YakShaving

Nan Hu, Paul A Pavlou, and Jie Zhang wrote about J shaped distribution curves for product reviews in ACM. I found it interesting because it cuts across behavioral economics, technology, statistics and visual communication.

For some time now, I’ve been interested in how companies can (or already do?!) positively or negatively use user generated content about products (often in the form of reviews and or star rating systems) to essentially change whether or not a future consumer will purchase.

Here’s me trying to make sense of this research visually:

I always thought this was weird that the decision-making factors for purchasing a product differ widely depending on consumer type, and naturally, the type of product. They also depend greatly on whether the product was evangelized to them in the first place by a friend, and even how much they paid for it.

I suspect that for digital electronics, product reviews and ratings play greatly into the product purchase decision.

Designing a clever product review system with an intent to render unbiased information about true product quality is in the best interests of an online retailer when they have good products available. For instance, when Amazon.com offers a panoply of products (both good and bad) as long as the profit margin is relatively the same on good and bad products, they make out well either way. Their best interest is served by being an unbiased merchant with a superior shopping experience so that I become a repeat customer. Transparency wins, all the time, hands down (I say this after spending a better part of the afternoon on TheFunded.com learning)

There are some other interesting behavioral trends in the data:

• People pay more attention to extreme reviews than moderate ones. (Why is that? I mean, I do it too, but I don’t exactly know why… Sometimes I even go so far as to sort for the worst reviews). I suspect that some people are risk averse buyers. They want to make sure that they know what the worst possible experience could be that someone had who bought the product. People never assume that they will be the extremes (at least I don’t think they do)
• The study authors claim that in order to enable full transparency, you have to provide this additional data, other than the average (which is given now): standard deviation, the two modes of the bimodal distribution of product reviews, and product price (to overcome purchasing bias).
• There are other things that are floating around in your head when you make a purchase that have a direct impact on what you post back to the site right? See my hacked figure. Surely there’s way more. Really, both consumers and companies are deceiving themselves if they think there’s a positive, beneficial qualitative feedback loop between product utility and product reviews

There’s only so much time in the day, but this is super interesting research. There’s a business underlying all of this waiting to be created.

I have been evangelizing this book, Rapt, recently in small circles of friends. Like Stumbling on Happiness, it’s not a self-help book, it deals more with cognition, attention, and social psych than anything.

I thought I’d take the time to post my interesting curations from the book since they are highly related to BettrAt.

– You are, essentially, the sum of what you pay attention to. This is sort of obvious, but I suspect if more people lived their lives this way, they’d be paying attention a lot more to the things they truly cared about.

– This is the kind of stuff that you read on cogdaily, but its interesting to think how the mind works: We have involuntary and bottom-up attention that we are wired to zoom in on brightly colored flowers (essentially detect and react to things that can threaten or advance your survival, and top-down attention, which requires us to actively focus and, as we say, “pay attention” to reading that textbook.

– Attentional capacity is creation of both nature and nurture (William James, the psychologist, proved this). The brain has a three part attentional system, Alerting, Orienting, and Executive function.

– A well developed executive network makes it easier to shift your attention from unproductive thoughts and feelings to energizing ones. It also has a tremendous impact on self-control/self-regulation.

– Continuous meditation over time increases activity in the left prefontal cortex, linked to optimistic, goal oriented emotionality. This also contributes to the ability to focus at other times.

– UWisconsin scientist Richard Davidson: Acute concentration on positive emotions like compassion, joy, gratitude strengthens neurons in the left prefrontal cortex that inhibit disturbing messages from the fear oriented amygdala.

– It is possible to be attentionally trained– to pay focused attention to the things that someone wants to repeatedly (it takes a long time)

– Gallagher talks about cultural differences in attention– eastern societies where attention is outward/group focused, vs. the west, where its focused on the individual. This was a good one – despite the claims made for products marketed to hopeful parents, a study showed that focusing babies aged 8 to 16 months on educational videos impedes their verbal development. each hour of viewing correlated with the child knowing 6 to 8 fewer words than unwired peers.

