engaging experience

What's So "Social" About LinkedIn?

I recently discovered Beth Kanter's blog on using social media for nonprofit strategy. Since the topic's right up my alley, I clicked through to her LinkedIn profile to check out her professional offerings. Her profile indicates she's open to being contacted for consulting opportunities or expertise requests. Since I'm a LinkedIn member, too, I decided to invite her to join my network, and clicked "Add Beth to your network" on her profile page.

This launched LinkedIn's Add Connections screen, below. Since I'm not sure whether Beth and I know anyone in common or are in any of the same groups, I decided to check the option "I don't know Beth" and type a friendly, personalized message in the note box:

Once I'd finished my note, I pressed Send Invitation. But LinkedIn threw this at me:

Clicking the only option in this lightbox returned me to Beth's LinkedIn profile, discarding the note I'd just composed.

LinkedIn violated a couple key UI rules, here:

• They offered the user an option that's not available. If there was no way that clicking "I don't know Beth" was going to get my message sent, LinkedIn shouldn't have showed me that option. I supposed it's possible this option is sometimes available to some users. In that case, it could be grayed and disabled for all other users, but only if there is a possibility of somehow meeting the criteria. For example, if upgrading my account would permit me to contact people I don't know, the option could be grayed-out but with a small note next to it asking for the sale.

• They threw the user's work away. LinkedIn didn't offer me the option of returning to the screen to edit my selections, or even to copy the note I'd so carefully crafted. What if I really knew Beth, but had checked the wrong radio button?

My uncharitable impression is that the rationale behind these UI choices is simply to reinforce LinkedIn's rules: "Don't contact people you don't know. They don't like it, and neither to we." Isn't there a nicer way to teach users "the rules" without scolding them?

As a social media site, LinkedIn needs to get a little more sociable.

Wild Helleborine

This orchid grows by our stone wall. Epipactis helleborine, the weed orchid. Each blossom is no bigger than a fairy's crown. The experience? Magical.

One Hundredth Post

This is my one hundredth post. The gravity of that milestone has muted me for weeks. What can I say that's special enough for the occasion?

Since launch, engaging experience has enjoyed 10,139 pageviews (and one more, now that you're reading this).  The average is 10.42 per day, the majority to posts I blogged live at the AI@50 Conference. Visitors seem also to be interested in meaning. Some even come straight to the home page. Now that's flattery.

So this one hundredth post is a tautology. It is about itself. And now I can move on.

Would you like to Next, or Submit?

Okay, buttons should be verbs. I think we can all agree. But Next and Previous, or even the ugly but more parallel Prev, are well established actions, or implied actions, so they're used a lot. But still, what verb?

At my husband's company, a vendor is developing a UI to collect clinical data about a medical procedure. First draft: a tabbed interface that requires the user to enter data on the first form, move to the next, and so on. Sound okay so far?

Each tabbed form is so long you have to scroll. Uh oh. Scrolling on tabbed interface = bad. We're not off to a strong start.

Then, here are the three buttons at the bottom of the first tab screen:

Previous  |  Next  |  Submit

Please take ten seconds and think about what each of these would do to the data you just entered into this (long, scrolling) form.

Ready?

Previous: Please recall that this is the first form. So why is previous even enabled? It does absolutely nothing.

Next: This takes you to the next tab of info to enter. But it doesn't save your data.

Submit: This runs a validation check on your data. If it passes, your data is saved. If it doesn't pass, your data is discarded. And in any case, it throws you out of the tabbed UI altogether.

Where to begin? This vendor obviously doesn't know thing one about UI design. In ten seconds I bet you came up with better ideas.

Discounting Charitable Gifts

"A survey last fall by American Express Publishing and Harrison Group found that 99% of wealthy consumers shop online, expecting goods to be discounted at least 30% from store prices." — Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2008

Twice in the last year my employer (and alma mater) has run a marketing campaign in which an anonymous donor promises $100,000 for each 1,000 gifts made during the challenge period. The goal is to drive participation by making each new gift, regardless of its value, worth an extra $100. The additional challenge money goes to financial aid, partly because it's an area of need, but also because it's broadly appealing to our constituency; an easy sell.

Challenges are a well-worn tactic of nonprofit fundraising: think public radio. They work because they lift gift value, but also because they create urgency. For us, the strategy works reasonably well. We usually see a few thousand donors fulfilling their pledges during these periods, many giving as little as $1, knowing their gift will amount to much more—up to 100 times more—when the challenge money comes in. But it's also not unusual for major annual fund donors, those who usually give in excess of $2,500, to fulfill their pledges during these campaigns, too. This is probably because we hit all non-donors hard with direct postal and email over a few weeks, and if you market, they will give. But we've always assumed the "extra $100" selling point probably doesn't carry much weight with these major donors.

But the above stat in the Wall Street Journal made me realize even the major donor might view such challenges as essentially a "discount" or "sale" on their charitable gift, because even a $2,500 gift yields a 4% premium if given during the challenge period. The donor doesn't realize a tax advantage of that additional money, but knowing it exists may make the donor feel like the "system" is giving them a better deal for the money.

