Nothing to do with uISVs, but I just nailed an interview in my continuing search to find a new day job.  It certainly helps when your current boss is best buddies with the prospective new boss and the person with direct hiring authority is an ex-coworker*.  I’d like to think that my resume and good attitude during the interview helped the matter, too.

* This isn’t that uncommon in Japan.  It isn’t that uncommon in America, either, although most people downplay its importance.  The freakishly high chances that two people in a related field will again do business with each other are as good a reason as anything to be faultlessly polite and fair in all of your business dealings.

Every uISV has a screenshot page and, if you’re sane, a shot of your program above the fold on your front page.  These are generally teeny-tiny thumbnails which exist more to demonstrate the fact that there is a real purchasable product than anything else.  Of course, customers actually want to be able to read the text on your GUI, so you link that thumbnail to an image file… and bad stuff happens.

For the non-technical B2C market, “bad stuff” generally means “Prospective customer cannot find their way out of the image”.  Yes, I know, I know, they have a back button.  They may not KNOW they have a back button, though.  My screenshots, for the longest time, had 80%+ bounce rates until I figured this out.  So I’ve been using the _blank thing to pop the screenshot up in a new window, which is a decent compromise but it distracts unduly from the sales pitch.  They have to close that window to get back to reading, and I’d rather they have a visual reminder of what exactly they were doing so they don’t get distracted, switch to their email, and go away.

Luckily, there is this nice little Javascript widget called Lightbox (introduced to me by the indispensable Nick Hebb, king of flowchart software).  Add two lines of code to your web page, tag screen shots with rel=”lightbox”, and you get a shiny Javascript preview effect which is quite similar to e-junkie’s Fat Free Cart.  It grays out the rest of the page but keeps it visible, and directs your attention directly on the screenshot — a single click anywhere dismisses it, taking you back to the page.  (There is a Lightbox2 which has more sophisticated behavior which is, for my customers, a usability nightmare.  I passed.)  You can take a quick gander at the home page for Bingo Card Creator — try playing with the main screen shot to see Lightbox and the purchasing page to use the Fat Free Cart.

… but the CrazyEgg guys do, and I wish them the best of luck.  They have a very, very Web 2.0-y analytics and split testing program.  Well, its not a full-featured analytics program — it basically tells you whats being clicked on, and thats it, with an extraordinarily cool (er, is that hot?) heatmap visualization of it.  It is amazingly easy to get started on their free trial, so amazing that they could teach Google a thing or three about it.  Put in email address, put in password, fill out two line form about page to test, copy one line of provided HTML into page, upload.  30 seconds or less to the shiny.  If I get nothing else out of my free trial, I’ll have gotten a good usability example for Kalzumeus.

Here’s my concern: while they are much easier to use than Analytics (they will, for example, track clicks on my links offsite or to setup files without any special work on my part), I have already climbed Mt. Analytics Learning Curve and can now bask in the awesome view — such as dicing visitors down by where they came from, watching search terms trends, and tracking click paths around my site.  For free.  Their free trial (5,000 visits tracked a month) will work for a few more weeks for me, but then I’ll go over the traffic limit and it comes down to the “Do I really want to pay more than my web hosting budget for an analytics program?” question.  Which would be “Oh, heck yes!”… if I didn’t already have Analytics. 

Then they have this split-testing option, where you can have them run, say, the stats on 2,000 consecutive visitors.  Then you twiddle the page a bit and rerun the test, getting 2,000 new consecutive visitors, and compare.  That is both great and, again, inferior to the free Google Website Optimizer*.  Now, if they could just bring their considerable usability chops to solving the biggest problem with Website Optimizer, which is that it is a freaking pain in the keister to use, I’d give them $9 a month and a gold star.  I have been meaning to start using Website Optimizer for months but every time I do I get to the start of the process, figure its going to take me two hours to get anywhere, and then get distracted by other demands on my time.

 * Note that the key problem here is that Website Optimizer does actual splitting — for example, if I get 4,000 visitors they get parceled out to the two alternative pages randomly instead of first 2,000 to one and next 2,000 to the other.  That is fairly key for me, since my business has very definite cycles in it, and I’m doing all sorts of things in the background.  If, for example, 2,000 visits happen Monday through Friday, and then the next 2,000 visits happen Saturday through Wednesday, then I naturally expect the “Download a Free Trial” link to get less activity anyhow in the second half because my best customers (teachers) aren’t typically on the Internet on Saturday or Sunday.  That throws off the results of the test.

I’m glad you found the article on customer service interesting.  Feel free to leave comments on it, or here.

Note to usual blog readers: Neat New Things is a newsletter sent around by a librarian named Marylaine Block who runs a little side business on the Internet.  I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and say you probably haven’t heard of it.  My site was listed for the customer service article from a while back, with the comment “Both the initial article and the comments provide valuable ideas and perspective.”, in the middle of about a dozen links about various topics.  Now, personally, if I wrote a post with about twelve links in a row like this one I would guess perhaps 1% of the readership would visit a link in the middle.  Given that literally one thousand readers (!) have come to take a gander at that post over the last 24 hours, most attributable to that email newsletter, I would estimate that librarian’s reach at probably in the high five to low six digits worth of extraordinarily dedicated readers.

Ponder that for a moment.

I’m going to take a wild shot in the dark and say that my post probably caught Ms. Block’s attention after it was mentioned on Librarian in Black, a high traffic librarian weblog.
Librarians, like school teachers, are quite smart folks who are not typically described as being on the leading edge of the technology curve.  However, apparently there are an awful lot of them out there, and they have their own little pocket of cyberspace which is actually not little at all.  They are an addressable audience on the Internet (or somebody wouldn’t have a mailing list of five or six digits worth of them, least of all one which is read actively), they read blogs at least part of the time, and they almost certainly have problems which can be solved by software.

Two takeways from this:

• Do you have a blog that 1,000 potential customers of your software could be reading tomorrow?  If not, what exactly is keeping you from writing one?
• Would you have written librarians off as a potential niche for a uISV, because they probably don’t buy software anyhow?   Often uISVs have a mindset which is overly informed by being quite techy people, and they forget that the rest of the world uses computers, too.