Today, I checked the numbers in iTunes Connect for Dollar Clock. At first, I only looked at the total downloads, in the left graph, where the hash mark notes the header change. Clearly, the header change increased the downloads. Then I looked at the purchases and updates separately, in the right graph, and the pattern was less clear. During the week after the header change (the bar after the hash mark), more of the downloads were updates, not purchases.

During the same week I changed the header, Dollar Clock 2.0 was posted to the App Store, and many people downloaded the update that week. The total downloads indicates my header change had a significant effect, but the breakdown reveals confounding variables. Perhaps if I had more variables, I would find that the header change had absolutely no effect.

Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to use Tufte’s small multiples.

But of course, Skype hadn’t screwed up. I had confused two separate services: Online Number (SkypeIn) where people can call me and Skype To Go where I can call international numbers through my cell phone using Skype’s low rates. Skype support replied to me within five minutes, allaying my fears about losing my original number and explaining the new Skype To Go feature. The problem was, like most consumers, I don’t read.

Let me repeat that: I don’t read. Moreover, I don’t care. My sole goal with Skype is to have a phone number with voicemail. All of my interactions with the service are in terms of that goal, making the other features just noise. I skimmed that email because the subject said “activate” and “number”, and when it mentioned a number that wasn’t my existing one, I panicked. I’m not familiar enough with Skype’s product line to recognize the difference between SkypeIn and Skype To Go, and frankly, I didn’t even read that part. Less than three minutes passed between seeing the email and emailing support.

It’s a marketing quandary. Users have a very limited view of the products they use. They only care about solving the problems they bought the products for, not utilizing all the accompanying features nor hearing about other available products. Developers live and breath their products. They intentionally added every feature to those products and wrote the accompanying marketing material. Developers read and care deeply; users don’t do either. As developers, we need to keep the user perspective in mind.

The best antidote: remember you are a user. Everyone has interactions like my Skype story. Reflect on those, and think about your own products in that context. What if users only read every 10th word? What if they continually hit “OK” on “Confirm Delete” followed by cursing? I do both as a user, because I want to accomplish a goal, not perform a task with a specific product. Your users will thank you.

Matt Gemmell sums up this viewpoint very well in his “World According to Gemmell” segment in The MDN Show Episode 10.

Whenever I encounter a strange error message or a similar roadblock while programming, I google for answers. This approach leads to a wide array of websites, almost all blogs. (In fact, most of this site’s traffic comes from Google, presumably from the same approach.) As soon as I get to the site, I want to quickly assess the post’s relevance and my level of trust. If the site is interesting and useful, I’ll trust it more if I come across answers on it again…if I recognize it. When I designed this blog, I tried to add these same breadcrumbs that I look for when I google: relevance, recognition, and trust.

Relevance

When I click on a Google link, I want to figure out as quickly as possible if the page is relevant. So I look around for a date, an author, tags, and a comment count.

I expect the date to be embedded in the URL, but unfortunately, WordPress’s default permalink format is arcane: http://www.bdunagan.com/?p=123. The URL format is displayed to every single visitor, and yet, all this conveys is how many times I’ve posted before this. It’s a sad default when the very next option conveys both timestamp and title: http://www.bdunagan.com/2009/11/05/sample-post/. The visitor can quickly glance at the URL and instantly know the post’s age and topic. The default permalink format is really an indication of the blog creator’s laziness.

The URL is easy. One step further is the post’s meta information. I want to know the author (for a site like TUAW), tags, number of comments, and frankly, the date again (as I might be looking at the homepage where the date isn’t in the URL). All that information gives me a better idea of whether or not the post is relevant to my goals. Including that information next to the title makes sense. However, the default WordPress theme hides this information, shown above, at the bottom of the post instead of next to the title and above the fold. Worse yet, comments follow that section, so I can’t easily page-down to the bottom of the screen, as it might be tucked away in the middle.

