Complete makeover for the home page

Eat your own dog food.

Some days ago, I posted a review for Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think”, a brilliant and funny book on website usability and recommended that everyone designing things for the web heed it. Since I am one of them, and design has been a slow learning process for me, I paid special attention to what the book said.

Some of the advice really hit home:

• Navigation should be obvious and intuitive.
• What the website is about should be clear.
• The home page is a whole other beast.
• Minimize text.
• Optimize workflows where there is a chance of user error.

This set me thinking about the Solomon Says homepage. Indeed, I tinkered with it even as I read the book. Together with some ideas I already had, I have released a severely updated version of the homepage today. Here’s what has changed:

• A tagline right below the logo on left top corner stating exactly what Solomon Says is.
• The “whys” and “hows” of Solomon Says are laid out first thing on the homepage. It breaks Steve’s “minimize text” rule, but will have to for now in favour of mission clarity.
• A new display for new reviews, which scrolls through them instead of the previous static six-tiled display.
• A blog feed is added to the main page to provide easy access to discussions and any ideas/upcoming features I am mulling over.
• No need to explicitly type your email id when requesting reviews or providing feedback. Just log in via the super handy Janrain login widget – we’ll handle the rest.
• Tools for following Solomon Says on social media have been moved to top right corner for easy access and to reduce clutter in the right panel.

With these changes, hopefully we have a more intuitive and informative home page which will allow reader to “get it” and use the site more effectively.

I have, however, not followed the biggest, most important bit of advice in the book. No user testing was conducted to see if the readers react as expected to the changes. This is where you, my loyal readers, come in. Give the new version a spin, and let me know how you like it.

After all, giving you what you need is what this is all about.

Cheers,
Kislay

Always keep a backup. Of everything.

Let me tell you a story of failures and backups and pain.

So last night I finished a bunch of changes to Solomon Says.  After the regular load of testing (that lasts 15 minutes and includes opening a bunch of pages on Firefox and Chrome), I uploaded the changes and tried to bring the server back up. Everything exploded in my face at about the same time. The only reason we are still in business is that I had backups. In decreasing order of importance, the following backups saved the day:

1. Database
2. Code/Configurations
3. Images

So pretty much everything :)

At this point, a note on the deployment process is in order. Here’s how it goes:

1. Stop python fcgi process and nginx service.
2. Delete the production code.
3. Run the DB migration script.
4. Upload the entire code from my laptop to the production location.
5. Start python and nginx

#2, #3, and #4 didn’t go too well.

#2 – My dev. environment is Windows, but production is on LINUX.  So there’s a bunch of stuff related to path handling (‘/’ vs ‘\’ etc.) that I change just for development. This is automatically handled in production by using a different configuration file. Alas, I ran the delete for #2 from one level higher in the directory structure. Boom goes the config. And on bringing the server up, I get a load of ‘access permission denied’ errors. I spent a half hour analyzing the arcane debug messages, then give up and restore the entire code base file by file and change by change.

#3 – I missed selecting a couple of ‘where’ conditions when running the migration script. Result – 2 of the main table got randomly changed. Considering how crappy the day had been so far, I realized it only on restarting the server. So bring the server down again, restore the DB to its previous avatar from the backup, and run the migration with extra precaution.

#4 – My development copy did not have quite a few of the images related to the newer reviews I had posted. And since I had deleted the production data in #2, the server started throwing ‘Suspicious Operation’ exception (What the hell is that? It should have said ‘File not found” or something). In view of the blunders I had made for #2 and #3, I assumed a mistake in the new configuration I had created and spent another hour debugging, then gave up and copied over the image folders from the back up to production.

All told, something that should have taken 15 minutes took 4 hours.

Lesson learnt. Always keep a backup. Of everything.

Looking just a little bit better

A lot of the feedback that I have received on Solomon Says (a big thank you to everyone who spent time and effort providing it) has been regarding the styling and design aspect of the website. Or rather, the lack of it styling and design aspects in the website. Now, I am no designer. CSS3 and templating were not quite my fortes when I started working on it. So operating out of my ignorance of these fields, I have been forced to improve the design of the site in increments. Get something working, make it usable, and put it out there. Then improve what it looks like in the next iteration.

I'd like to share with you some of the changes I'm currently working on to the layout of the review pages. This primarily involves improving the data panel just above the text of the review. For the uninitiated, this is what it currently looks like on book and travel reviews respectively.

Both look very cramped and difficult to interact with. The huge orange rating section is sort of a waste of space, and the images don’t get due prominence (especially harmful on travel reviews). So I thought through these problems and came up with a small redesign which hopefully makes everything cleaner and easier to access. Check it out.

The new version is only slightly different from the current one but I think it lends a much more spaced-out feel to the whole page. You would also have noted that there is a small panel of image thumbnails right above the ratings section. These are the images that currently show up below the text of the review, like so:

I never really this design because pics are cool and everybody loves them. So I moved the images right to the top in a combination of sliding thumbnail carousel and Fancybox. Now they are easily accessible, and clicking on the thumbnail gallery blows them up to full size too! Like this.

A lot more groovy, even if I say so myself! I am planning to roll out the changes in about two weeks after a few minor tweaks and testing.

