I never knew that grilled cheese sandwiches could be such an effective medium for learning about product viability.
Yet recently I found myself hanging out with a couple of data center dudes at a grilled cheese restaurant (aptly named Cheesie’s). Dude 1 was part of the winning team at a Mobile Hackathon last fall, and Dude 2 is the creator of gruntle.me, a place to fix disgruntled humans so they can become gruntled again. It’s fair to say that both of these guys know their way around the web.
So naturally, I did some brain-picking over sammies at Cheesie’s.
Me: What would make this concept useful?
Them: It’s gotta be social. Gaming dynamics would also be cool. If you want people to use it, they need an incentive.
My conversation at Cheesie’s provided me with my first batch of community feedback. According to Aza Raskin, creating a tight feedback loop is important because “your first idea probably sucks.” These words of wisdom really speak to me, partly because they make me laugh and partly because I’m operating under the assumption that I don’t know everything.
Stated in other words by aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready, “The problem is that we don’t understand the problem.”
Thus, one of my goals is to gain a better understanding of the problem. At Urban Geek Drinks, I asked Erin to tell me how my first idea probably sucks.
Me: What do think is one of the biggest challenges for the app?
Erin: Getting journalists to tag time and location data is going to be very difficult.
Here’s what grilled cheese- and beer-fueled conversations taught me about the problem:
- To provide social value, the product needs to make people feel good. People don’t just want to be informed—they also want to feel connected and important.
- Creating the working product isn’t the hard part. The real challenge lies in creating a process that makes participation easy, or maybe even automated. It’s nice to think about getting a package in the mail, but if you actually want the information delivered, someone needs to lick the stamp.
There are many different ways that you could solve the stamp-licking problem. Among other possibilities, you could:
- Pay someone to put stamps on envelopes
- Create a game or incentive to put stamps on envelopes
- Provide self-adhesive stamps to make the process easier
- Make pre-stamped envelopes
- Bribe the mailman to deliver your envelopes sans stamps
To me, the stamp-licking dilemma is akin to tagging content. In my other life, I train teenagers and young adults to use new media. No matter how many times I remind them to tag their posts/photos/tweets/etc, it just doesn’t happen. It’s an extra step that feels nonessential to the content producer; it’s not a direct part of the story, nor does it resemble the way that we communicate in the offline world.
Delving deeper into the problem has shown me that it may be time for a shift in my approach. Burt Herman advised that you should be prepared to change directions. Sometimes you need to adjust as you go to get to your destination, or in this case, to get the letter to the mailbox.
So tell me, #MozNewsLab peeps, what would you do to attach a stamp?
Maybe it’s a hard sell for individual journalists, but I think it could work if you could convince entire organizations. For them, it’d essentially be their mobile app. It shows coverage of stuff nearby as well as allows people to report something’s happening, both things news orgs really want. And they don’t have to pay big bucks for it, because it’s free. Excellent. And because they want that, product managers will nag editors to tag, and editors will nag the reporters. (For that to work, though, people may want an app that is just for their organization, not a global one.)
That’s just one potential avenue… in general, my intuition would be to ask the question: who do I want to be pitching this to? Who will need the most convincing, or has the most leverage once convinced? Users? Producers? Managers?
My 5 cents,
Stijn
Thanks for sharing; you make some really good points. Convincing the right group to adopt this app could be enough activation energy to start building momentum. Though, the nagging-and-tagging issue still doesn’t feel like an ideal solution. In a perfect world, people would participate because it’s fun, engaging, and fits neatly into their workflow—not because someone else is telling them to do it.
But I think you’re right about the necessity of clearly identifying the most influential audience that can push the app in the right direction. Spending time making the app very useful to the RIGHT people is perhaps a better strategy than trying to generalize the app and make it somewhat useful to other groups that kind of care.
Hi Trina – So, if someone hit’s the Curious button, isn’t the story already tagged with time and location data? There’s no reason you couldn’t use geolocative tagging for the guy on the street, which eliminates the journalist’s need to tag both time and place. And giving the curious people the ability to tag might help in getting more tags.
The power of your proposal (IMHO) lies within the fact that a citizen can participate in reporting the news. So I would think that figuring out the way to reward a citizen for being curious about this or that event or occurrence is the most important step.
Perhaps people are rewarded for their curiosity with related content (ie I don’t know what the Banana people are doing here, but I’m curious, tagging it “gathering”, “banana” and “this location” and sending it off to see what comes back. In the meantime, Curious gives me a story about “this location” or “bananas”.
Just some brainstorming. I did the Banana people example and I like grilled cheese!
I like the instant gratification idea, e.g. “While you’re waiting for the Banana Gathering story, would you like to learn a bit of history about this intersection? Or “Would you like to learn about the history of banana gatherings in your city?”
Hello,
Quick question: does this thing have to be restricted to the real world? See, I figure the biggest obstacle to the success of something like this would be getting to a critical mass of users. It’s one of those things where the more people use it, the more useful it is.
If it were implemented as a browser button that users of a particular site could use to tag interesting stories they think that site should be covering, you’d be able to see how it works in practice without having to convince a print publication to adopt it. Plus, you could have semi-automatic tagging, pulling suggested tags from the page content somehow.
There’s loads of successful news blogs out there that are run by just one or two people. I’m sure having access to these sorts of stats about what their readers are interested in would be of great use to them. You’d then have a more complete product to sell to the papers.
I’ve thought about the critical mass issue. If only a few people use it, those few people probably won’t have the best experience. I think that’s true for a lot of products. I’d like to explore different ways that this idea could still be valuable even if it’s only used by a small number of people.
The browser button is interesting…would that be similar to the +1 button?
Sorry for the slow response. I was thinking more a browser toolbar button. The +1 button is something site owners would have to add to their pages. A browser button would let you flag anything with a URI as interesting.
I would do it as a browser extension. Participating news sites would have a Curious link which stores that site’s details in the browser’s local storage. The user then goes off, when they find something curious, they hit their toolbar button and up pops a list of all the sites whose details they have stored. They choose who would be most interested, and carry on.
Would you be sending the details direct to the relevant news site, or would you store them on a central Curious server for anyone to search (by tag, time, etc.) and forward on a notification to the relevant news site? I’m thinking the latter would fit better with your original, GPS-based proposal.
Check out http://openfile.ca and the ideas behind Murmur (http://murmurtoronto.ca/about.php) — perhaps they’ll give you some inspiration.
These are great! Yup, I’m inspired. Your compadres in Canada have some cool ideas.
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