Pizza Hut and the iPhone
There were reports last week about the impact that the Pizza Hut iPhone application has had on sales with claims of sales of $1M dollars in the first three months.
It’s not obvious whether these are net new customers or sales are simply being transferred from other channels like the regular telephone. I would be curious to see if there’s any bias in the time distribution of orders (it’s easier to order a pizza via app rather than by phone from the back of a taxi), or order composition (the after-bar feast, for example). I suspect iPhone users themselves have subtly different tastes vs the population so that introduces bias there also.
Regardless, providing easier ways to order your products and services is rarely a bad thing.
Jobless visualization in the NYT
I do love some of the visualizations that the New York Times puts together on their website. Interactive and simple, they make the underlying data much more accessible.
My daily reading
A couple of my favorite reads right now are the Harvard Business Review Voices and Felix Salmon. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt in Seattle earlier this week, and their NY Times blog Freakonomics is always entertaining.
On the tech front, TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb are good for general news. SearchCap from Search Engine Land has a good daily summary of the goings-on in the search world.
I wish I had more time to spend on fun things like Photoshop Tutorials at psdtuts, The Big Picture and a bunch of other photography and PS blogs, but sadly they barely get read.
News mostly comes from Twitter these days which is both focused (good) and myopic (bad) at the same time. It helps having a job that makes me sensitive to large scale trends around breaking events.
A little fiction would be nice soperhaps that’s something for the holidays.
Building an optimal phone tree
I am yet to meet someone that enjoys the prospect of calling an automated customer support number to complete a transaction. Fortunately many such tasks can now be completed on the web and that mode of interaction, while not always perfect, is generally a lot more efficient. There’s much more bandwidth in the form of a screen to share information and the interaction model is much richer with keyboard/mouse over touchtone keys.
However, every once in a while a support website dead-ends with ‘for more information call 1-866-555-1322′ and there’s nowhere else to go. What follows puzzles me without fail. Never have I wanted to call to get a reprint of my last statement or change my mailing address. My tasks seem to end up under the menu 8, submenu 6, choice 9 section, deep down in the tree.
Who is the tree structure being optimized for? I’d like to believe the answer is ‘the majority of callers but not me’ such that the average caller is faced with the least hassle in navigation. That would be aiming towards optimal which is good. But I wonder if they’re really measured and arranged in that way at all. I suspect most trees are built via construction – either by primary tasks, or by departments (these boundaries shouldn’t show to customers) or by the time the capability was added to the phone tree (yikes!). Perhaps an ideal phone tree would actually constantly adjust based on tasks and demand so that the ‘please listen carefully because our options have recently changed’ message actually meant something.
Alas, the best predictor of a good customer support phone call still seems to be an immediate answer by a real person who can relate to service they’re representing.
Post offices and the Bing Maps API
I spent an hour this morning hacking together a quick prototype that brought together Windows Azure hosting and storage, the Bing Maps SDK, and a set of photos that Amy and I have been collecting of US Post Offices. The result is a United States Post Offices mashup which shows a map with pushpins for each post office for which which we have a photo.
The practical part of this was really the experience rather than the output. In short, it was really surprisingly easy to pull together the pieces to make this work. It takes a little while to get Visual Studio set up as an Azure development platform but once that’s done (once) it’s trivial taking existing techniques and having them run cloud-enabled with barely any changes.
A few resources that came in handy:
- Windows Azure Platform
- WPF Client for the Windows Azure Blob Storage
- Data Visualization with Bing Maps
- Bing Maps Control SDK 6.2
- Bing Maps Interactive SDK
- Image Resizer (convenient replacement for the great XP PowerToy that did the same thing)
After all that, two things are clear: it should be a good PDC this year and there are many more post offices yet to be visited.
Simple PivotTables in PowerShell
Quick script for PivotTable-like functionality in PowerShell. I find myself using this a lot.
# Rotates a vertical set similar to an Excel PivotTable
#
# Given $data in the format:
#
# Category Activity Duration
# ------------ ------------ --------
# Management Email 1
# Management Slides 4
# Project A Email 2
# Project A Research 1
# Project B Research 3
#
# with $keep = "Category", $rotate = "Activity", $value = "Duration"
#
# Return
#
# Category Email Slides Research
# ---------- ----- ------ --------
# Management 1 4
# Project A 2 1
# Project B 3
$rotate = "Activity"
$keep = "Category"
$value = "Duration"
$pivots = $data | select -unique $rotate | foreach { $_.Activity}
$data |
group $keep |
foreach {
$group = $_.Group
$row = new-object psobject
$row | add-member NoteProperty $keep $_.Name
foreach ($pivot in $pivots) { $row | add-member NoteProperty $pivot ($group | where { $_.$rotate -eq $pivot } | measure -sum $value).Sum }
$row
}
Collaborative filtering win
Among many other things, Amazon.com sells jewelry. Given the amount of business I’ve sent their way over the years, it seemed fitting that we’d get my wedding band from Amazon also.
For this particular purchase I was delighted by the recommendations for other products I might be interested in. For a mens gold wedding band, size 9, the top suggested item is none other than the venerable Linksys WRT54G router.
I am in good company.
Symmetric bus route numbers
In building any kind of system or infrastructure, strange things can happen when your designers and engineers aren’t representative of your real users: you end up optimizing for the wrong audience.
This problem surfaces in software design all the time. I recently read something to the effect of “Every time you ask a user to make a choice about something they don’t care about, you’ve failed.” While the most configurable, flexible application might be an engineers dream, all those configuration dialogs, checkboxes and sliders are not awesome for consumers. It seems many of the innovations in user interface design over the last ten years have been the reduction of such clutter, noise and confusion.
Apparently this pattern surfaces in other fields too. For example, Seattle bus routes are identified by a single number which represents the route in both directions. You have to combine that with the final destination to figure out which one you want. Except that some buses terminate at different points along their route so even that rule doesn’t always work. And sometimes you know you need to go in one direction but are unsure which . It’s fine once you know how it works but a nightmare for newcomers and tourists.
My guess is that both drivers and route planners think in terms of circular or out-and-back routes which the same drivers traverse every day. Reasonably enough it makes no difference to them which direction they’re driving in.
Why not have a 5A and 5B bus that go in different directions along the same path? You can always get back to where you came from by switching the letter.
Bonus point: I started drafting this very post on a bus just minutes before I overheard a rider ask “is there more than one 271 that goes to Issaquah?” to which the driver replied “no there’s not, but this one’s heading to Seattle.”
Sounders FC beat FC Dallas
A couple of years ago Seattle added another professional sports team to its list – Seattle Sounders FC an expansion team in Major League Soccer (MLS). The last serious soccer match I saw was Manchester United playing Chelsea in a summer game in Qwest Field several years ago and before that it must have been Stoke City in Britannia Stadium a long time before. Suffice it to say, it has been a very long time since I’d enjoyed a proper football game.
It was a cool, clear and dry night and the lights of the stadium beckoned.
I was impressed by the level of crowd engagement (quite different from the previous soccer game at the same venue). Singing, chanting, horns, drums and rowdiness behind the goal; just like England. There are still a few subtle differences, however.
The whole lower level of Qwest Field was filled, a record mid-season attendance of more than 33,000 people. Good to see such a level of interest and support.
It was a good game and all the more enjoyable to see the Sounders win 2-1.
Sounders game set on Flickr.
