What does it do for me, the average American who has some form of employer-based coverage? Most probably realize Healthcare is too expensive – premiums rising every year, actual Dr bills are outrageous – $4000/night hospital stays, or heard of relatives who went bankrupt due to medical bills. And that the whole employer based system requires one to be employed, which everyone knows now is not so guaranteed. So why hasn’t anyone tapped into this fear/uncertainty in marketing the new healtcare legislation?

And why hasn’t someone from the Dems side come up with a simple slogan like “Decent Health coverage for anyone who wants it for $100/month”. It doesn’t even have to be completely true (you can always pass additional legislation to help the poor, the illegals, abortion issue, etc.)
But a simple core idea like that can be appealing even to those with insurance, because it offers assurance that even if I lose my job, I can still afford some type of care – and this is not at all emphasized in the debate.
Like Hillarycare, Obamacare was run by too many Health Economists and Budget Directors (Peter Orzag should never have been the face of Healthcare), and not by Marketeers, who could’ve packaged & sold this more effectively.

1) The user experience of the feature is designed with what you want the user to do for your site’s goals & objectives, not the user’s.

2) The site is designed to bring users to the site (traffic generation), not for them to actually fulfill their needs.

3) The feature is designed to make use of the site or business’s competitive advantage WITHOUT regard to what the consumer wants and needs. This is often the case with companies with cool technology that has no user value.

I thought of why we often as product managers or designers create features that commit these sins, and I think some of the blame is on the PRD process where often it begins with “Objectives” and “Goals” that are site-centric, like increase conversion by 25%, collect 100,000 reviews, etc.

I think that we talk so much about “user-centric” design but never actually implement it, because we are often bound by these site-centric goals and objectives, much more than actually thinking about the user.

Obviously, sites are often businesses, and it is natural that there is some conflict. But the other part of this phenomenon is that pure user-centric improvements are harder to quantify – it may show up in the elusive “retention-metrics” but you often have to wait a few months to see the fruits of a lot of these metrics.

So we often commit these sins, because we improve things that can be quantified – its “metrics-driven” – but we lose a lot in this process.

IMG_9049.JPG

Originally uploaded by emilychang

So simple, yet so elegant. Only one color, but use of shade, form & function all come together to deliver in functionality as well as elegance. Websites should be designed this way.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/openforquestions/

Here is a list of all the Celebrities that have used Yahoo! Answers as a public invitation to ask them questions or answer a question they posed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_answers#Special_guests

From my experience at both Yahoo! Answers and at FixYa, I came up with a theory that Crowd-sourced communities can best be described as a marketplace between providers of content (sellers) and consumers of content (buyers).  The currency that makes most of the free content generation possible is “thank you’s”.  The key ingredient to making this work is that most providers of content need nothing more than an authentic “Thank You” for them to feel that their contribution (whether its an answer to a question, a video, or photograph) is appreciated, and worth the trouble of posting.

From this perspective, I think that Community Managers are filling in a hole where sometimes the “market” doesn’t work and the content providers are not compensated with proper appreciation.  This is especially true when there is not enough consumers of content – or when content production far outstrip the audience.  So Chief Thank You Officer is also a “market maker” often found on stock exchanges.

A community manager’s job is also to curb abuse – which often is when there is improper feedback (mean-spirited, personal attacks, meaningless responses) from a consumer of content to the provider of content.  Yes, there is also provider – provider conflict that community managers get into, but I do think the chief purpose of online community management for a crowd-sourced site is making sure that Thank You’s are doled out to the right people in the community.

But there is one universal truth to the effectiveness of such plans, and it is that they should be simple and easy to understand.  One of the major benefits of a market system is its transparency and easy to understand signals (high price = sell, low price = buy, if you don’t value something at $500, don’t buy it at $500). So any assistance program with complicated rules (like the Geithner plan) is bound to fail with many people not taking advantage of it, and it will empower the middle-men (loan brokers) who have the financial incentive to interpret the rules and find loop holes. 

This is precisely how the whole derivatives mess happened in the first place, with the financial instruments being too complicated even for execs to understand, and the middle men (Wall Street quant jocks & loan brokers) making decisions that enriched them, but collectively took the economy down with them.

So my suggestion would be that the government should step into the market, but with more clear rules – they should set up a Resolution Trust Co. to just buy the houses that are about to go into foreclosure, and then rent them back out to the occupants on a long term lease. 

This would be similar to how a government take over of a bank or auto company might look like, where the government ponies up the cash and keeps the employees (occupants) and factories (house) , but wipes out the equity holder and basically takes over.  

The rent can be determined by market rates in the area, and the government can bascially sign itself a contract to own the houses until the housing prices in the area stabilize (or rise above a certain threshold), which would then stabilize housing prices because all these foreclosed homes would have a government guaranteed floor price.

Jason Furman – economic advisor to Obama, and acquaintance from my grad school days, if you see this please give it a thought!

But as Americans, I’m confident this will end soon, as we will collectively get bored with continously worrying & talking about “the economy”.  Just like the housing boom was all anyone could talk about for a long time, we will soon reach an overload of yet another bad news, and just start to spend & invest because we get tired of it.

What kept the Japanese in recession for so long was their (our) penchant for pessimism, and self-flagellation.  Even during the 80s boom, everyone secretly thought we would be punished for excessive consumption & land grabbing.  But Americans are not so puritanical or at least there is a good segment who will just simply tire of all this doom & gloom. 

This is the land of Disneyland & Hollywood.

1. Don’t show up late, and then not apologize.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like candidates that show up on time.  But stuff happens. Traffic happens. Trains don’t run on time like they do in Germany.  But is it really that much to ask to apologize when you’re late to an interview?  Or at least call ahead to warn that you’d be late?

“Punctuality is the courtesy of kings” – quote I remember from the wonderful BOOK not the movie ”Thank You for Smoking” but supposedly its from a Louis XVIII. Its not that 2 minutes here, 5 minutes makes a world of difference in terms of time – its a matter of respect for the other person – and this is important no matter what the role (except maybe – brilliant engineer). 

2. Don’t admit you had a long weekend in Vegas, so you didn’t really have time to prep for the interview.  
Again, this is more about respect for the other person.  In what world is this an appropriate response to your lack of preparation? At the very least, you should try to appear prepared – because yes, at some point in your career, you will have a long weekend in Vegas and won’t be prepared for the important presentation. But the ability to get through those situations passably – is what separates the boys/girls from the men/women. 

3. Don’t be negative about the interviewer’s T-shirt.

Negativity is fine for soul-searching blogs and Yelp reviews.  And sure, you can joke about people’s dress after you’ve landed your job.  But being negative about the company, about industry events, about the T-shirt that the interviewer is wearing – all things which should follow the maxim “If you can’t say something nice, better not say anything at all.” You can think all these things – but do you really have to say them out loud? 

All of these things come down to “RESPECT”. If you have a modicum of respect for someone who is spending the time to consider hiring you and giving you money & a sense of belonging, I think its all common sense….

Otherwise – its much more respectful to cancel an interview, than to go thru with it. In the Web world, you may not want/or care about the job now, but in 2 years this same person may be interviewing you for the dream job, and negative impressions will last a lifetime….

FixYa is headquarted in the Peninsula of the Bay Area – in San Mateo.  We are hiring at every position – product manager, business development, designer, and marketing. So forward this on to anyone that might be looking.