because if I think I wanted to rely on it as a $ project, it’d be a lot more disappointing since there’s not a direct audience for it, it was just a way for me to be productive over a few days.

You can launch stuff because you want to prove things to yourself. It’s satisfying to ship. But remembering that shipping isn’t success and that just because you put something out there, doesn’t mean people have to care is instructive. It makes me more discerning about the ways I launch projects, helps me better decipher what makes sense to launch and to take my time to curate things smarter than just jumping into the pool and hoping that it’ll work, rather than being more confident it can work because I’ve put the time into understanding the market/audience of what it is I’m trying to execute.

[notaquarterback]

How We Got Here - A Book List

I won’t wax poetic on this, other than to say it’s a coincidence that I’ve been buried in lots of non-fiction reading about the history of this country and how we got here. This list isn’t exhaustive AT ALL. 

With that, here’s some reading worth adding to your list.

Some of the highlights below:

In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990, Quintard Taylor

Education of Blacks in the South 1860-1935, James D. Anderson

Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, Leon Litwack

Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class, Mary Patillo

Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class, Larry Tye

The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia, Tim Tzouliadis

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, Tommie Shelby

Other People's Children, Lisa Delpit

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Geoffrey C. Ward

"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity, Beverly Tatum

The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality, Thomas Shapiro

Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs, Deidre Royster

Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union: An Autobiography, Robert Robinson

Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation 1968-98, James Cone

Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class, Karyn Lacy

Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America, Paul Tough

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander

Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority, Tom Burrell

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson

Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Kenneth T. Jackson

[notaquarterback]

How One Florida City Is Reinventing Itself With UX Design

"Like great companies, great cities need to think about user experience."

Yes to all of this. 

[notaquarterback]

Stash

Stash is an intelligent bookmarking tool that will automatically analyze and organize links that you save, allowing you to find them when you need them.

A competitor to pocket and instapaper emerges.

[mssnglnk]

How does a guy from America start following Finnish baseball?

An unlikely story of fandom from afar

My last month in a nutshell.

[guimarvs]

Understanding Vertical Marketplace Innovation

It’s already common knowledge that the latest wave of marketplaces are vertical plays attacking horizontal behemoths like eBay or Craigslist. Disruptive online marketplaces not only connect demand and supply but enhance the experience in a way others can’t. Vertical marketplaces provide such enhancing dynamics that give them a comparative advantage versus horizontal ones. The problem is that not all vertical marketplaces are equally disruptive or defensible.

It’s important not to confuse the attack of a vertical which refers to a specific segment of the economy (e.g. cars, books, food,etc) versus a verticalized business model which refers to the vertical integration of production of a service.

Vertical marketplaces have 3 fundamental types of innovation: (i) verticalization (ii) aggregation (iii) automation.

A true vertical marketplace, as mentioned, are those who typically internalize processes in order to make transactions happen. These marketplaces not only aggregate demand and supply but make the matching experience fundamentally better. A good example is Beepi, the end-to-end car marketplace. Beepi not only skips the used dealers to help sellers find buyers but actively participates in the process from inspecting the cars to doing the title transfer and shipping. Food delivery company, Sprig, is another great example of true verticalization as they plan their food menu and manage their logistics network through their dispatching app. The more work these companies do the lower the gross margin from their take rate will be. Nonetheless, such action are typically needed to be able to fundamentally change the way supply and demand interacted before their existence. On the bright side, the aforementioned examples have one of the two key characteristics a vertical marketplace needs to have: either high order tickets or high frequency. Verticalized business models typically work best in segments where the current players have abussive profits like car dealers Beepi or real estate brokers (Compass, Redfin).

The second way marketplaces innovate is through aggregation. As the name suggests, these marketplace provide additional value by aggregating supply and (sometimes) demand. Classpass provides a lot more value to their users by aggregating supply under their unique pricing model. No single gym or chain can provide the same value by itself. Other examples of aggregation such as Cargomatic and Uber have very strong network effects as supply scales. The higher the fill rate and the lower the average pick up time, the more dominant they become. The best type of aggregation marketplace are those whose supply was inaccessible or non-existant to consumers like Airbnb.

There are also aggregation marketplaces with some verticalized components like Doordash or FlyCleaners. Both of them aggregate suppliers, restaurants and dry cleaners, but internalize part of the service by providing the logistics and delivery. In both cases, pure aggregation wouldn’t work because Doordash’s restaurants typically don’t deliver and FlyCleaners’ service providers don’t have the right infrastructure.

The last form of innovation is through automation. These marketplaces typically tackle inefficient markets by professionalizing them and building a trusted brand. Nonetheless, such marketplaces have lower network effects and a feeble customer loyalty. Concrete examples are those of Shyp, Handy and, the now defunct, Homejoy. Before these marketplaces, the customer experience was fundamentally broken with low service quality. This type of innovation heavily relies on stellar execution. A home cleaning marketplace becomes increasingly hard as it scales because it’s harder to keep high quality supply. Unfortunately, Homejoy expanded too fast and couldn’t control supply quality and thus had to cope with churn. Managed by Q is a company that operates in the same segment but a model which is fundamentally better given their cleaners are W2s to ensure quality of service. Managed by Q also understood the benefits of economies of scope in B2B clients that represents less churn and higher average order values.

Building a successful ‘vertical’ marketplace needs:

To fundamentally improve the experience for all of the parties involved to be sustainable.

Strong network effects as a consequence of user behavior and business model architecture.

Have sustainable unit economics for supply and demand at scale

Understand market dynamics to choose the appropriate type of innovation

Provide on-demand service only when there’s a real need and don’t sacrifice profitability.

Understanding the nuances of the needs of customers is paramount to design the right marketplace infrastructure. Building an online layer is typically better than current solutions but sometimes just not good enough. Truly successful marketplaces don’t simply connect demand and supply, they fundamentally change the status quo.

[maxistentialist-deactivated2020]

As an actor, remember to stay present. This business will force you to always look to the next thing. Not worth it, stay here. This business will say ‘you have value when…’ Not true. Your value stays the exact same before and after 'success.’

Tony Hale, on Reddit (via maxistentialist)

[notaquarterback]

[notaquarterback]

I’ve been in a bit of a consistent battle with my own personal internet presence. But one of the things I’ve wanted to do for years is consolidate my professional projects of all stripes into a single site.

I used to separate things over time, because I felt like it was distracting and I thought I needed to be known as “one thing” or whatever. While I don’t ever intend to do a lot of cross-pollinating my pursuits into talks where it’s not appropriate, I do think it’s important for my own emotional state to have a compendium of finished projects.

If nothing else, it’s a reminder sometimes to be like “hey, you’ve done a few cool things.”

Anyway, it’s over at work.ronbronson.com

[notaquarterback]

Gchat Was the Future of Messaging, But Google Didn’t Know What It Had

Everyone has been talking about Slack lately. The chat app, which is primarily aimed at offices and productivity, is simple, well designed, fun to use, ...

How is it that outsiders can understand your business better than you do? What kind of corporate culture is so entrenched in the smell of its own recipes that it can completely ignore the ways people engage with the product to build things nobody wants to use and then express surprise when those ideas incubated in the noxious culture do not succeed?

[newyorker]

What if we could all mute our phones on the weekends, let our laptops gather dust during vacation, never again feel a buzzing in our pockets just as the appetizer arrives? Would we? And, if we did, would we be happier?

Lauren Collins, “The French Counterstrike Against Work E-mail” (via newyorker)

[notaquarterback]

[notaquarterback]

[uxreactionsofficial]

When the business wants you to deliver designs before usability testing:

[notaquarterback]