The online ramblings of Dylan Bland

By the time you’re reading this you’ve already read dozens of reviews of the iPad so I’ll do you a favour and keep this brief.

Why I love my iPad:

• it’s better for consuming content than a laptop or desktop. Browsing web sites, reading articles, watching videos all feel better on the iPad. It’s magic. No, really it is!
• The Internet no longer feels like the Internet. Spend time with the YouTube app on the iPad and you’ll forget YouTube started as a web site. The lines have been blurred.
• eBooks will work. Forget about the iPad replacing fiction, it’s not what it’s really about. Think textbooks, newspapers, magazines, articles, reviews etc. For this it’s perfect.  And they wont have illustrations, think inline videos and URLs.
• It brings the Internet out of the study and into the home. iPads can be grabbed quickly and used in any room of the house to show pictures, share recipes, send a quick email etc.
• Anyone can use them. I’ve had kids as young as 8 pick up the iPad and use it like a pro. Ditto my Dad…
• iPads make you happy. This is a quality device and Apple has nailed the content. The web, videos, books all come together in a way never seen before.

Bottom line, don’t be a hater. If you’re a geek, a lover of great content, or just want a sneak peak into the future, you owe it to yourself to own one ASAP. Buy Now!

Today I had the same thought twice so it has occurred to me that now would be a good time to resurrect my blog and share my thought with the world: creative people don’t care so much about time, money or opportunity cost, and neither should they.

You may already know this, and to a degree I did too, but it’s worth being reminded of.

When you work with talented creative people they don’t think about what’s “practical” or “how long things take” or “how much something costs to build” – their eyes are fixed firmly on realizing their creative vision. And so it should be. While I’m not advocating ignoring financial or practical realities, sometimes it’s best to leave those worries to someone else and let the creatives run free.

I was reminded of this today when I was working with a designer on some web pages. As always, I was excited and pumped to see our ideas come alive on the screen, but I had deadlines and dollar figures running through my head, thinking of the cost both in time and money. It’s a tricky balance; I wanted it to be good, but I also wanted it “done” so we could move onto the next thing. You have to draw a line somewhere, but to an extent design is “done when it’s done” – the magic is in the little touches that always occur at the very end.

Tonight I also saw Michael Jackson’s “This Is It” (which as a side note, you should go and see) where the point I’m trying to make hit me hard. As you probably know, the film is based on footage of MJ’s sell out (50x over) come-back show that obviously (and sadly) never happened – and it was epic. As I watched it I saw things over, and over, and over again that were massively expensive and time consuming to pull off. Sets like you wouldn’t believe, animations and footage (for the stage) that must have cost a bomb. Costumers, dancers, fireworks – no expense was spared. But it easily could have been. A less creative person might have said “you know what, we could cut this and we could cut that and we’d save a couple of million bucks and you know what, we’d still sell out 50 times over.” And they’d be right. But that’s not what made MJ special. Despite his (apparently) less than ideal financial position, no expense was spared when creating the show for his fans.

Good design, good creativity,  the “Apple Factor”, comes at a price both in dollars and time. But in my opinion it’s a price worth paying. It’s what people remember, and it’s what makes great people/companies/products/whatever great.

Imagine the final 2 minutes of an online auction for a brand new Nintendo Wii with an RRP of $399. The leading bid is just $100. Sounds compelling…yes? You’d consider placing a bid…yes?

If this sounds like you then head over to swoopo.com and more recently planetbid.co.nz and you’ll likely find such an auction…but with an evil twist.

In the case of planetbid.co.nz each bid costs you $1.49 and the bid increment (the amount the sale price raises with each bid) is just 11 cents.

Do the maths: an auction with a leading “bid” of $100 has already earned planetbid a massive $1,354 from bidding fees (divided $100 by the bid increment of 11 cents and then multiply that number by $1.49 which is the cost to place a bid). On top of that, the winning bidder must still purchase the Wii for the leading bid price of $100.

This is an evil business model but what’s really interesting is the psychology at play.

Let’s have a look.

