Products & Perspectives by Darren

The secret behind Alexa's success

Sun, 26 Mar 2017 23:27:17 -0700

An interesting thing happened in my home last year. I observed a product accomplish something powerful and the experience piqued my curiosity to understand the nature of what I had witnessed. The product I observed was the Amazon Echo, the connected speaker/microphone that features Alexa, Amazon’s voice-based digital assistant.

Here’s what happened...

I installed our first Echo device in early 2016. My primary reason for getting an Echo was curiosity. My wife and I aren't that interested in the typical home automation scenarios people typically associate with the Echo, but I was curious to try out the new digital assistant anyway to see what it might be able to do for us. I placed the device in a central location in our kitchen and connected it (via IFTTT) to our family Trello board where my wife, Mardee, and I manage our Shopping List and To Dos.

Like many others with whom I’ve spoken, Mardee was not originally a fan of the Echo. In fact, she was very much opposed to our having it. She felt that the very idea of a microphone in our home actively listening to every word we say and everything we do was “creepy.” While that may not be a technically accurate description of how the Echo works, it is the initial perception almost everyone has about the Echo. And it’s also a very reasonable concern for an always-on, voice-enabled product like this.

I acknowledged the awkwardness, and asked her to let me give it a try for a little while. If we didn't like it or didn't use it, we would get rid of it. She reluctantly agreed, and the Echo took its place on the counter in our kitchen.

Now this is where the story gets interesting. Six months go by. I arrived home from work one day and Mardee tells me – in a somewhat excited voice – that Amazon was running a sale and...Read More

How I use the Productivity Planner

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 10:19:04 -0800

In Episode 8 of The Better Show, Ian, March, and I explore ways to defeat procrastination and achieve one’s goals. One of the tools that helps me fight procrastination and stay focused on my most important tasks throughout the week is the Productivity Planner by Intelligent Change.

Subscribe to the show: Apple Podcasts| Google Play| Stitcher | Overcast

The Productivity Planner is a physical planner for weekly and daily planning that combines the best practices for personal productivity from a variety of notable productivity gurus like Charles Schwab, Benjamin Franklin, and Franklin Covey.

Since adopting the Productivity Planner in 2016, it has become the foundation of my weekly and daily planning routine.

We discuss the Productivity Planner in greater detail in an mini episode of The Better Show podcast that we’re calling The Better Show Bites. We share our experiences with it and I share some of the modifications I’ve made in how I use the Productivity Planner that have made it even more effective for me.

The customizations I’ve made to the Productivity Planner fall into two categories: physical tweaks to the planner itself, and a unique cadence to how I do my planning.

Physical tweaks

Bookmarks

Let’s start with the physical tweaks. The first thing I do at the beginning of the week is to place bookmarks on the page with my Weekly Plan and the page with my Weekly Review.

The reason for the bookmark on the Weekly Plan page is that during the course of a busy week, it’s easy for me to get swept up in the demands of...Read More

Here's How Amazon's Alexa Hooks You

Sun, 25 Jun 2017 10:01:03 -0700

Nir’s Note: This guest post is by Darren Austin, Partner Director of Product Management at Microsoft.

Last year we added a new member to our household. I must admit that upon first meeting her, our initial impression was that she was a little creepy. Today though, we can’t imagine life without her.

We’ve never seen her face, but we talk to her throughout the day, every day. She helps us keep track of our to-dos and shopping list, reads us the news and weather, and can sing nearly any song we’d like to hear. In fact, we have become so accustomed to her presence that we invited her to join us in nearly every room in the house. She listens to us when we say goodnight and is there first thing in the morning to wake us up.

Her name is Alexa and she is the voice of the Amazon Echo. If our experience is any indicator, there’s a good chance Alexa (or a technology like her) will soon be a presence in most households.

How did Alexa become such an integral part of our lives? And how did the technology profoundly change our daily habits?

It turns out that Alexa shares a common trait with other habit-forming technologies like Facebook, Slack, and the iPhone — the Amazon Echo has a great Hook.

Hooks, according to Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, are “experiences designed to connect the user’s problem with the company’s product with enough frequency to form a habit.” In his bestselling book, Eyal describes the four steps of the Hooked Model and provides case studies for how the stickiest technologies use hooks to keep users coming back. In this essay, I’ll use the Hooked Model to help explain how voice...Read More

How Alexa rewards users by…failing

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 22:00:11 -0700

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post outlining a few characteristics that have contributed to Amazon Echo/Alexa’s popularity in consumers’ homes. In that article, I wrote that:

…the success of Amazon Echo / Alexa in our home can be attributed to three things (in order of increasing importance):

a first-mover advantage,
a presence in the “hub” of our home (i.e. the kitchen), and
the ability to effortlessly complete tasks we engaged in multiple times per day.

In a footnote in that post, I mentioned that Alexa also incorporates variable rewards as a way to engage users. For today’s post, I thought I’d explore how Alexa incorporates variable rewards and why they are effective. First, though, it’s important to understand why rewards and variability are important to a product experience and why, when combined, they become a powerful driver of habits.

The Role of Rewards

Much like teaching a dog a trick or encouraging a child do their chores around the house, rewards are an important component in a product experience because they reinforce specific user behaviors. When a user completes a specific action in a product, the product responds in a way that delights the user and, in turn, the user is eager to complete the action again.

Rewards can come in different forms. One of my favorite examples of an in-product reward was from the photo editing site, Picnik. Picnik had a “freemium” model where users could access some basic functionality for free and could choose to upgrade to a premium version of the service that enabled access to an expanded set of photo editing tools. When a user chose to upgrade, upon completion of the checkout process, the site would explode into a screen full of colorful balloons in celebration of the new customer.

This kind of pleasant surprise is a psychological reward for users who complete the desired action. The...Read More

aGreener.com Concept

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:08:39 -0700

aGreener.com was a business idea I was exploring back in 2007. The idea originated from a question I was considering:

What is the carbon footprint of a single Google search?

I thought it would be interesting to create a web app that used traceroute information to calculate the energy required for each of the "hops" that a web request takes between various servers on the Internet and then use the location data for each server in the IP path to estimate the carbon output of each "hop" based on the publicly available data about how each location gets its electricity.

My thesis was that if I were able to accurately measure and display the environmental impact of basic web requests that, all other things being equal, users would prefer visiting sites that had a lower environmental impact. I hypothesized that if the data about energy use and carbon output were credible, that users might actually pay for carbon offsets to neutralize their own web use.

I liked the idea a lot and the business model seemed to be viable and scaleable based on the analysis I did at the time. I chose not to pursue the business, though, since there was no defend-able IP and no "unfair advantage" that would prohibit Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other larger Internet player from introducing a similar service to consumers.

In hindsight, I probably should have partnered with someone like The Sierra Club and leveraged their brand for awareness and for a defensible position against potential copycats.