Aaron Hillel Swartz

“ So not only are you asking people a question they don’t—can’t—know the answer to, you’re also asking them in a nice conference room, filled with other people, after giving them some cash. It doesn’t take much reading in social psychology to realize this isn’t exactly an ideal situation for honesty. People are, of course, going to say what they think you want to hear, and even if you have the most neutral of moderators asking the questions, they’re going to be able to make some educated guesses as to what that is. ”

“ When a company does focus on their users, it’s a real shock. Take Zappos, an online shoe store. Zappos is fanatical about customer service. They quietly upgrade first-time purchasers to overnight delivery, they write cards and send flowers when the situation warrants it, and they not only give complete refunds but pay for shipping the shoes back as well. It’s the kind of company people rave about. But, most interestingly for our purposes, if they don’t have the shoe you want in stock, they try to find you a competitor that does! ”

“ Instead, I’m suggesting you let users get their own data out of your site. People who put their events in your calendar should be able to export their calendar; people who got their email thru Gmail should be able to get it back out again.
Good export isn’t just the right thing to do, it can also be a strong way to attract users. Folks are uncomfortable about pouring their whole life into a hosted web application—they’ve been burned too many times by companies that took all their data and went bust. ”

“ Robots and browsers and protocols are fun, sure, but if you want your site to succeed it ultimate has to appeal to humans—the real people who build and use all that other stuff. And even if information doesn’t, humans generally want to be free. ”

“ And, of course, it goes both ways: a great way to attract users is to provide import functionality yourself. By supporting import from other products, whether they have official export features or not, you make it easy for users to slide into your own version. Even if your competitors don’t have an official export function, you can still help users out (and offend your competitors) by scraping data out of their system—writing custom tools to pull stuff out of their user interface and into your database. ”

“ It’s a piece of cake to serve someone an additional link and seeing if they click on it; keeping track of whether they come back to the store in the weeks and months to come is much harder. Worse, the difference made by any one additional box is subtle, and thus hard to measure. The real test isn’t whether removing one sell box gets Amazon more customers, it’s whether switching to a kindler, gentler layout does. ”