The conundrum of privacy and invites

Now that www.trymehere.com is live in early beta form, we have no doubt that the requested feedback will be interesting to read and evaluate!

Some will like it; some will not. I’ve spent a few hours recently looking at blog comments about social networks and their associated services and I am amazed by just how polarised views are. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Indeed, we were very cognizant of some of these views when we took considerable care to create an easy-to-use and easy-to-access Delete Profile capability. This is still a missing capability with many, if not most, web-based services.

One of the key issues for us is the question of privacy. Indeed, it might even be an issue that could prove to be make or break for trymehere. It’s not a question of whether trymehere has been lax in this area; rather the opposite could be said to be the case. Could the degree of privacy we have implemented possibly “stall the service in the market” as one ‘feedbacker’ put it?

So what is this conundrum we are talking about? It’s to do with maximising subscriber uptake while maintaining privacy.

Achieving maximum subscriber uptake.

Significant uptake of a new internet service, such as a social network, has much to do with what has been called ‘reduction of friction’. This simply means that you do not put anything in the way of the service being easily evaluated and used. This is a key factor in building a large member base which should lead to hockey stick growth and success (hopefully!).

Last week, I was listening to a ‘how we became successful’ talk by Peter Ward, co-founder of Where Are You Now, a travel-orientated social network whose raison d’être is to enable their members to meet people on their travels. They have gone through numerous travails to reach 11 million members. He stated quite strongly that “the days of using invites are over. Any service using them will fail” (not a word perfect quote).

I take this as a view that if a service is to achieve maximum success it should be as open as possible with a minimum number of barriers getting in the way between users posting information and users reading it - blogs are good example of this approach. I cannot but agree with this and have given that very same advice several times in the last few years.

Location and presence services

So why have we not taken this seemingly sensible advice with the trymehere beta?

The initial version of trymehere is aimed at giving business people an ability to provide availability guidance to their colleagues. This guidance could and probably will contain privileged information about whether they wish to be contacted and how they can be contacted throughout a 24 hour day. The majority of people we have spoken to, would not wish this information to be available for anyone to see on the open Internet. If there is a particular category of information that should remain private and under the control of the individual, this is it (well, other than bank account information I guess). You only need to read the debate associated with mobile phone location-based services to get a better understanding of the strength of feeling about this issue.

We therefore took an approach whereby individuals ‘invite’ their trusted colleagues and friends to view their guidance using Connect Requests. They are then able to target their availability / non-availability guidance at different groups of people.

We believe that maintaining privacy is such a core issue that removing the Connect Request capability could severely limit the service’s capabilities. On one hand, to satisfy privacy concerns, we need to use invites, while on the other, accept that this could risk stalling the service in the marketplace.

Squaring the circle

Help is at hand however! There is a way that we can ’square the circle’, although it will involve giving up some features. This has been on our agenda for some while though it is not part of the current beta.

It is based on the ability to create a particular Member Group that can be designated to be Public and backed up by a public Routine Schedule.

This would enable a member to embed a link (or possibly and image) in an email signature or as a widget application on a public web page. This public guidance would be open for anyone to see and what they are prepared to show would be under the complete control of the Member.

More importantly, there would be no need for anyone to ’sign-in’ beforehand to trymehere  before viewing the public guidance.

Members should then be able to decide about going ‘public’  or remaining ‘private’ as they may wish!

Comments are always welcome!

TryMeHere goes live…

14:41 GMT, Monday, March 3^rd 2008: With no great drama we are pleased to say that we have gone live with the trymehere service - www.trymehere.com on the Internet!

Like everyone else who has worked on a project for some considerable time we are so pleased that this day has finally arrived! We have been developing trymehere for some considerable time but as we are self-financed we felt this to be acceptable. We still have a never-ending list of ‘nice to have’ features and minor things we could change or add but we decided that it was time to go live.

This is a real beta version and we hope that early users will report any problems they might come across. Indeed, the first person to use the Wizard failed to complete it due to a bug but this was corrected within ten minutes of it being reported.

