Found via Certified Bullshit Technician.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
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If you’ve taken a psychology course or have leafed through a user experience book, you’ve probably come across a diagram of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:
Dan Zambonini of the web development shop Box UK took some inspiration from it and wrote an article titled Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For. In it, he writes:
As customers, we have a finite number of needs that we’re willing to fulfill by parting with our hard-earned cash. If you’re planning a web application that can’t build a business model around one or more of these needs, you may face difficulties generating sustainable revenue.
He breaks down people’s needs into the following categories, with an explanation of each one:
- Time: Convenience, Efficiency, Immediacy
- Scarcity
- Comfort
- Esteem: Id, Desirability, Self-Image, Ego
- Belonging: Relationships, Sex, Affection
- Survival: Health, Safety, Wellbeing
- Financial Security: Wealth, Success, Career
- Entertainment: Emotion, Experiences
- Intellectual Stimulation: Creativity, Learning, Expression
He also looks at how much people are willing to have different needs fulfilled. For example, people are willing to pay geometrically increasing prices for increasing comfort. Consider the 15x price difference between “cattle class” and first-class tickets on an airplane (even though both depart and arrive at the same times), or the 27x price difference between a bargain-basement pillow and a down-filled one:
Entertainment, on the other hand, is a different beast. According to Zambonini, across the wide array of entertainment options from games for their mobile phones to vacations in the tropics, people are willing to pay the same rate: $5 an hour…
He categorized the top 100 U.S. sites by the needs he listed — here’s how they break down:
Naturally, such categorization is subjective and had to be drastically simplified, with each site being slotted into a single category. Sites about food were put into the “survival” category, even though a top 100 site on food would probably cover things like gourmet food and wine, which could arguably be put into the “entertainment”, “comfort” and even “esteem” categories.
He closes the article with a series of questions that you should ask about your application, such as “Does my app allow the user to do something more quickly?”, “Does my app allow the user to express their creativity?”, “Does my app provide entertainment for the user?” and so on. Your should be able to answer “yes” to at least one of these questions, and better still, you should be able to explain why.
Links
- Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For
- Better Than Free: In it, Kevin Kelly “discusses the concept of ‘Generatives’: non-copyable qualities that retain value in a digital age.”
- Wikipedia page for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
- Follow Dan Zambonini on Twitter
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Qixing’s Big Move
Good Luck, Qixing!
We may be losing a User Experience Evangelist, but I think we’ll get a great Windows 8 in return. Qixing Zheng, who’s been with Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team for the past three years, is leaving to join the Windows UX Team as a Program Manager. While I saw firsthand that she enjoyed her work as a UX Evangelist, talking to developers and designers about building usable, comprehensible and beautiful applications, joining the Windows UX Team is the opportunity of a lifetime. After all, how often are you given the chance to design something that will get used all the time by millions of people, all over the world, at work, play and in their day-to-day lives?
Qixing’s been the sole writer for the Canadian UX Connection blog during her tenure. She posted her farewell article, A New Year and a New Beginning, on January 1st, but don’t think that’s the last you’ve seen of her online. She promises that she’ll be blogging soon – she’ll let us know where, and I’ll let you know in turn. In the meantime, you can follow her on Twitter, where her handle is @hundredflavour.
What About User Experience?
While I’m glad that Qixing is going to be applying her skills and knowledge to Windows’ user interfaces, there remains the need for someone to help developers, designers and people who play both roles build useful, usable and beautiful interfaces, applications and experiences. This is becoming even more important as mainstream software development extends beyond the desktop OS to the web, mobile phones, tablets and even big-ass tables.
I’m planning to pick up some of the slack in the tech blogs where I write, Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy. In addition to articles on programming, industry trends and reports from the field, I’ll also be posting articles about usability, user interface and user experience, as seen from the developer’s point of view. I’ve had some experience in this area, and where my skills and knowledge fall short, I can always call on my “friends in UI places” and bring their opinions and know-how to you.
Once again, congratulations Qixing, you’ve been a great teammate — and yes, we’ll keep evangelizing user experience!