This makes me wonder whether we could even more consciously leverage other mass-market phenomena like discounting, promotions, time-limited offers, and outlet sales without cheapening the enterprise. We're selling the undergraduate experience, essentially, but that's a pretty broad, generic product, even for an institution that has a strong reputation for excellence. What more specific products would connect with donors? And how can our product/marketing mix get more specific and targeted?

Obama (Mostly) Gets It

This week I donated a modest sum to Obama's candidacy. Earlier this month I started receiving email announcements from his campaign, a consequence of having joined his web community. I had already decided to contribute, so when I received a direct email solicitation, it was natural simply to click through and give.

The hook of this solicitation was the promise of a dollar-for-dollar match by another Obama supporter somewhere in the country, to whom I could subsequently send a personalized note. I entered my gift amount and card details, and learned on the confirmation screen that my matcher was "Norman." Using the form on the screen, I dropped Norman a line of thanks, declining to provide my email address because I wasn't keen to start a conversation with a stranger to whom my only connection was action politics. Once I'd submitted my note to Norman, I landed on another screen asking me to start recruiting other friends into the cause, using the site to reach out for additional support and donations. I decided to skip that step, too. I got an email confirmation of my gift a few minutes later, and left the site believing I'd done some tiny good in the world, and made a tiny connection to boot.

I also left believing the Obama camp gets it. They demonstrated by this experience that they know there's power in the emotional connection between the constituent and the candidate, but also among constituents themselves. They know that technology can facilitate that connection, and permit the constituent to make the connection as personal as she finds comfortable. They know that in marketing, there's always a next ask, and they know that on the web, there's always a next action.

But there's still some room for growth. I don't know, for example, whether my donation was tax-deductible, because neither the UI nor the email mentioned this. I don't know whether I'm going to receive a printed acknowledgment of my gift by postal mail, and whether this would be the official tax document. The net effect of this experience was more emotional than intellectual or programmatic, which is okay only to a point.

What's more, a few days after donating, I got another solicitation asking me to donate $15 or more to receive a groovy Obama car magnet. I'm not sure why I was asked again so soon; whether it was because the campaign has hasn't yet processed my gift, or because there's a policy of continual re-solicitation. (A less charitable donor might wonder whether they're disorganized or greedy.) And as a very recent donor of more than $15, shouldn't I get a car magnet, too? (Again, less charitably: shouldn't I have held my gift until I could get better swag?)

Since in my day job I design online fundraising websites, this experience has taught me a few things about designing a good fundraising web experience:

1. Ask for the sale, and always ask for the next action, but don't ask for the sale again too soon, or you'll risk alienating your loyal customers;
2. Support the donor's pragmatic requirements. Make it easy to find out the tax and financial consequences of their donation. Tell them whether to expect anything further in the mail;
3. If you offer a premium to new donors, send the premium to any new donor who's given in the last month, especially if the new premium is widely marketed;
4. If you offer a premium to new donors, offer one to repeat donors, too, and maybe even a better premium. Fundraisers know that repeat donors are more valuable than gold.

The Smiling Whale

I get the Twitter "over capacity" error screen at least once a day:

Why does this whale look so self-satisfied? And why aren't the birds straining on the ropes?

I would be embarrassed to run a web service that was so under-resourced, even if it were free to users, and I would be scrambling to enable additional capacity. Maybe the tweeting peeps at Twitter are scrambling; I don't know. This error screen sure doesn't tell me so. Maybe it should.

Absolute Pronouncements Corrupt Absolutely

In the last few days I've been treated to an overabundance of blanket pronouncements by experts. Here's a sampling:

"There are only five or six, maybe seven, real authors alive today."
"There are really only three or four pieces of literature that have ever been written about the Holocaust."
"There is almost no literature now. There's a lot of writing, but little of it is literature."
"The Back button is the button of doom."
"Users do not come to browse your site. They have a purpose."
"Web users want actionable content; they don't want to fritter away their time on (otherwise enjoyable) stories that are tangential to their current goals.

Okay, you're entitled to you opinion, and I'm entitled to mine. If you back up your opinion with data, you're more likely to convince me. But if you postulate easily disprovable axioms, or if you postulate axioms that are impossible to prove or disprove, I'm going to shut my mind to you. And that's not really what a pundit wants, is it?

Magnetic Fields Visualization

This short film, recorded at the Space Sciences Laboratory UC Berkeley, offers a striking visualization of magnetic fields.

Hat tip: cboone

How Are You Feeling Right Now?

I use Basecamp from 37signals for project management. Yesterday, after getting tripped up for the second time on one feature of the app, I decided to submit a support request. Here's the support screen:

Note the last selector. Here it is, opened up:

Note that 37signals did not make the customer classify the error itself (as a bug, feature request, error message, question, etc.). Instead, they asked the customer to classify the impact of the error, which is an easier task for the customer and more meaningful for 37signals.