– UCLA study on postmodern families and dinner: American families in one study dine together only 17% of the time, even when everyone is home, despite the fact that this is one of the few times that family members have the opportunity to pay attention to one another. The television and various other electronica and attentional vices have brought about the “staggered meal” common to so many households. Being “busy” is not an excuse, some families really just don’t make this a priority. The study also found that most families who do get together have a narrative style with the “chief” being the father. Moms and kids tend to be open ended and participatory–”How should I deal with this situation?” while Dads prefer “Here’s how I’m handling it”. Wow, so I know I’ve been guilty of this in the past.

– A person’s unique perspective is shaped almost solely by what they pay attention to, and how they pay attention. Sometimes people’s senses differ entirely, and this means that people in relationships focus on different realities. The best way to get around this is working out a lot of things (like chore responsibility) beforehand that demand attention so you don’t have to keep attending to them and talking about them. See “fundamental attribution error”.

– Thoughts + Feelings = mental state. You process information that jibes with your current mental state. This one’s huge! We like to think that we have more control of what we’re “thinking” but our current mental state acts like this substrate that’s infinitely malleable.

–96 Beware the demand-withdraw pattern in relationships that’s a vicious circle – once it gets established, refocusing efforts on the other person and communicating openly is difficult.

– 101 unless you can concentrate on what you want to do and suppress distractions, it’s hard to accomplish anything, period. Nicholas Hobbs — choose activities that push you so close to the edge of your competence that they demand your absolute focus. Relish taking on risky projects that have a 50/50 chance of success.

– 103 ESM – Experience Sampling method (major innovation in psychological research used at work). Surprising discover: only about 20% of people flow once or more each day. About 15 %, never, and most people, only occasionally. Most people spend time oscillating between stress and boredom (different but equally unfocused, unproductive, unsatisfying conditions.

– 105 Paragons of inventiveness maintain a wide angle perspective on life that ensures that they’ll as Csikzhentmihalyi puts it, “be surprised by something every day”.

– Oliver Schultheiss (Michigan) – visualization exercises to “pre-experience careers” is a good idea (At BettrAt, we say that one mentor’s hindsight is another’s foresight). Pre-experiencing someone’s day is a great way to learn what they do.

– 112 – Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work AND leisure activities produces not only better daily experience but also a more complex interesting person. Hobbs: Choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become. (Did I choose trouble with starting BettrAt?

– 113- Csikzhentmihalyi: “I just don’t have the time” == I just don’t have the self discipline. Okay I loved this part: Optimal human experience is a Darwinian dynamic that can slowly transform society and even affect evolution by encouraging activities of ever-greater complexity, countering business-as-usual mindsets, and offering alternatives to obsolete, destructive behavior. Maybe that’s why I am hopped up about the line we use “BettrAt: An Evolved way to get better“.

-117: Kahneman: Our thinking gets befuddled not so much by our emotions as by our cognitive illusions, or mistaken intuitions and other flawed, fragmented mental constructs.

– 119 – People have an “experiencing self” and a “remembering self”. Attention both to what you choose to experience and what you choose to think about is at the very core of how I approach questions of well being. hear it evaluated, remembering self looks back on experience, focus on its emotional high point in outcomes, formulates thoughts about it, not always accurately. Since memory is biased and unpredictable (more like a patchwork quilt than a seamless tape history of reality), the actual mental artifact is either more positive or negative in tone than the actual event. this reminds me of the article in the Boston Globe that talked about money & happiness, and how people spend money on things that essentially do not make them happy (lots of stuff).

– 135 – William James: degenerative mind is full of copious and original associations, so that tending to the germ of an idea soon leads to all sorts of fascinating consequences. Whenever you engage in creative activity, you boost your level positive emotion, which in turn literally widens your attentional range giving you more material to work with.

– p136- Fascinating study by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer on human behavior: chose subjects who were elderly men who are volunteered to live in a setting that appears 20 years earlier. The old men grew visibly younger, not just in frisky attitude but also in physiology! (Amazing!!)

