This user’s experienceby Matt Henderson, since 2003

My friend Andy Rutledge asked yesterday whether there is place for compromise in the design profession. There are probably multiple interpretations of what’s meant by “compromise”, but in terms of design itself, I would argue that no design solution can exist without compromise.

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IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that an opportunity presents itself to develop a product for an audience of 1.5 million people. That’s exactly what happened recently at Makalu, as we were engaged to develop the iPhone component of Catalog Choice’s new suite of premium services.

And we can’t wait to tell you about it!

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Alex and I were discussing over coffee at the office this morning the amazing job Apple did in their retail experience, and were imagining the areas in which clothing retailers could improve their shopping experience. One glaring example in which some attention is badly needed is the changing room.

The changing rooms in many retail outlets are surprisingly overlooked, when you consider they’re often the place at which a consumer makes the final purchase decision.

• Many retailers start off the experience by suggesting you’re an unwanted thief. You have to ask for a key, because all the doors are locked. And don’t think about taking in more than three garments at a time.

• Some have curtains, rather than doors, which can leave the timid a bit too focused on preventing the world from getting a sneak peek at their backsides. The good places have solid doors, that make a comforting clunk when closing.

• Often, changing rooms provide nowhere to place the clothes you’re taking off. Who wants to drop their clothes in a big clump on the floor? The good places provide hangars, a bench or a shelf. (And this concept can be extended to other consumer needs we can anticipate — like what to do with the 22 pins evidently required to hold a folded shirt in place.)

• And last, but definitely not least, there’s the lighting. How do they get such an obvious thing so wrong? We’ve all been there, getting half-naked in a changing room lit by cheap florescent bulbs, casting their light down at just such an unflattering angle that one glimpse in the mirror provokes a quick decision that the more prudent purchase would be a gym membership.

For nearly a decade, we at Makalu have worked to consistently deliver real, objective value to our customers, and by external measures we’ve been successful. We built a website for Catalog Choice that registered a million users in its first year. We built a game for Google and Virgin America that Ogilvy & Mather pointed to as a reference for modern-day marketing. And we’ve increased signed up conversion, customer retention, and ultimately the bottom line for many more.

We seem to have done well, which is great, except for one thing — we’ve never been able to shake a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction. Although we’re doing good work by external standards, we know deep down that we’re not doing our best work, by our own standards.

Is it something we should just accept, or should we do something about it? In case others in our industry might share in this internal tension, I decided to put our thoughts into an article to share.

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At Makalu Interactive we ran both Google and Facebook ads for our RaceSplitter product, for about six months. After seeing the relative performance, we dropped Facebook.

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My company develops an iPhone application called RaceSplitter for the timing of sporting events. It’s a well made product, that until now has received almost exclusively exceptional reviews. And that’s important to us, because user reviews strongly influence the purchasing decision of potential customers.

Today, a new review came in from iTunes — giving the product “one star”, i.e. essentially saying it couldn’t be any worse. Let’s take a look at user WEDALLARD’s review of RaceSplitter (in an iTunes view that also shows us his other product reviews).

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Having tracked my personal finances and investment transactions in Quicken for Mac since around 1992, I was keenly interested in an email from Intuit, with the subject, “Is Quicken compatible with Mac OS 10.7 Lion?”

Coming from a company who’s major product upgrades over the past years have included new features along the lines of, “Enhanced Toolbar Icons”, and “Includes free copy of Stuffit Expander”, my hopes weren’t high.

And it’s a good thing they weren’t. The email pointed to this page of insulting corporate speak.

I’ll do you the favor, and translate it here to plain English.

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BEFORE NOW, THE CHOICES AVAILABLE to organizers of trail running events for the timing of their races were:

1. Expensive — Contracting a professional chip-timing service, the cost of which can easily exceed 1,000€.

2. Painful — Manually recording times, using a stopwatch and paper, or typing into an Excel spreadsheet on a laptop.

An exciting new option exists that costs a fraction of a professional service, is convenient and easy to use, yet provides high quality, reliable results.