Recognition

The default theme for WordPress is Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick. It’s a fine theme, but far too many authors stay with it, making it difficult for new visitors to trust the site and for repeat visitors to recognize the site. (Moreover, many spam blogs use this theme as well, making sites using it more difficult to trust.) Selecting an alternate theme is ridiculously easy; just go to the admin section, click Appearance, find a theme, and click “Activate”. WordPress is nicely architected such that nothing more is required. And with the large number of free, built-in themes, selecting a relatively unique one is no problem. Many insert the post’s meta information near the title, rather than at the post’s end. Creating an identifiable site helps visitors recognize you. Going with Kubrick is just lazy.

Trust

A new visitor to this site has no idea who I am. No trust at all. The only thing going for the site is the fact that it showed up in Google as possibly relevant to the visitor’s goal. In addition to the content, I put a quick description of myself at the bottom. I put links to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Flickr. Each represents a one-click path for the visitor to find out a bit about me. No guarantee it will be interesting, but it does establish I’m a real person who writes Mac software. I want to establish a modicum of trust with the visitor. It’ll help the next time the visitor comes to the site and recognizes it.

Matt Gemmell’s blog redesign is a great example of this trust in action. I visited his site yesterday but immediately thought I’d clicked on the wrong link; the theme was completely different. Instead of the graphic-rich white-on-black theme I was accustomed to, the site was text-rich black-on-white with lots of white space. I went over to Instintive Code to see if I’d mistakenly gone to Gemmell’s other blog. Nope, no work blog. So I went to the blog’s index page and saw the title “Accessible Blog Redesign”. Ah, a redesign. Still, there was a brief period when I didn’t trust the page I landed on; it wasn’t the one I built my trust on.

To drive home the importance of breadcrumbs for trust, visit Clay Shirky’s blog. Shirky is an impressive speaker and a great writer. When I read a tweet last spring about his sharp critique on the demise of newspapers, I immediately clicked through to the blog post. But I landed on a standard WordPress site with the default Kubrick theme. Weird, seemed like a guy as aware as Shirky would do something a bit more creative. I looked back through the blog’s history. Hmm, created a month ago with only three posts so far. More weird. The blog came from Shirky’s domain, but it had no links back to the homepage. And, Shirky’s homepage didn’t have any links to the blog. At this point, I’m very skeptical about the blog. I actually googled around to make sure other authoritative people linked to the blog articles, which they did. Now, nine months on, the blog still only has six posts and no links. I still find it weird. So many missing breadcrumbs.

Iterate

Ironically, in writing this blog post, I noticed that my single posts didn’t include the number of comments up at the top like the main index does. Fixed that. And I added a nice favicon from Glyphish. Iterate, iterate, iterate.

Apple only makes 6% (~$2B) of its revenue from software and services, and that includes many products beyond OS X. And the company has $25B in cash now. Wall Street would love to see that money used in a stock buyback, but Jobs clearly stated in the last earnings call that the cash would be used on product development. Using its supply of cash to subsidize 10.6 purchases would certainly be more useful than a stock buyback program. Apple could cut support for 10.4 and 10.5 quicker and invest more resources into 10.6+ features.

Fortune’s Apple 2.0 brought up a very interesting point about how Apple might deal with its cash: “Of course, Steve Jobs may have better ideas than Toni Sacconaghi about what $25 billion can do. The last time Apple’s stock fell this sharply — plunging from nearly $40 a share in March 2000 to $7.44 in December 2000 – Jobs used the cash he had on hand to start a chain of Apple Stores.”

Google subsidizes an amazing variety of services with ad revenue. Perhaps subsidizing its operating system would make sense to Apple in its current financial position.

07/31/2009 UPDATE: As people probably read, Apple announced at WWDC that it will indeed sell Snow Leopard for $29. Also, this post is somehow the second result when googling “mac 10.6 $30″.