– p137 – people have been impoverished, static understanding of what ” paying attention” means. what does it mean when a teacher asks students to pay attention, focus, concentrate on something? If the answer is “to hold that thing still”, this is incorrect. most people think of attention as a kind of mental camera that you keep rigidly, narrowly focused on a particular subject or object. this is absolutely not the case ( particularly when it comes to creativity and creating connections between various thoughts or ideas).

– p183: motivation is a slow, effortful process that has only small effect on behavior, where his attention is a fast and effortless one therefore, when facing a bit stressful situation, it’s best to plan how you would act in advance ( if X happens, then I will do Y). (Peter Provonost hand washing in the ICU example)

– 214: Einstein: ” There are two ways to live your life. One is as though in nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle”

- p215: Anticipated Recall. Creating experiences ( with positive sensory pleasure) is incredibly important because you can come back to them again and again and again and derive immense value, as opposed to “things”. and in

—

Rapt: Attention and the focused life is good stuff, I’d highly recommend it. This concise but detailed thought alone is worth thinking about: You are, essentially, the sum of what you pay attention to.

via huffpo

I guess they’re down but not out. They certainly don’t show you much, but check this out:

The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a “pocket” to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft’s tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we’ve seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

Gizmodo Gallery

Okay, as promised, here’s my Pandora makeover. Don’t get scared off by the red text. Pretend this is an undergraduate design critique or something. Here are some things that Pandora might do to truly improve the experience for users and garner more revenue to boot.

First, let’s take a look at the current state of the experience:

Okay, now how could it be changed? Refer to the core truths that I mentioned yesterday in Part 1 of this post.. Let’s take those and create some basic ideas from them.

Now, here is a quick whipped up mock up of what the interface could look like. It’s not refined yet, but heck, I’m not getting paid by Pandora and I wanted to throw this out there.

Since the interface uses Flash anyway, Pandora can really do anything that it wants to and go nuts with its interface. I chose not to go nuts here, but that’s just a stylistic preference. Minimalism might not work for the set that is routinely bombarded by the myspace eyesore.

All I did right now was make the CD cover that was playing a little larger than the one that has just played and the one that is up next. But you could take this idea and blow it up even more and make the artist take center stage the way the Trojan commercial does in the previous ad. It would be great to see tour dates, or other related albums and songs right here on this page. Interesting facts, lyrics, anything related to making me love this artist even more, and be compelled to buy something from them. If Radiohead’s In Rainbows is any predictor of what’s to come for content producers, we (as an audience and a generation) are willing to pay content producers for good content when it’s easy to get to. Good content producers deserve compensation, and people are starting to sense that.

One little thing that I’d definitely do is make the context menu a little easier to understand. I can Vote Up, Vote Down, or Learn more about the actual song. Actually I already created this mockup but now that I’m thinking about it, this mouseover could have more than just salient song features, it could also have where and when this song was first written and played (If that information is available). If stuff like this is not available, considering making a direct deal to the artist. Make artists want to be a part of Pandora, and you’ll have more direct access between the listener and the artist in the way myspace music does.

Incidentally, I think that Pandora‘s most popular channel (I’m not using that word literally here) is the iPhone application. I’m not certain, but I believe that it’s incredibly hard for Pandora to monetize ads on the iPhone platform, unless there’s an interesting new song playing and the user wants to turn the phone display on and give feedback that the song is good or bad. From a user’s standpoint, I can’t stand irrelevant ads. But here’s the one exception. If Pandora figured out a way to do location based ads while I’m listening on the go, I’d be cool with that. Imagine bicycling (I know I shouldn’t be listening while riding) down Milwaukee Avenue and hearing about a deal as you’re getting closer to the store offering the deal. This sounds like an awesome business by itself. I don’t really use other location based services at all because they’re mostly vacuous and social networky…. but I imagine that I’d be open to ad if it was locationally relevant and timely.

If someone at Pandora (Hi Tom/Tim!) reads this, I’d love your thoughts. That said, keep up the great work. It’s an awesome product and you’ll get your exit soon. Your product is just too awesome not to be loved universally.