The T-shirt of the day at Tee Fury is sure to be a big hit fans of Star Trek and classic games. It’s the “Spock, Paper, Scissors” shirt:
Here’s a closer look at the design:
The shirt sells for US$9 plus shipping. It comes in two versions:
- Men’s: Slate blue, in sizes S, M, L, XL and XXL
- Women’s: Powder blue, in sizes S, M, L, XL
If you want it, you’ve got until the end of the day today (Monday, January 4th) to place an order. Once the day ends, Tee Fury will retire the design from production.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, the odds are better than even that you either make presentations or will do so eventually. That’s why, from time to time, I’ll point you to some resources for public speaking and presentations, here on Global Nerdy.
One good resource is Carmine Gallo’s book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, in which the author examines Steve Jobs’ legendary keynote presentations – Stevenotes – and distills helpful lessons on how to be a more effective presenter. For a taste of the book, here’s a SlideShare presentation that sums up its big ideas:
There’s a lot of presenting in my line of work. In fact, it’s a personal requirement for me. In the past, I’ve turned down higher-paying jobs because they didn’t involve presenting, blogging o’r any other public-facing activity. Maintaining and improving my presentation skills is just as important as maintaining and improving my technical skills (and yes, I still write code quite regularly), so you’ll find me polishing my communications technique quite often. As I read, learn, practice and present, I’ll share what knowledge I pick up along the way, so as I often write: watch this space!
The Book
I do believe I’ll be ordering an ebook edition of Apress’ Windows Azure Platform. Here’s Apress’ description of the book:
Master Microsoft’s brand-new cloud-computing technology with Windows Azure Platform by Tejaswi Redkar. You’ll learn how to utilize Azure’s four core components— Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services—both separately and together to build flawless cloud computing services.
What you’ll learn in Windows Azure Platform:
- Everything you need to know about the Azure Services components—from Access Control to SQL Services, from the Service Bus to Workflow Services.
- Understand both the architectural thinking behind Azure and the nuts-and-bolts code that binds your service together.
- Design, build, and deploy an Azure service with the assistance of a fully worked template for end-to-end application design that mimics a real-world scenario and gives you a rock-solid example of the design and development processes that you need to work through.
The Discounts
If you bought the ebook version of their previous Azure book, Introducing Windows Azure, you’ll get an automatic 50% discount off the the price of the ebook of Windows Azure Platform.
If you didn’t buy the ebook version of Introducing Windows Azure, you can still get a discount. If you place an order for Windows Azure Platform before the end of December 31st, use the discount code APRESSHOLIDAYML, which will apply a 25% discount to your entire purchase (so you can save on other Apress books, too!)
These discounts won’t last very long, so place an order today!
“You can’t improve what you don’t measure” is a maxim for many fields. Engineers, businesspeople and athletes may all have their own way of phrasing it, but however it’s put, they repeat it to each other all the time.
The act of measurement becomes murkier when applied to creative endeavours such as blogging. The qualitative stuff – How many people read the blog? Which articles were the big ones? Is the readership trend going up or down? – is pretty easy. A little StatCounter code embedded in the pages of The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century and Global Nerdy does the tedious stuff; I just look at the data and interpret it. As for the qualitative stuff, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the individual reader.
Accordion Guy’s Stats for 2009
Once again, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century passed the “2 million pageviews” mark. As of this writing, here’s how the numbers break down:
- 2,198,906 pageviews – that is, the number of web pages from the Accordion Guy blog that were downloaded. Every time you www.joeydevilla.com, one of the individual article pages or hit the “refresh” button on your browser while reading my blog, it registers as a pageview.
- 105,599 returning visitors – when you visit Accordion Guy, the StatCounter code embedded on every page attempts to leave a “cookie” – a tiny scrap of data stored by your browser – for anonymized tracking. If the StatCounter code sees that your browser has already stored an Accordion Guy cookie, it means you’ve visited the site before. The cookie data includes the date and time of your last visit, and if it’s been more than an hour since you last visited the Accordion Guy blog, you’re counted as a “returning visitor”.
- 1,672,393 first-time visitors – the opposite of a returning visitor is a “first-time visitor”. If the embedded StatCounter code can’t see an Accordion Guy cookie stored by your browser, you’re counted as one of these.
- 1,777,992 unique visitors – this is a calculated value: “unique visitors” is simply the sum of returning and first-time visitors.
Here’s an incredibly compressed chart showing the day-to-day activity on the Accordion Guy blog:
The spikes in the graph represent the most popular articles. The rightmost spike, which also happens to be the tallest, represents the How Fanboys See Operating Systems article from December 16th. That one got featured on Reddit and re-tweeted like crazy.