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A few months back, I received an email from Ramiro Rejón, owner of a local Spanish company called “Avent y Event” — organizers of the popular series of local ultra trail running events, including the Animal Trail (in El Burgo) and the Inferno Trail (in Tolox). He and his partners, JuanMa and Yolanda, wanted to talk about the possibility of using RaceSplitter in their newest event, the INFINITA Ultra Trail, taking place on Saturday, June 25, in Cortes de la Frontera, Spain.

http://infinitaultratrail.es

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Marketing and advertising have long been important ingredients in the success of commercial products. What has accelerated those industries forward over the decades has been the ever-increasing ability to close the analytics loop from advertising to sales.

For example, through direct mail coupons, which can be traced back to specific campaigns, advertising professionals have been able to conclusively demonstrate the effectiveness of long copy, have identified particular words that are effective in headlines, understand the importance of captions, and can determine cost per sale to the penny. Online, tools like Google analytics, in combination with techniques such as A/B testing, have taken us even further.

The iOS market, however, currently suffers a critical shortcoming in this area.

Apple do not provide any mechanism to close the loop between a source (referral from a website, or advertisement) and, ultimately, a sale. Without it, Apple are denying product makers with precisely the mechanism that propelled advertising from an industry of guesswork to one that, today, has nearly become a science.

Furthermore, controlling a single marketplace, Apple have the potential to take advertising and sales analytics to a level never before possible. For example, in addition to providing positive- and neutral-feedback analytics, they could provide negative-feedback as well — i.e. they could provide product makers and advertisers with closed-loop data relating ones own ads to the direct purchase of a competitor’s product. Things could get very interesting!

So here’s to hoping Apple make this a priority.

My wife and I were invited to participate in the Swans school “Career Day”. We were assigned one of about 10 tables in a large ballroom, where 100 or so year-10 students walked around asking career-related questions. Here’s a summary of the advice we gave:

1. Technology is a great field to pursue. It’s never boring. It has the potential to impact people in positive ways, and to change the world.

2. Don’t worry about making the wrong choice when deciding what to study at university. Neither Pino nor I relied on what we learned at university in our careers. If you’re going into technology, you probably would be better off with engineering, than, say, painting, but other than that, don’t worry about it.

3. Work on your writing skills. The best companies these days, in most any field, are looking for people who can communicate clearly, and concisely in writing.

4. Travel. Spend your summers living in other countries, so that you can get a perspective of the world outside Marbella.

5. Don’t hesitate to change careers, in search of work that you enjoy. You want to do good work, and you’ll only do good work if you’re doing something you enjoy.

For almost a decade, my company, Makalu Interactive, has been providing web design and development services to clients. We’ve had a lot of both good fortune, and success. But all along, we’ve also dreamed of creating and selling our own products, and have been working towards the day in which we could share time between both serving clients, and creating for ourselves.

Late 2010, the opportunity to take the first step presented itself, and several months later, RaceSplitter — Makalu’s first product — went on sale in Apple’s App Store. The story of RaceSplitter — how it came about, how it was designed, and how it was later marketed — was recently published on the blog at 37signals.

Be sure to check it out! Click here to read the article.

Apple Inc. took a risk, and invested in the design and development of an integrated platform — including innovative devices, an operating system, a distribution system, and a payment system. They offer this platform in the free market, under a set of terms and conditions to which those who choose to participate must agree. Those terms explicitly allow Apple to change the game anytime they wish.

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Recently, a potential new customer expressed surprise when I told him that we at Makalu usually don’t sign NDAs. Mentioning that he’d found plenty of other companies willing to sign his NDA, I restated commitment to our position, and acceptance that we’d unfortunately have to miss the opportunity.

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My brother, who lives near Atlanta (United States), visited an Apple store last week to check out some odd behavior with his MacBook. The technician noticed that his battery has physically expanded, and needed replacing. Seeing that my brother’s computer was covered by AppleCare, he said, “Hey, let’s take the opportunity to see whether anything else needs fixing/replacing, since your AppleCare expires next month.” As a result, my brother walked away with a new battery, trackpad, keyboard, and display.

Recently, some bureaucrats in Germany decided that business owners who employ contractors — even those, like me, who’ve been in business more than a decade — should provide certified proof that they (the owners) are not criminals.