As of this posts writing, the latest stats I found from a Techcrunch interview:
Pandora: 30 million registered users, 12 million monthly uniques and 7-8 million iPhone app installations (plus 2 million more on Blackberry).

I suspect that making some simple changes could increase registered users and at the very minimum, uniques by 10-15%. Just a guess?

Just an FYI, if you read this in an RSS reader instead of live at yakshaving.net, please point your RSS reader to this link, I made some configuration changes.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/yakshavingnet

Also, please point bookmarks you’ve previously used directly to yakshaving.net, not http://bhoopathy.net/wordpess

Thanks

Lately I’ve been thinking about high concept pitches. I read pitching hacks by Naval Ravikant and Nivi, and I’ve looked over lots of stuff before that says you need to have the simple, high concept pitch.

Here’s how it usually goes:

Most of the time, this is X.COM meets Y.COM.

I’m sure it’s incredibly important to have a high concept pitch, but when your product is comprehensive and solves a robust set of problems, the question is always WHAT do you select as the Y?

So, I get it. Startups are like movies and you’re pitching to a film producer. But when you’re pitching to a film producer, there are *tons* of movies to select from as the “Y”. When you’re trying to work on a startup, you need to pick a successful “Y”, or else this paints you as an impending failure right? Did anyone just walk into a room and say this is {awesome company here} meets Pets.com?

This is also related to the question “Who is your competition”? We created an interesting market map here that shows who our competition is, which I’m obviously not planning on sharing here but I realize it’s the most helpful thing for me to understand the space that we play in.

The High concept pitch has its merits: It conveys information quickly and maybe finds a conversation with an investor or a party to speak to much earlier than normal.

However, I think registering the space using the high concept pitch is fraught with failure if the entrepreneurs involved don’t have a bold vision for the company and it is an entirely derivative product.

I think the “We are the X of the Y” formula has a tendency to make the product derivative. (Wait isn’t that what Web2 is all about?)

I enjoy listening to streaming music from Pandora while I’m working. (Special thanks to big Dave for sharing his channel with me so I don’t have to spend time sifting or curating the good stuff)

Pandora is an awesome product- it allows for discovery, evolves with me, and is generally a pretty good experience. I’m putting these thoughts out there because I enjoy their experience, really want them to improve it, and encourage other people to try it. Also, I read this bit by David Hornik from August Capital about Tim and persistence and was very inspired so I wanted to help out.

While the jury is still out on how successful Pandora will ultimately be (apparently there is a bet between Mike Arrington/Robert Scoble and Steve Gillmor on this very question), one thing is clear to me, Tim Westergren is the poster child for startup persistence. He has grown his company. He has shrunk his company. He has grown his company again. And through it all he has been an energetic evangelist, pounding on doors, living in airports, and doing whatever it takes to keep his company alive. I wish him the best of luck and hope that Pandora is a huge success. Entrepreneurs with the drive and determination of Tim deserve to succeed.

Now back to Pandora. I also listen to Grooveshark, but this is mostly when I have a particular set of songs that I just want to listen to. (This is pretty common actually, I have a work playlist that’s pretty cheesy and used solely to pump me up. Think Eye of the Tiger kinda stuff.)

I tried Blip.FM after Rich recommended it to me, but I just can’t get into it. There’s something weird about having to come up with a snarky comment and send it to the world in order to garner listeners and gain reputation that just plain rubs me the wrong way. Someday I’ll rant about the stupid unspoken follower/following ratio that people look at that remind me of elementary school pissing contests.

Anyway: Generally speaking I leave a tab of Pandora open and I’m off using some desk reference or doing something else in another tab. Sometimes, I like a song, and I come back to see what it is. And then what do I see? A tiny little tile…. Often I can’t read the whole artists name or the song title. And then if I click on it, it opens up in another window, taking me away from the experience of listening to the music. That’s like if I were listening to a song at a friend’s house, I asked him what song it was, and then he told me to go to some other record shop to buy it, instead of showing me the CD cover, and telling me more about it. Even worse, the irrelevant ads on Pandora are like the friend telling you about kosher pickles after you asked him about the music.. Weird, right?

