Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Killing my baby
I had to do it. I had no choice. I had planned to try something different with One Stop Web Support—a brand new idea. It was my baby. It was going to be great. It would save visitors from a pet peeve of mine. It always irked me that I would start to read an article online, find it was mainly stuff I already knew, so I'd be wading through familiar material hoping to find a hidden gem of new information in it.

I decided I was going to do something unique with my site and provide two versions of each article—one a full version and one a summary with links to the full version, so that those who chose the summary could quickly switch to the full version if they wanted more details.

It was a lot more work, but I figured it would be worth it for visitors. There's a reason, though, that this format hasn't caught on on the Web: it doesn't work.

I tried to make it work for a couple of weeks, but I'd keep finding yet another compensation I would have to make to ensure that visitors would understand the format. Yet as I looked at the almost finished website today, it became clear that it just wasn't worth it.

Finding a way to fit an explanation of the format into each summary conflicted with the very purpose the format strove for: simplicity. And providing an entrance into the multiple directories (for each type of article) and making sure my navigation bar provided enough explanation of how the format worked was eating up too much valuable space.

So I killed my baby.

It's something we all have to do in business. At times, we get ideas that sound fantastic, but don't translate anywhere near as well into reality. The key is a willingness to abandon our own great ideas in favor of what's best for the customer.

I was caretaker for a church camp one summer. One of the groups that came up was a preteen girls' group. The leader had planned lots of fun for the girls, including an evening-long set of outdoor games. Unfortunately, that night mosquitos swarmed all over the girls. The girls were miserable, but the leader demanded they every game be completed.

Girls were crying, the leader was yelling, demanding that they have all the fun she had planned for them. The girls finally finished all the games and dashed for shelter in the lodge. Nobody had fun that night—not the girls, not the leader—but the "great idea" had to be carried out.

That's what we have to guard against. We have to honestly assess whether those great ideas we have benefit our customers and we have to abandon the ideas rather than bull-headedly forcing them down our customers' throats.

I'm not trying to pat myself on the head for being so brilliant. Today was one recognition of a failed idea. The test is in doing the same thing day after day. The test is keeping the focus squarely on what's best for the customer.
Jeff