Of course, now comes the time when we find out whether there is any real interest in the service and whether people actually find it a useful. We do not plan to over-promote the service in the early days. This is so easy to do but we will resist and focus on getting the service reliable.

Time will tell of course, so watch this space!

By the way, if you create a trymehere account, search for me in the database and send me a Connect Request!

Chris Gare

Islands of communication – or isolation?

One of the fundamental tenets of the communication industry is that you need 100% compatibility between devices and services if you want to communicate. This was clearly understood when the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) was dominated by local monopolies in the form of incumbent telcos. Together with the ITU, they put considerable effort into standardising all the commercial and technical aspects of running a national telco.

For example, the commercial settlement standards enabled telcos to share the revenue from each and every call that made use of their fixed or wireless infrastructure no matter whether the call originated, terminated or transited their geography. Technical standards included everything from compression through to transmission standards such as Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) and the basis of European mobile telephony, GSM. The IETF’s standardisation of the Internet has brought a vast portion of the world’s population on line and transformed our personal and business lives.

However, standardisation in this new century is now often driven as much by commercial businesses and consortiums which often leads to competing solutions and standards slugging it out in the market place. I guess this is as it should be if you believe in free trade and enterprise. But, as mere individuals in this world of giants, these issues can cause us real pain.

In particular, the current plethora of what we term ‘islands of isolation’ means that we often unable to communicate in ways that we wish to. In the ideal world, as exemplified by the PSTN, you are able to talk to every person in the world that owns a phone as long as you know their number. Whereas, with many new media communications services we choose to use to interact with friends and colleagues are in effect closed communities that are unable to connect.

What are the causes these so-called islands of isolation? Here are a few examples.

Communities: There are many Internet communities including free PC-to-PC VoIP services, instant messaging services, social or business networking services or even virtual worlds. Most of these focus on building up their own isolated communities. Of course, if one achieves global domination, then that becomes the de facto standard by default. That is the objective of every Internet social network start-up!

Enterprise software: Most purveyors of proprietary enterprise software thrive on developing products that are incompatible. Lotus Notes and Outlook email systems was but one example. This is often still the case today when vendors bolt advanced features onto the basic product that are not available to anyone not using that software - ‘presence’ springs to mind. This creates vendor communities of users.

Private networks: Most enterprises are rightly concerned about security and build strong protective firewalls around their employees to protect themselves from malicious activities. This means that employees of that company have full access to their own services but these are not available to anyone outside of the firewall for use on an inter-company basis. Combine this with the deployment of vendor specific enterprise software described about and you create lots of isolated enterprise communities!

Fixed network operators: It’s a very competitive world out there and telcos just love offering ‘value-added’ features and services that are only offered to their customer base. Free proprietary PC-PC calls come to mind and more recently, video telephones.

Mobile operators: A classic example with wireless operators was the unwillingness to provide open Internet access and only provide what was euphemistically called ‘walled garden’ services – which are effectively closed communities.

Service incompatibilities: A perfect example of this was MMS, the supposed upgrade to SMS. Although there was a multitude of issues behind the failure of MMS, the inability to send an MMS to a friend who used another mobile network was one of the principle ones. Although this was belatedly corrected, it came too late to help.

Equipment vendors: Whenever a standards body defines a basic standard,

equipment vendors nearly always ‘enhanced’ the standard feature set with ‘rich’ extensions. Of course, anyone using an extension could not work with someone who was not! The word ‘rich’ covers a multiplicity of sins.

Privacy: This is seen as such an important issue these days that many companies will not provide phone numbers or even email addresses to a caller. If you don’t know who you want, they won’t tell you! A perfect definition of a closed community!

One take away from this is that in the real world you can’t avoid this and all of us use several services to interact with colleagues that are effectively islands of isolation.

Your friends, family and work colleagues, by their own choice, geography and lifestyle, probably use a completely different set to yourself. You may use MSN, while colleagues use AOL or Yahoo Messenger. You may choose Skype but another colleague may use BT Softphone.

There are attempts at partially solving these issues as can be seen in the IM world, but overall this remains a major conundrum that limits our ability to communicate any time, any place and any where.

