ideas

/ Don

A Decade of Lessons in Small Business Management

As we round third plate to complete our 10th year of business at era404, it’s impossible not to reflect upon the previous decade’s successes and lessons. In fact, despite the enormous pride we have for our successes—the awards we’ve won, the opportunities we’ve been afforded, the pieces we’ve created—it was in the lessons that our company grew the most. We can only assume that the same way the triumphs and tribulations of a child’s first ten years shape his or her personality, a business uses its own experiences to analyze the risks it will take and the directions it will pursue.

The first ten years weren’t always easy.  Read more

/ Don

Seven Questions to Ask When Designing the Feel of Your Mobile App

Feel Can Make or Break a Product
Imagine you are shopping for a new car. You found a model that looks great and has all the features you want. It’s even in your price range. So you go to the dealer and take a test drive. After about five minutes of driving, you find you are mildly dissatisfied with the car. Perhaps it’s the way it takes the bumps. Perhaps it’s difficult to check your blind spot. Perhaps the pedals and buttons are not responsive. Do you buy the car anyway? After all, you like the look, it’s a good buy and it’s got the features you want. Odds are though you are not going to buy it. Why? Because you don’t like the feel of it, and the majority of your experience with a car is tied to the feel.

Feel Plays a Key role in Mobile App Satisfaction
Since mobile devices are held in our hands and operated with touch, the feel of the experience becomes a key determinant of user satisfaction. Also, since the screens are small, more interaction is generally required than on desktop devices. So we experience the nuances of the feel again and again as we use an app. Mild annoyances can add up, let alone major ones. Conversely, a good feel will create an ongoing sense of ease and comfort. This makes it more likely the app will be used repeatedly, bubble up on users’ favorites list, be talked about and recommended to others.

Seven Questions to Ask When Designing the Feel of Your App
So are you ready to optimize the feel of your mobile app? To help, here is a list of questions worth asking when designing a mobile app to make sure you have addressed the feel:

  1.  Have you anticipated how the user will hold the device?
  2. Have you designed for operation using fingers, thumbs or a combination of the two?
  3. Have you eliminated undesirable “eclipsing” effects, that is, uncomfortable blind spots where the finger obscures what is being touched in such a way that the interaction is awkward
  4. On screens with a dense amount of content, have you kept the structure of the layout and interactions simple?
  5. Have you used an intuitive sequence of gestures to perform core tasks?
  6. Have you minimized user effort to see, locate and interact with elements on the screen?
  7. Have you asked someone (or several people) to try a prototype of your app on an actual device?

Check your design against the above items, and you will find the improvements you make to the feel of your app to be well worth the effort.

Original post: Bob Moll, Pathfinder Software

/ Don

Spam-blocking sub-domains

A long time ago, around the time I started compiling my “Best Practices…” list, I began creating forwarders for ecommerce accounts to distinguish who was sending me solicitations and to be able to stop them easily. If you give someone your email address, say “joe@joe-co.com” then you have no idea where the soliciations are coming from and the only way to stop them is to increase your SpamAssassin rating—potentially losing false positives—or to get a new email address.

But, if you create “hsbc@joe-co.com,” and forward that to “joe@joe-co.com,” you can see who sold your email address and promptly disrupt the flow of spam by simply deleting the forwarder. Well, after a decade of online business through my company, ERA404, I have a veritable bee’s hive of forwarders floating around. And, as I’d like to do some house-keeping to keep them organized, I’ve decided to create a sub-domain to create easily visual recognition of what is an actual forwarder (i.e., don@ forwards to don.citarella@) and what is a spam-blocking forwarder (i.e., hsbc@ temporarily forwards to don.citarella@).

Here’s where I need your assistance. Fill in the blank:
Solicitor: “Sir, in order for me to process your order, you need to provide a valid email address.”
Me: So I’d like to provide them with: “[solicitor name]@_____.era404.com” where ______ is the word I’m seeking.

Here are a few that I thought of: @firewall, @temporary, @spam, @commerce, @solicitations, @junkmail, @junk, @delete, @block, @protect, @safe, @safety, @protection, @temp.

Here are a few suggestions by friends: @refuse, @trash, @scrap, @waste, and my personal favorite, @is-a-dirty-dirty-whore. (Imagine providing the following: “The email address is: hsbc@is-a-dirty-dirty-whore.joe-co.com“). Ah, it’s the little things in life. It truly is.

So I appeal to you, gentle readers. What would be the best spam-blocking sub-domain? While my preference is to go with @solicitations, I worry it will be too long: networksolutions@solicitations.joe-co.com. And does @trash have that certain je ne sais quoi that I want, so that solicitors think “I see what you did there. Well played, dear sir. Well played.“?