Short digression. When I was in undergrad, I remember this company called AllAdvantage that made you look at ads on the desktop in order to get money. I modified some scripts to move a mouse and keyboard that allowed me to collect a check. Shhh, don’t tell anyone Many of you will probably remember this web1 debacle, but if not here are the highlights from wikipedia (literally):

AllAdvantage was launched on March 31, 1999, by Jim Jorgensen, Johannes Pohle, Carl Anderson, and Oliver Brock. During its nearly 2 years of operation, it raised nearly $200 Million in venture capital and grew to more than 10 million members in its first 18 months of operation. [2] The company’s practice of compensating existing members for referring new members led it to become one of the most heavily promoted websites of its time.[3] That popularity was reflected in the ranking of AllAdvantage.com among the top 20 of many website traffic indices during most of the company’s existence, including Nielsen//NetRatings….

…AllAdvantage ultimately fell victim to the sharp decline in advertising spending as the dot-com bubble burst and the U.S. economy entered a recessionary period in mid-2000…

… The company continued to seek new sources of revenue and expanded its offerings to include sweepstakes.[9] But the company finally halted consumer-facing operations in February 2001. By the time it closed its doors, the company had paid out over $160 million to its members.[10]

So this analogy might be a little overboard but I’ll use it to be provocative and have some fun:

Some core truths exist here:

1. People come to Pandora for a love of music
2. Most sophisticated users know how to use multiple tabs. The adspace is mostly wasted unless the user is on the page. They’re essentially *not* on the page most of the time.
3. The use of a radio station to listen to at work is common. Usually, the person is actually performing work and can easily minimize the browser to listen to pandora in the background and have office open
4. There’s a certain age group in which people have a natural tendency to pirate music rather than purchase it. See Matt Mason on Pirate’s Dilemma / and most talks by Larry Lessig, they’ve nailed this.
5. I fundamentally agree with Fred Wilson at AVC about piracy/streaming and content: He said “We used to wonder if we could “untrain” a generation to steal. The answer is yes. Just make it easier to get the content they want and they’ll stop stealing.”
6. Pandora could make it a lot easier to connect with the music, purchase it, and do other stuff related to the artist (that I’ll get into later)
7. It’s in Pandora’s interest to retain a user and (seemingly) upgrade to a premium membership.

Tomorrow we’ll roll up our sleeves and do a UX (and tiny business model) makeover on Pandora. Boy, I hope Tim actually reads this after all this effort.

This beauty is what I use to commute to BettrAt every day. I just had some work done on it and was taking pictures of it to use for my friend’s bike shop, 312Cycles. As you can see, he did an amazing, amazing job. Thanks, Jonathon!

I hope these pictures speak for themselves. Waterloo, Wisconsin handbuilt 1984 Reynolds 531cs touring bike. 8 speed internally geared shimano hub + salsa delgado rims + front dynamo hub connected to a vintage light (ultimate green machine). cane creek levers, mundaliata italia seat, conti gator skins, tektro interruptor brake levers, cinelli bars + stem. cinelli pro tape.

My friend Matt, a kind hearted soul and fellow bicyclist (consequently waaaay faster than I am), is riding across Lake Michigan to raise funds for a classroom modernization project for Claremont Academy, a K-8 school in the Chicago Public School System.

He made a website, Pledge my Ride, where you can follow along. Help support education and students at a struggling school system, if you can.

Keep on trucking, Matt!

Follow along on twitter also.

The NatureMill composter is terrible. The waste still smells so much worse than when I put it in… it’s incredibly loud, and the thing is designed so flimsily (Is flimsily a word?). What a sham (also, a shame). I’m returning it promptly and getting my money back.

This is the thanks I get for being green?

The directions before I bought the NatureMill composter didn’t explain that I’d have to measure out baking soda and sawdust pellets and put them in there…. or that it would be ridiculously loud and you actually need to put it OUTSIDE to realistically use it. If I was going to put it outside, I might as well just throw the stuff into a large pile in the backyard.