The Unexpected

Finding new ways to improve your apps is always good. Things that will dramatically improve your products or increase revenues are often unexpected.

One day we decided to redesign the look of the checkout page on our site. We use an external payments provider, so the checkout page looked slightly different from the rest of the website. It took me two hours of work and the next month our revenue was up 20%.

That's not an obvious thing. Rarely someone would abandon purchase at the very end, after actually making a decision to buy. Everyone tells you, that you need to optimize the funnel from the beginning, so we never thought of the very end. Two hours of work, 20% up. That's a lot and that's unexpected.

Lessons like this teach us to never underestimate anything, even things that seem ridiculous at first, so we keep trying different things. A couple of months ago we decided to give heatmap analytics a try and I signed up for CrazyEgg trial. At the first glance we didn't see any value in it. We could see where users click on the page. So what, right? Wrong.

After a while, when we had enough clicks tracked, so we were able to see some patterns there, we found out a couple of things. Apparently users really loved to click on screenshot on the product page, but we didn't pay any attention to it. There was like a little thumbnail in the corner. We've added a big screenshot of our fancy Helpdesk app to it's page and got another 5% up in sales. And we were tracking clicks on only one page. Unexpected again.

When we decided to add heatmap analytics to our other pages and sites, we started to experience some difficulties with CrazyEgg. For some reason it didn't handle fluid pages with many floated elements on it well, heatmaps were not very accurate. So we decided to develop our own tool, because it seemed easy to us. After two weeks of hacking JavaScript the Heattest was born. Wow, that was pretty hardcore to develop. Anyway, now we had a tool with an algorithm, which handled any page we had perfectly, had no performance drawbacks at all, and would not lose a single click.

Heatmap analytics is an amazing instrument. We're getting more value from Heattest than from Google Analytics. After more testing was done we found a lot of usability flaws, a lot of things we didn't saw earlier and after a month we achieved another 10% up in revenues. I can't even imagine, what we can achieve in the coming month, after more testing is done. Damn, we're so exited about it, we even created our own app.

Never hesitate to try something new, because results may surprise you.

Feature requests are not (necessarily) evil

We are not a big fans of 37Signals' approach of turning down every feature request by default at Jitbit. We actually love and appreciate our users feedback. Not a day goes by without a couple of feature requests for one of our apps and in many cases we're making a decision to implement them.

It's just wrong to pretend you know, what's best for all your users. They are not dumb too, they have good ideas and you've got to listen to them. Of course you shouldn't blindly fulfill every request to make everyone happy, it will turn your app into rubbish in no time. But you do need to analyze every request carefully.

The bad thing is it's rather hard to do. And the main reason for this is that in the most cases users are proposing the solution to the unknown problem. Unfortunately, acting like a selfish smart ass is a default user behavior pattern and that's perfectly fine. They don't need to think about other users, it's not their job, it's yours.

To analyze a request and decide to implement it or not you should make a user to tell a story. What he's trying to accomplish? What is his actual problem? Make a user tell a story. When you will know and understand it all, you can came up with a solution that will be good for everyone, not just that one user, it will add a real value to your product, also you will know more about how your clients are using your apps.

Listening to your users is essential, you just need to put on a little effort to make them happier.

Easy way to quit smoking (unless you're dumb)

I don’t remember myself as a non-smoker and I don’t remember how was it – to live without cigarettes. Now I’m 23, and I had been smoking since I was 15. That’s not a lifetime, but quite much for this age.

It’s been 20 days since I quit smoking. Maybe it’s a little bit too early, but I think I have something to share.

Every friend of mine, who’s recently quit smoking, did it with the help of Allen Carr’s “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking”. Yeah, you’ve heard about that book, I bet you know a couple of people, who quit after reading it, too. The thing is, it never really worked for me and I don’t know why exactly. I think mostly because this book is too general. Allen did a good job describing the primary reasons why smokers smoke, but everyone has their own reasons and their priorities are different.

I never gave a shit about the harm smoking caused to my health. I mean, come on, I’m 23, I’m too young and dumb for that. Money has also never been a problem for me. I have my own reasons to quit.

The first reason is being out of cigarettes in the middle of the night. You need to stop doing whatever you are doing, put your clothes on and go outside to buy them. I couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning, I needed them right now, I was panicking and nervous. Don’t forget – it’s dark and cold outside, and it’s a long way to the closest 24/7 shop.