Microsoft did have a great idea: let their customers speak for them. It nicely battles Apple’s professional Mac ads, and it gives normal people a place to be heard and possibly be on TV. And yet, Microsoft designed the entire campaign around “I’m a PC and…,” rather than “Microsoft makes my life easier because….” The ad campaign is embarrassing for Microsoft. They’re explicitly acknowledging that Apple’s ads have been damaging. But moreover, their rebuttal campaign is implicitly acknowledging that their own products are indeed worse than Apple’s by not discussing them. Instead, Microsoft is encouraging people to identify with a fairly meaningless slogan, “I’m a PC.” The campaign is effectively saying, “We know Vista is worse than Leopard, but more of the world runs on Microsoft.” Very true but probably not a useful marketing strategy.

Microsoft is the 800-pound gorilla of the computer industry. And yet, they have done a surprisingly bad job at advertising. Vista was years late in launching, and the best ad they could come up with was “Wow”. More recently, they took a different tactic: the Mojave Experiment, where they initially tricked a group of people into thinking they were looking at a prototype OS, before revealing that the OS was Vista. Both seem like wastes of money. Apple needs to advertise to convince the public to buy something other than Windows; Microsoft doesn’t need to convince people to buy Windows, just as Google and Amazon don’t advertise their main services.

Microsoft does have the capacity for brilliance. Two years ago, an internal marketing video was posted to YouTube, entitled “Microsoft iPod”. The video was supposed to make the larger marketing department wake up and start selling elegance, and it was so popular on the web because it succinctly contrasted Microsoft’s approach to product marketing with Apple’s approach. They’re self-aware of their weaknesses, but they haven’t changed.

All of which brings me to Microsoft’s latest misstep. In September, the company decided to spend $300M on a set of ads called “Windows without Walls”. They began with two spots with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld; it was reported that they paid Seinfeld $10M for his role. These ads succeeded in getting a lot of media attention. They were quirky and pointless, and I assume both were intentional. But it’s believed that Microsoft prematurely ended this series because of the publicity, and they transitioned to ads directly acknowledging Apple’s ads. A real Microsoft employee (who looks remarkably like Apple’s PC caricature) starts it off by saying, “I’m a PC, and I’ve been made into a stereotype,” and then a whole slew of PC users say variants of “I’m a PC”. The only redeeming quality of the ads is the real people they show. While Apple took a great idea and executed it well, Microsoft had multiple ideas and executed them badly in concert. They directly addressed Apple’s ads and tried to defend themselves by getting real people to read from a script. Microsoft shouldn’t have acknowledged Apple or its ads at all. Politicians don’t address issues the opponent brings up; they change the subject to ones where they shine. Apple now has new ads poking fun at Microsoft’s ad campaign.

So I wondered what I would do in Microsoft’s position. I have $300M to spend on advertising and well-known products that have well-known issues. Simple: let the people tell defend us. Microsoft had the right idea using real people in their ads. They just executed the idea badly. The company shouldn’t try to manage the story. Instead, just let people tell their own stories, and turn the best into ads. Microsoft should have made a game out of it: “$1K for 1K”. Anyone can upload a 15-second or 30-second video to MSN Video (since Microsoft probably doesn’t want these on YouTube). Anyone can vote on them. Microsoft will pick the best (not necessarily the highest voted) and turn them into TV and web ads. Anyone whose video gets picked gets $1K. I’m sure there is a price point around there to convince Windows lovers to pick up a camera and shoot 15 seconds.

The key is to focus on real people. Let them talk about what they like. Let them acknowledge problems, perhaps as reasonable solutions to difficult problems. Apple’s ads can talk about viruses because the Windows install base is a larger vector than Mac OS X’s. Some portion of the videos would probably attack Apple, pointing out these realities, like a small market share. The ad campaign would cost 10% of what Seinfeld cost, and yet it would be far more effective at putting a human face on the global brand. Moreover, just as Apple’s ads scale well in terms of subject matter, Microsoft’s ads could focus on any feature with a video to address it or any product they sell, like Office or Exchange.

Microsoft wants to appear more human. The solution to that is not hiring Seinfeld or handing regular people a three-word script. Give people an outlet, and I think they’ll surprise you. Let them be the face of Microsoft.