Go Away

I know Blogger isn't hip.

But I know I'm not, either, so we work together well.

I have no complaints here. Oh, it would be nice, for instance, to be able to post PDFs here, rather than having to do things the clunky way and post them at Box.net first. But for the blogging things I do, Blogger works just fine.

See, it works.

Rarely have I experienced glitches with this platform. Oh, the occasional hiccup, but nothing chronic. I see a lot less trouble here than with other services such as Twitter -- though I rarely see the Fail Whale there any more, either.

Blogger works when I need it to. So I can pretty much ignore it. And it's free, which makes it even better.

Then there are the folks over at Tumblr. That's one of the hip blogging platforms. At least I think it is. I'm so unhip I'm not sure what's hip any more, not that I really knew what was hip in the first place. I am connected with Uncharted.net, which we're trying to make hip, but that's been a little difficult as of late, since part of the site has pretty much been broken since late October. We are working on a fix. We are also working on a shoestring budget. And so far, no complaints. Not having a huge audience of users helps in that department.

But what could we do with $40 million in venture capital funding, like the folks at Tumblr have? Light years' worth of awesomeness, I'm sure.

Not at Tumblr, though. Apparently, they've been having much more serious trouble with their platform than we've been having, and their CEO's answer to that is to tell the complainers to go away.

That hardly seems productive.

Yeah, dealing with whiners isn't fun. But you know what? If I had that much VC at my disposal and was running a site approaching 200 million hits a day, I'd be doing something about fixing things, and I wouldn't be telling customers to go away. I'd have my guys working around the clock until the problems were fixed. If my guys needed help, I'd bring in more help. I wouldn't be telling customers to go away.

Clay Shirky points out that people are turning more and more to social media to get companies to fix mediocre and outright bad service. Witness sites like The Consumerist, for just one example, where people are banding together to get things fixed. For a social media company, then to ignore its own users who are banding together to try to get that selfsame company to fix things just doesn't bode well.

If I had a brick-and-mortar business tell me to go away if I went in to complain about poor service, I would go away. And given that I've got a big mouth, I'd tell a lot of people that I am going away, and why. Maybe there are those who don't see problems at said business, or have a higher tolerance for poor service, or simply choose not to react to the poor level of service they're getting. That's fine. We see that in cable companies, cell phone companies, any kind of company you care to mention. But to actively tell your customers to leave? Wow.

So the answer is this: Be up front with your customers. Listen to them. Work harder at fixing what's bugging them. Maybe you don't fix everything, but if enough people call or write you about something that's bugging them, you fix it. Fix the big problems by paying attention to the small ones, per 37 Signals. And never tell your customers to go away.

Start With No

Through our work on Uncharted, I've been introduced to the 37 Signals group's book Getting Real, a guide the group behind Basecamp, Campfire and the Ruby to Rails markup language markets to software developers. Though I'm not a software developer, I am interested in website development, and find that a lot of the things they bring out in their book apply to websites as well as software.

One of the most intriguing things they bring up is their "Start With No" concept, explained in full here. Here's what they have to say in part:

The secret to building half a product instead of a half-ass product is saying no.

Each time you say yes to a feature, you're adopting a child. You have to take your baby through a whole chain of events (e.g. design, implementation, testing, etc.). And once that feature's out there, you're stuck with it. Just try to take a released feature away from customers and see how pissed off they get.

Their reasoning is that adding every feature, every page, every this and every that which your customer asks for through usability studies can often lead to sites and software and publications getting unmanageable.

In my publications management class, one student brought up the website for students in tne tech writing masters program, complaining that it's hard to find pertient information among all the other stuff that's been added to the site. This is, I believe, evidence of someone who can't say no to their users. You'd think that class registration and getting to Blackboard would be important functions, but they're buried in all the other folderol on the page. But all that's been added is due to someone -- often just a someone, not a group someone -- asking for the addition. Sometimes the best thing that can come out of a usability study is the recognition that you can say no to your users.