The second reason is that smoking is anti-social. I’m not talking about the society in general, I’m talking about my friends. Smoking really started to affect them.

I almost don’t have smoking friends anymore and I used to have a lot. I often find myself at some party smoking somewhere alone, while everyone else is having fun together. Smoking is fucked up. That came clear to me on my last vacation in Paris this New Year. I traveled with three non-smoking friends. Here’s the typical situation: everyone is sitting in the restaurant, enjoying wine and delicious food, having conversation to each other and I am standing outside alone in the fucking rain, freezing and smoking my damn cigarette. I don’t wanna do it anymore. Ever.

Smoking is a pain in the ass when visiting non-smoking friends. You make everyone uncomfortable – you need an ashtray, which they probably don’t have, you need a place to go for a smoke, chances are it’ll be another cold, dark and desperate place of suffering, you smoke your cigarette, and finally you come back smelling like shit. Maybe that’s not a problem for you, because you’re a cool guy, who doesn’t care about what the society thinks, blah-blah-blah. Well, good for you. But I do care, because I don’t like being a selfish dick with my friends.

Those are my reasons, you got to have yours. If you want to quit, you should made a decision, that’s the only thing that matters, everything will go easy after that. You can’t make a decision without reasons.

The next thing Alan Carr would’ve told you is that you’re going to smoke your last cigarette ever. Fuck that. I don’t want to do anything for the last time ever. Smoking has it’s pros and they, as well as cons, are individual for everyone.

I love to smoke when I’m drunk. I love to go out to smoke with mates on occasional parties to talk about men’s stuff. A lot of good and funny things happen in the smoking areas, I don’t wanna miss that. It’s all fine, your only goal here is not to become an addict again, that’s not very easy, so use your head and smoke responsibly. Unless you’re getting drunk everyday, you’re good, and if you are – well, that’s a different problem (by the way, I know how to solve it too).

So, this method basically has two prerequisites:

1. You should have reasons strong enough to make a decision to quit. I’m sure you have those. Write down all pros and cons that matter to you, you’ll see that there are way more pros than cons. Smoking is just irrational.

2. You shouldn’t be dumb. If you are – go try Allan Carr’s book first.

My point is, as it turns out, you can quit by yourself. It’s the easiest thing ever. You literally should just stop and that’s it.

Reading: iPad vs. Kindle

I’ve always wanted to buy a Kindle, mostly because, you know, all other geeks have it and really like it. At the same time, purchasing a Kindle while already having an iPad seemed like an overkill to me. Well, at least I thought so before reading the latest DHH’s post on 37signals blog:

Instead of killing the Kindle, the iPad just killed my desire to read books. From the time I got the first iPad until I rediscovered the Kindle this Christmas, I don’t think I finished a single book.

I realized, that I had the exact same problem. I’ve been struggling to read Steve Jobs’ bio for a month, and I haven’t read even a quoter of the book, although it is very interesting and incredibly well written. So, I went and bought a non-touch Kindle 4 yesterday. Wow! I can’t stop reading ever since.

When you’re reading on an iPad, the whole internet is just a few taps away, while Kindle shows you just the things the real book shows you: the text itself and your progress through the book (you can always estimate how many pages left in the real physical book). I think that’s the main reason causing such a great difference in the reading experience. Kindle is a distractions-less and, with it’s sluggishness, even zen-like device.

Kindle fits in the inside pocket of my jacket, it is really light and cheap. You can take it anywhere without being afraid to lose it, it’s not a big deal at all, just go get a new one. Can’t say that about a $500 iPad.

iPad is much better for reading RSS and magazines, but for books (and Instapaper, i guess) Kindle is way ahead. I’m reading again and, damn, it feels good.

Quick Tip: Text Selection Color

I saw this feature for the first time in the HTML5 Boilerplate quite a while ago and have been using it in every project ever since.

Changing text selection color with CSS is easy and, in my opinion, it adds a little bit more fun to the web-site. It make users feel surprised in a good way and surprises make their experience with your web-site memorable. There is absolutely no usability issues, unless you are using über-acid selection colors.

Also, you need to remember to always set text-shadow to none, because selected text with shadow will be unreadable. Here is the code you need to add to your CSS file.

::-moz-selection { background: #4DA400; color: #fff; text-shadow: none; }
::selection { background: #4DA400; color: #fff; text-shadow: none; }

It applies to the whole page, but you can easily limit selection color to specific elements by using CSS selectors (e.g. p.article::selection).

You can see how it works right on this page, try selecting some text.