By design, trymehere is completely independent of any individual service, platform or community.

The dichotomy of a selling or service focus?

When an ecommerce retailer creates a web site to sell product, its focus is clear cut – to sell. Make the shopping ‘experience’ easy and enjoyable to entice the consumer to part with their hard-earned disposable income.

The site development objective should be the perfect combination of information, excitement, usability, look and feel and ease of use. Get one of these wrong and there is a price to be paid. Now that is a real challenge as anyone who has read “boo hoo, a dot.com story from concept to disaster by Ernst Malmsten” can testify.

When considering Internet services such as social or business networks and communication services, we believe there is a real dichotomy when it comes to site design objectives which, if not resolved, leads to a chaotic web site.

On one hand, there needs to be a focus on explaining, marketing and selling the service in the same way as an ecommerce reseller. But on the other hand, if someone is going to be using the service on a daily basis, once they have ‘signed up’, they do not want to be faced with all clutter associated with selling the service. What they need a clean user interface that enables them to get what they want to do easily and quickly – without wasting time and getting confused by the need search though stuff that plainly distracts them from the task at hand.

With certain types of services, this separation between ‘selling’ and ‘using’ happens naturally as a user needs to download an application to run on their personal computer. In this case, the web site focuses on the marketing while the application focuses on the service. Even this natural split of focus can get obfuscated if the service provider requests you to upload information to their server so that they can provide a pure wed-based service. Address book synchronisation is a good example.

If the service does not require the installation of an application on your PC because the service is delivered only by the web site, then confusion often reigns! The web site gets cluttered with marketing material and it becomes very difficult to find the needle in the haystack – the service itself. In our user experience this applies to many social network sites, business network sites and even web based CRM services. We have found that ‘selling’ and ‘using’ just do not mix as the web site becomes just too confusing.

A web site focusing on selling needs to be designed in a completely different way to one focussing on delivering a service. A web site focussed on selling should be laid out in a manner conducive to a potential using easily finding out everything they might want to know about the service before signing up. A web site providing a service should be designed around the flow of service usage and should not contain extraneous clutter. We have found that it is not possible to mix these two design objectives as an inspection of many live Internet services sites will show.

To resolve this dichotomy, trymehere has developed two entirely separate sites. The public web site is 100% focused on “Getting to know trymehere” and enables a potential user to preview every aspect of the service including the QuickStart Wizard (Yes, we even preview the wizard!), management of your personal profile and even the Connect request process. If a potential user likes the service and goes on to sign up that’s great. However, if they take a look and feel it’s not for them, then that’s fine as well. We do not want to waste anyone’s time on principle!

The trymehere service site is entirely different from the public web site, although we follow the same look and feel. As well as being secure, its tabs are aligned to using the service.

It was just not possible or sensible to combine these entirely separate activities and the decision to separate them was one of the better decisions we made early on!

Oh no! Do we really have to provide help as well?

I don’t know about you, but I often dread using a new web service. There you are right in the middle of doing something and you don’t know what to do and you get stuck and need help. You can even have this problem with a service you have been using for years -wanting to delete your profile and not finding a way to do so is a good example.

What is the normal method for providing help? Well, it’s usually about providing a Manual [in PDF format], a Help file or an FAQ.

With trepidation and foreboding you leave what you were doing and click the link. After a delay, up pops the requisite text (Can I ever get back to where I was? Where was I?) and the challenge begins!

The usual first step is to enter the name of what you are looking for in a search box. When this fails, as it often does, you start reading the appropriate chapters and often find that what you need is not covered! C’est la vie!

There just has to be a better way than this!

Of course, if a service is SO simple then you can probably ignore providing any sort of help at all – or so a developer might think! Help, along with many other things, are often left to the end of the development phase and it often turns into an ill thought-out after-thought. However users, no matter how experienced, will always need help from time to time so the provision of help should be at the forefront of a developer’s mind from day one.

As a point of principle, we believe that help needs to be provided at the specific place it is needed. Help needs to be point focussed on the activity that a user is attempting to undertake. A user shouldn’t be taken away from their current activity. But how can this be achieved without adding bloat on the web page?