So what do you think? Like the new look? Not quite? Let me know in the comments or drop me a line at solomonsaysindia@gmail.com. Suggestions/flowery words of praise/hate mail are all welcome.

Solomon Says at ISB

First things first – Please fill out this short survey. This will help me in assessing what I can do to make Solomon Says more exciting and useful for its users. I really, really appreciate it.

Now for the news of the week.

Solomon Says is currently the subject of a marketing project/case study in a course on Entrepreneurial Decision Making (EnDM) at ISB (Indian School of Business). The project is being conducted by Varun Jain (a very close friend of mine from my undergrad days at NSIT) of the ISB class of 2013 under Prof. Arun Pereira. Over the course of the project, I will be working with the two aforementioned gentlemen (mostly with Varun) to conduct market surveys, audiences analysis and other analytical wizardry to refine SolomonSays into an even more awesome product.

Quick background on how this came about. Essentially Varun was looking for a start-up to whet his new-found marketing chops on.. I was going around writing reviews and hacking away to glory with no time for reaching out to the wide world and finding a place in it. We discussed the website one day, and agreed that it could use some MBA lovin’. So starting this week with survey mentioned above, we’ll be doing some basic scoping exercises to (hopefully) understand out audience and define our market with a lot more clarity than before. These efforts will also try to discover how readers interact with the website and what we can build into it to make that experience smooth.

I have written before that I do not have a proper business plan yet for SolomonSays. Throughout this ISB affair, my focus will continue to be on how to make this the best, most helpful reviews website on the web. No doubt there are parts of the project which demand an emphasis on revenue streams and sustainability, but those come later. Till then, the spotlight, my dear readers, is on you.

Don't forget the survey.

The problem with crowdsourced content

We have whole lot of sites featuring reviews written by their readers on pretty much all topics. Of these, at least the front runners attract large traffic volumes, have a devoted user base, and are, I assume, making money. However, I want to discuss what I think is wrong with them.

The problem is the method of generating content. All these sites rely on a bevy of users to come write reviews on the products/service that the site focuses on and that they have used/experienced. This can be restaurant, book, travel, gadgets, or whatever else. Via friendly UIs, facilitated social media interaction etc., users are encouraged to contribute data for each others benefit. This strategy is very effective in generating large amounts of data. However, it is very bad at generating cohesive data.

In general, I have three somewhat interconnected problems with this:

1. Data is of poor quality – Since the website wants readers to submit reviews, it can rarely hold them accountable to the quality of their writing. The aim is to lower the barrier to writing and social media sharing. Get him to write. No matter he writes, get him to write. To be fair, most of the reputed website will intervene if you write inflammatory or profane material, but apart from that, pretty much anything goes. As a direct consequence, the quality of review in terms of both the content (what is written) and the form (how it is written) goes down. Most people write unbalanced reviews, either giving full marks and endless praise or griping about a very bad experience.This can be avoided to some extent by making sincere efforts at moderating and community building (StackOverflow is a great example), but none of the major commercial websites seem to be doing so.
2. There is just too much data – This is the explicit result of successfully inducing readers to submit content to a site. Since anyone can submit anything, the data volumes are large, and it becomes well-nigh impossible to find information. This is what I like to call the Problem of 500 reviews. What I mean by that is that on any successful reviews site, today you can find 500 reviews for pretty much every single item. Too much data is not much better than no data. The best this deluge of disjointed reader inputs can give us is a general sense of how people like something. As an experiment, choose any famous book about which you know nothing, and try to find out about the book using only GoodReads reviews. I am fairly regular on the site, but I mostly do it for the bragging rights, and to let my friends know what I am up to.
3. Data is without structure – I totally agree that a successful travel site of the kind that we are talking about will have all data about some destination. But how do we find this data? Since it is broken up across a large number of unconnected reviews, it is very difficult to present the information in a coherent, intuitive manner. It is now left to the reader to sift through the data that each reviewer has provided and collate the data he needs (when to get there, how to get there etc.)

The crowdsourced content model is like a group discussion where everyone is talking at the same time. There is no anchor or reference around which a discussion can be built.

IMO, a far better alternative is to have an informed member write one review, and then use that to gather all sorts of varied and personalized experiences regarding the topic of discussion. It may seem so up front, but such a model (critic-driven model, if you will) is not about classroom style information broadcast. The Expert has not spoken. It is about providing a structured core, the basic information, and then inviting the readers to extend that into a wider body of information. If you want people to spend time and effort sharing their opinion, it is only fair that you offer them something in return.

Introducing Solomon Says

Solomon Says is a reviews website that reviews products across very diverse categories – food, movies, music, books etc. The USP of this website over other such platforms is that it combines the best features of an archaic expert review forum and the more recent crowd-sourced reviews. So while there’s an option for users to see the independent reviews from other users, they also see an expert opinion which provides normalized reviews across different categories.

The purpose of the website is to provide “useful” information in a “structured” way.
“Useful” means it provides data that immediately answers questions that a reader might have about a travel destination or a book as against providing Wikipedia style encyclopedic knowledge that has only passing relevance.

“Structured” means that the information present should easily discoverable and well cross-referenced with other related pieces of information. This is in direct contrast to forum-style/community-style information channels where there is a large amount of data but information discovery is difficult as it is spread across numerous replies/reviews.