Here’s how the numbers look for each quarter:
The trend is up-slightly down-up-slightly down, but still rising overall.
Global Nerdy’s Stats for 2009
Accordion Guy is my “hobby” blog. It’s the forum in which I express myself, tell stories and jokes, share pictures I’ve taken and point to interesting things I’ve found on the ‘net. I write it “just for kicks”, and the moment I stop enjoying writing it, I’ll stop.
Global Nerdy is a different beast. It is my second personal blog devoted to programming, internet technology and the nerd lifestyle, my first being The Happiest Geek on Earth (which Cory Doctorow called me in this Boing Boing article, which points to The Accidental Go-Go Dancer, in which I chronicled my brief stint as an accordion-playing go-go dancer at a downtown Toronto nightclub). Global Nerdy is both: T
- An exercise to make me a better programmer and tech advocate through writing about the field, and doing the necessary legwork and research to support that writing, as well as
- Self-promotion. Yes, it’s also a mercenary playing-to-win, look-at-me, hire-me, separate-myself-from-the-crowd, I-am-ten-Scobles blog.
I can say with certainty that Global Nerdy has helped me land my last three jobs, which includes my current one as a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft Canada – a job I landed in the middle of the econopocalypse of 2008 after getting laid off. In spite of all the job market doom and gloom, I was unemployed a mere three weeks.
This year, Global Nerdy crossed the “1 million pageviews” mark for the first time. Here’s how the numbers break down (for an explanation of the terms, see the Accordion Guy review above):
- 1,608,638 pageviews
- 60,340 returning visitors
- 1,263,873 first-time visitors
- 1,324,213 unique visitors
Here’s the chart showing the day-to-day activity on Global Nerdy:
The spikiest period is in late January, which represents the buzz around the Winning the Gnu article, in which I won Richard Stallman’s auction for a plush version of the Free Software Foundation’s mascot, the gnu.
Here’s how the quarterly numbers break down:
Eek – a downward trend!
If viewed in isolation, this would be a worrying development. However, there’s another blog that’s been getting the readers that would normally go to Global Nerdy, and I’ve included a screenshot of that blog below:
Canadian Developer Connection is Microsoft Canada’s developer blog, and it literally pays the rent. As a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft, I’m paid to write it, and my performance – and yes, my bonus — is judged on the number of articles I write for it and the impact those articles have.
Furthermore, I’m trying to be Microsoft Canada’s most prolific, most-read and most influential blogger. After that, I’m aiming for Microsoft worldwide. I think my closest competition is my friend, and coworker (and guy who recommended me for the job), David Crow. Here’s how we stack up, blog-wise, according to Alexa:
In your face, Drinky Crow!
(I’ll admit, he’s got an edge on me in Twitter followers – I have 4,498, he has 4,719 – and we each have our own spheres of influence. And hey, he’s the man behind DemoCamp – I just help out.)
As a result, I’ve been doing two things:
- I’ve been writing Global Nerdy articles and cross-posting them to Canadian Developer Connection.
- I use Twitter to promote those articles, but I link to the Canadian Developer Connection one first, and the Global Nerdy one second.
I still think of Global Nerdy as my primary tech blog; I’m just nice (and pragmatic) enough to share my material with Microsoft. Should the day come when Microsoft and I part ways – I can’t see such a day on the horizon, but the era of the lifelong “company man” has passed – I’ll still have it. There’s also the fact that sometimes, there’s stuff I’ll post here that I won’t post in Canadian Developer Connection, such as when I’m speaking for myself and not on behalf of Microsoft Corporation.
The Blogs Over the Years
Accordion Guy is a long-running blog – not the longest-running by a long shot, but pretty long-lived, having had its start in November 2001. I’ve been measuring it with StatCounter since 2005, and here’s how it’s been doing since then:
There was a slight dip from the 2008 to 2009 numbers, and the cure is simple: write more, write better.
Global Nerdy is a newer blog – my friend George Scriban and I started it as a career-booster in mid-2006. George no longer writes for Global Nerdy, what with his being very busy with stuff at Microsoft’s main HQ in Redmond, and my job is a little more in-your-face than his. Global Nerdy’s maintained an upward trend, with an big shot in the arm from my joining Microsoft in late 2008:
Again, the mantra for Global Nerdy in 2010 is simple: write more, write better!
To of you who read either of my blogs – thanks for the great year, and expect great things in the new decade!
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.