Stage 1: at the beginning of the auction when the leading bid is below say $100 people sniff an opportunity to get a $399 Nintendo at a bargain price – a free lunch if you will. A flurry of bids follow.

Stage 2: the middle of the auction where a handful of bidders have made a small to moderate financial commitment to the auction (remembering of course that each bid has cost someone $1.49). At this point some bidders will see the train wreck ahead and will pull out – cutting their losses.

Stage 3: the end of the auction where, perhaps even unwittingly, two, three or four bidders have placed a large number of bids and in doing so have made a substantial financial commitment. This is where loss aversion kicks in and bidders are no longer bidding to win but are bidding not to lose. They’ve dug themselves a hole and are unwilling to let go. These bidders may have each paid $30, $40, $50 or more in bidding fees and if they lose now they’ve simply thrown their money away. The momentum of the auction combined with an intense fear of loss also brings out blind optimism. When looking at potential loss in the face bidders cling to the hope that everything will turn out OK and the other bidders will drop out before they do. The alternative, to withdraw now, is to accept a sure financial loss – a deeply unattractive option to many people.

Evil. For every auction run there’s only one winner and many many more losers – in the true sense of the word.

This week I’ve been doing some work with the team over at Mighty Ape to improve some of the site’s key conversion points.

The exercise really highlighted to me how similar building a web site is to building an America’s Cup yacht.

I’m serious.

A web site is like a yacht. It gets designed, built and launched. All things going to plan it does what you designed it to do.

And then the tweaking begins. The optimization.

Teams in the America’s Cup spend hundreds (or more?) of hours testing different sails, different rigs, different bulps and different combinations of all of those things until they settle on a combination that might go a couple of seconds faster round the course than the boat you originally launched.

And so it is with web design.

If you change the copy on this page how many people click through to this page? If you change the colour of this text how many people click this button? If you change the size of this button how many more people click it? And so it goes on.

Just as it is on a yacht you may only milk an extra 2 or 3% but over the course of a year that may add up to a significant increase in people joining, people buying, people making an email enquiry or whatever it is you want people to be doing on your site.

Tweak the boat. Tweak the boat…

A little earlier this year Shane, Simon and I set aside some time to design and build a mobile version of Mighty Ape which launched yesterday.

If you have a web-enabled mobile phone you can check it out at m.mightyape.co.nz.

Building a mobile site was no different from building a regular web site except that you must consider that a) people spend less time on mobile sites, b) people load fewer pages on mobile sites, and c) you have a much smaller canvas to work with.

These constraints forced us to be crystal clear about how we wanted customers to use the site (not a bad thing!). Building every possible feature and page just “because we can” wasn’t an option. We settled on two key objectives: 1) the ability to place orders, and 2) news and releases lists to keep customers informed and to encourage daily visits. We snuck in a few extra things such as checking the delivery status of past orders, but these were secondary objectives that didn’t make it out of the footer.

To achieve the objective of daily visits you’ll find “latest news” “recent releases” and “coming soon” on the home page. This content will change several times per day and is driven directly from the main MA site. To achieve the objective of accepting online orders we obviously added the shopping trolley/cart and the ability to search the database of over 1 million products. We deliberately left off browsing the category tree as it doesn’t work with the whole idea of respecting people’s time and data constraints as described above.

Anyway I’m pleased with how it’s turned out and I’ve already placed my first order from my mobile. If you’re like me and have a short attention span you may even prefer the mobile site to the main site! Visit m.mightyape.co.nz and try it for yourself…all feedback (good or bad) is welcome!

PS: the above may seem all terribly obvious but you’d be surprised how many people I meet that approach building a web site by jumping straight into Photoshop or whatever without giving any thought to what they’re actually trying to achieve. Good web design is so much more than writing clean code or making stuff look pretty!

…for finding a flat:

Last month while making a handful of improvements to nzflatmates I thought I’d play around with the prices we charge for GOLD Membership in an attempt to increase our revenues. I learned a valuable (literally) lesson which I thought I’d share.

nzflatmates makes over 90% of its revenue from our members upgrading to GOLD Membership, a highly effective upgrade that dramatically increases the usefulness of the site for flat hunters. Three subscription periods are available: one week, one month and one year.

