Change the Timing, Change the Game: TurnTo, Curebit

Change the Rules (Photo by Satish Krishnamurthy, cc-by license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/unlistedsightings/3252766510/, rotated and cropped)

Some of the most interesting innovations in eCommerce are based on simple changes to the context of the customer-store interaction. Private Event Retail, for example, turned on its head the idea that your goal is to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, and changed “limited inventory” from a weakness into a strength.

In this post I discuss two other examples of changing the game by changing the rules in eCommerce: TurnTo and CureBit. Both attempt to drive consumer behavior more effectively by changing the basic timing of events: one in product reviews and recommendations, the other in deal sharing.

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The Problem with Time on Site

Time is Running Out (Photo by Andrea Zamboni, cc-by-nc license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/zamboniandrea/170324255/)

In a previous post (Metaphors That Mislead Us: User, Audience, Visitor, Shopper?), I discussed the way in which the terms we use to describe the people who interact with our web-based applications can shape our thinking, encouraging some approaches and limiting or making others highly unlikely.

Another way in which the language we use to talk about web applications fails us is in the notion of “time on site” which analytics vendors have led us to believe means something other than what it really means.

Time on site (or Time on Page) really means something more like:

Time elapsed between multiple HTTP requests in a sequence from a single IP address within a given period of time.

Nothing more, nothing less. The “given period of time” is the session length, which is configurable but is commonly 30 minutes or an hour.

In other words, if I request one page, and only one page, from your web application/page/site, my “time on site” is exactly 0 (or undefined). Doesn’t matter if I spend 20 minutes reading the article, if I don’t request a second page, the web analytics software has no way to know how much time I spent “on” that page.

If I request a page – but open it in a background tab, as I often do, along with 10-15 other things I’m going to read throughout the day – and the view that browser tab 25 minutes later, and click on a link within it, requesting a second page – this will register as me having spent 25 minutes “on” the original page.

What web analytics software knows what URLs have been requested in a browser from an IP address. (If I use multiple browsers, each of them is treated by analytics as a distinct user, because each browser gets a unique cookie, though multiple windows or tabs in a single browser is treated as one user). The software has no knowledge of what the user behind the browser is actually doing during that time.

This doesn’t mean “time on site” is meaningless, precisely – just that it needs to be carefully considered in a broader context and with an understanding of what the label conceals.

The most common misuse of this, in my opinion, is the discussion of Facebook, and the amount of time users spend each day “in” or “on” Facebook. One of the reasons retailers are so excited about F-Commerce is because of the amount of time potential shoppers spend “in” or “on” the site, because they’re imagining Facebook as a location – as though there’s a giant Mall of the World (even bigger than Mall of America) with 600 million plus people trapped in it for 4 hours a day, yearning to spend some money.

Mall of America (Photo by jpellgen, cc-by-nc-nd license, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpellgen/778968733/)

But are people really in Facebook in the way this suggests?

I’m in danger here of assuming my own experience is representative, but I know for myself and everyone I’ve talked to about this Facebook is just one among many things open and active on my laptop (or iPad, or phone) at a given time. The average user often has Facebook open in multiple tabs as she reads links friends have sent her, engages in comment threads, and jumps between webmail and other applications. Add them all up, and we’re all certainly spending significant time during the day engaging with Facebook (requesting urls from facebook.com). But we’re not stuck there: we’re skipping in and out – switching to other web pages, tabs, and windows, interacting with other applications on the same machine, and even (shocking, I know) stepping away from the keyboard from time to time.

Sometimes those interactions will be within the session window (a fairly arbitrary window, to be clear) and count as one visit with a long duration. Sometimes those interactions will be across session windows and count as multiple visits of short duration. Neither’s really entirely accurate, but in the aggregate it seems to me the latter is probably more accurate.

Metaphors That Mislead Us: User, Audience, Visitor, Shopper?

"I Am" photo by Allison Felus, cc-by (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrestlingentropy/405308094/)

The metaphors we use to describe digital technology end up misleading us.

We attempt to understand new technologies by bringing the context of previous experiences and hoping to find relevant analogies, but those analogies often carry other unintended meanings and can obscure possibilities.

For example, we think of the urls our browsers request as:

• Sites we visit (geographic / spatial metaphor, as in cyberspace)
• Pages we read (publishing / media metaphor, as in web publishing or content management)
• Applications we use (software metaphor – as in web applications)
• Communities we join and interact with (sociological metaphor, as in online community management)
• Stores we browse and shop (retail metaphor)

In turn, this means we think of the people who interact with our digital experiences as visitors, readers, users, members, and shoppers. These get all mixed together in actual usage, and there are complexities in each. (In social networking, for example, we also think of each user/member as a node in a network – drawing on a shared mathematics concept which underlies computer networking, social networking, and graph theory).