There are a tremendous number of opinions on this subject that fill web servers around the world. One of the best repositories for perspective and an in-depth discussion on web site usability issues is Jakob Nielsen’s Website. We recommend a visit to his site and his newsletter wholeheartedly.

We wanted to provide focused in-context help on trymehere and to that end we decided to use pop-up windows. Now there is a subject to discussm, but we won’t here! It used to be a sore problem due to unethical usage of such a feature, but this is largely a thing of the past. Many major sites use pop-ups in a wholly productive way.

The benefit for trymehere is that it is possible to click on a small 9 x 9 pixel graphic that looks like this .

We use it in page headings to describe a page’s function:

We use it after terms that are unfamiliar to a new user, e.g.

We place it next to data entry fields to explain what you should enter ands in what format:

When you click the button, a small window pops up that provided detailed help. Two examples are:

Yes, we even provide help about the Help button!

Notice that we even use help buttons within a help screen so that you can spend as much time clicking around in the nested help environment as you wish! To make this less boring, we have placed a small picture on each screen :&gt

There is one down side to taking this approach! I have just counted the number of individual help screens and it totals over 300! Phew! No wonder we have seemed to have spent 24 hours a day editing them! If we’ve rewritten one once, we’ve rewritten it twenty of times! Maybe this has taken more time that developing the service?

Still, we think the effort was well worth while. Mind you, between you and I, I’d rather be on a beach on Barbados…

Chris

For heavens sake, all I want to do is delete my account!

Providing a facility to delete an account; it seems such a simple thing to for a web service to implement doesn’t it? The Internet is not the Wild West any more. So why is it that in 2006 this simple capability is still such a challenge for the user on many sites? It’s possible to understand and forgive this with a simple ‘Web 2.0′ service whose designers are testing a new concept and have built the site on a shoe string, but with services that have seriously backed by VCs this is just plain weird.

Is it because the whole ethos of these services was focused on building a community and adding relationships rather than worrying about how one of their users could delete their footprint and personal information from the site easily? Probably.

I’ve been user sof several business networking services and address book synchronisation services since their very early days. I’m a great fan as they enable me to maintain contact with my hard-earned business colleagues even when they change jobs on a disarmingly regular basis. A business network, like a social network, also allows me to ‘link’ to key colleagues.

What do you have to do to delete an account on an example business network service? You won’t find a delete account link on the site and you need to delve into the Customer Service / FaQ section where you find the following buried advice:

Yes, you have to contact Customer Services to delete your account! I’m not sure how you provide proof of who you are? Why can’t you do this on-line?

Personal relationships change as well don’t they? This leads to the occasional necessity of deleting a community link. This capability is hidden well away at the side of the community list. You would never find it if you needed it. Even after following the guidance in the help section it is very hard to spot.

Why is this link not placed prominently at the top of the page in plain view? Also, why do you have to go to a separate page to delete a link? Why aren’t the delete tick boxes not on the same page as the list of contacts?

Also with an address book synchronisation service, yet again you have to search the Help section to find out that you have to contact customer services to delete your account.

When you click the link, it explains that you need to delete the application on your PC but it does not mention how to delete your uploaded contact directories on their server!

Of course, some do it right! In the Account Profile of a leading social network service is a clear link (albeit small) that enables you to cancel your, or your child’s, account.

Clicking this button leads to a clear delete account form. This is excellent!

With trymehere, we have made the ability to delete your profile and community links as easy as possible. To this end we have placed a prominent Delete profile button slap bang in the middle of the home page of the service site.

If you do decide to stop using the service, you just press the button, type Yes and all your personal information and your community links are gone! We couldn’t make it easier.

On the home page of the service site, there is a tab called Manage Members which you can select and immediately delete an individual Member Community link if you wish.

 

Of course, we hope you would never need to use the delete profile capability, but if you ever decide to do so, you can do it easily without having to search to find out how to do it. Not wanting you to use the feature, is not a good reason for not providing the capability.

Chris