For as long as I care to remember the prices to upgrade have been $9.95 for a week, $19.95 for a month and $49.95 for a year. There was no real science behind it and I just ran with what felt about right at the time.

Anyway, it occurred to me that our $9.95/week option was eating up our $19.95/month option because it was priced too cheap. If a member upgraded for a week at $9.95 and was unsuccessful finding a flat, he or she could simply upgrade for another week at $9.95 and be no worse off. Given that most people (I should really do some proper analysis) can find a flat within a week or two, at $9.95 it’s worth the risk.

The solution? Bump the price up from $9.95/week to $14.95/week…leave the $19.95/month option unchanged. All of a sudden the $14.95/week option makes the $19.95/month option appear like great value (which it is) and serves the primary purpose of pushing members up to a one month subscription period.

The result? Before we made this change 65% of members opted for the one week upgrade and 30% opted for the one month upgrade. Since we’ve made the change, members opting for the one week upgrade has dropped to just 25% and members opting for the one month upgrade has risen to 70%. Despite the small increase in price of our cheapest subscription period (one week) there hasn’t been significant drop in the total number of people upgrading (I’m not smart enough to work this out properly…taking into consideration natural growth, seasonal effects etc), but most importantly revenue has increased by ~45%. It’s also worth noting that this is another one of those changes where the effort/reward ratio is massive. It took seconds (OK, maybe minutes) to change the prices and it would take days/weeks/months to redesign the site, increase listings or make one of any other possible changes that stood a change of achieving a similar result.

Sadly, maths was never my strong point and I’ve learned this valuable lesson the hard way, leaving quite a lot of money on the table in the process – ouch. If you’re in a similar line of business to me, maybe it’s time to take a look at your own prices and avoid making the same mistake!

Last month I felt motivated to A/B test a key conversion point on nzflatmates in an attempt to introduce some science into how we go about designing pages. This was our first attempt at an A/B test so I thought I’d share what we learned…

For those who don’t know, an A/B test (on the web at least) is when you serve two different versions of the same page to find out which one performs better at achieving the goal of the page. i.e. 50% of your users get page A and the other 50% get page B.

In the case of nzflatmates the key conversion page on the site is the “upgrade to GOLD Membership” page where members are invited to upgrade their free membership to a GOLD Membership for a small fee. This is how nzflatmates generates over 90% of its revenue. How well this page performs can be measured by how many people upgrade to GOLD.

Page A

Page B

We served the two different versions of the page by serving page A to members with an even number Member Number and page B to members with an odd number Member Number. The result? Page B is generating 11% more upgrades than page A. Switching every member over to page B will add a few extra dollars to the site’s bottom line each year, for really not a lot of effort.

So if you’re in the business of building or running web sites I strongly recommend giving A/B testing a go! It can be used to test all sorts of pages…sign up pages, upgrade pages, product pages with “add to cart”, checkouts etc etc. Basically any page where you have a clear action that you want the user to perform.

Last week I posted about the launch of my friend Simon’s online shopping site Mighty Ape.

One of the key reason my money’s on Mighty Ape going all the way in New Zealand is their same-day shipping service, a carryover from GP Store.

Take for example Richard Branson’s new book Business Stripped Bare. The book was released in New Zealand only yesterday – it looked good so I ordered it…

… and today it arrived. That’s the benefit of holding stock and it sure beats the experience of waiting 2-3 weeks for shipping from overseas or battling the inner-city car parks. Go The Ape!

PS: iPhone cameras suck!

My good friend and Zillion business partner Simon Barton finally took the covers off his new shopping site today with the launch of Mighty Ape.

Simon, Matt and the rest of the team at GP Store have been working hard on Mighty Ape for a very long time and I really rate them to go all the way and deliver New Zealand a truly world class shopping web site. The site’s great, they have a warehouse packed full (really full) of stock and a solid team of guys and girls packing and shipping orders quickly (like GP Store, Mighty Ape offers same day shipping of in stock items).

Well done guys. Seriously well done.

Check out Mighty Ape