The challenge is how to use these metaphors to understand the new experiences while being careful not to let them constrict our thinking about what is possible.

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The Assembled Web: Notes Toward a Manifesto

In the spirit of (and heavily inspired by) the original Cluetrain Manifesto and the recent 10th anniversary edition, I offer the following definition and 10 principles of what we at Optaros have been calling the Assembled Web.

The Assembled Web is not experienced as a set of discrete web applications and sites, neatly separated from each other and organized into categories: it’s an indiscriminate field of content, functionality, and people interacting in multiple contexts and in unpredictable ways: like life.

New web applications are assembled from other projects/applications/frameworks/services, sometimes on the server, sometimes in the browser, sometimes in the cloud. People’s accounts, identities, and networks come with them across sites, applications, and contexts.

How should enterprises not only come to grips with this bewildering confusion but thrive in it?

By embracing the assembled web and participating fully in it.

Assembled Web First Principles:

1. You should always be thinking multi-site, multi-interface, multi-project. If you think you will (always) only have one interface to any given set of content of functionality, you’re mistaken, and you will paint yourself into a corner.
   
   
2. Success on the web is no longer (if it ever really was) about driving traffic to your site, or keeping eyeballs there once they arrive. It’s about engaging audiences everywhere they already are. It’s about improving the size, quality, and velocity of your “digital footprint.” Ubiquity is the target, not exclusivity. The danger is not that people will say bad things about you but that you will be ignored.
   
   
3. Your brand is not what you say it is, but what your prospects, customers, partners, and employees say it is. In short, your brand is what the Internet says it is. You influence this not through marketing but through creating appropriate experiences and getting users exposed to those positive experiences. (Micro-interactions are ultimately assembled into and become brands).
   
   
4. Design is critical, and design is not about pretty shiny objects. It’s about usable interfaces, in the sense of traditional HCI (Human Computer Interface) design, visual design, and technical design. Creating usable experiences for users and usable projects for developers are both essential, and to ignore either is to invite failure.
   
   
5. The internet itself, like the *nix operating systems on which it (almost entirely) runs, is a set of small pieces loosely joined. Every project you do must be composed of smaller discrete components communicating with each other. The corollary is that every project you do must also be composeable or consumable by other projects – including projects you know nothing about. This is true across multiple projects (within your organization and outside it) as well as over time within a given project.
   
   
6. The difference between “behind the firewall” and “out in the cloud” is trending toward zero. Same for the difference between employees and contractors, customers and prospects, competitors and partners. If you’re still thinking in terms of intranet, internet, and extranet, remember that the difference between them is (from a technology point of view) entirely arbitrary. What differentiates them is business processes and decisions.
   
   
7. There is no defensible reason to invent a proprietary standard wherever an open standard exists. In fact, even where no open standard exists, great efforts should be extended to create one, rather than implement a proprietary version.
   
   
8. Working in isolation from the rest of the internet is inherently limiting and dangerous. This is true whether you’re a one-developer shop or a 5000 developer IT department in a Fortune 100 company. Collaborative engineering with appropriate participants (which almost always means open source licensing arrangements) is required. Why continue to work alone now that the Internet exists?
   
   
9. Consumer Technology is beating Enterprise IT, and soundly. If your “in-house” IT can’t compete with a consumer-grade provider available “on the web” you need to catch up and compete or concede the function.
   
   
10. Small incremental releases are essential. It isn’t just a question of not putting too many eggs in one basket – it’s also about lowering the cost of failure and therefore raising the level of innovation. Don’t accept quarterly releases of functionality, or even monthly. Web applications should change hourly or at least daily. The web is live, not pre-recorded.

Community versus Commerce: MySears or Yours?

I was excited last month to see a blog post on ReadWriteWeb about Sears and Kmart adopting OpenID. In that post, Frederic Lardinois writes:

Users on Kmart’s and Sears’ web properties can now use their OpenID credentials to sign up and log in to these sites. MyKmart.com and MySears.com, which are both owned by the Sears Holding Company, implemented technology from Viewpoint and JanRain to allow users to use their login credentials from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Windows Live, as well as from any other OpenID provider. This marks one of the first times that such a large, mainstream online retailer has adopted OpenID.

As Sears points out in its press release, it simply makes good business sense for the company to allow its users to use their social IDs to log in to its properties. After all, not having to sign up for yet another new account on yet another site greatly reduces the likelihood that a potential customer would just abandon the process and head to a competitor’s site.

I’m a huge supporter of OpenID – and identity portability generally – and would absolutely agree that it makes good business sense to lower the barrier of entry for new registrations, in order to encourage more reviews, comments, questions, and ultimately purchases from end users.

But what exactly is Sears letting you sign in to?

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