Rolandt

Lightroom 2.2 for iOS is here, and brings a bunch of improvements, including an oft-requested feature: full resolution output.

With version 2.2, we added in the ability for Lightroom mobile to output full resolution files for any file that was either captured on the device or added to the device, either through the camera connection kit, transferred via Wi-Fi from a camera directly, or transferred to the device via services like email, Dropbox, or Google Drive. Additionally, any files that were added directly to an iPhone or iPad are transferred in full resolution to other mobile devices signed into the same account. This way, files captured with your iPhone are available for further editing and exporting from your iPad, in full resolution and vice-versa.

One of my favorite workflows is shooting with my camera and transferring to my iPhone for quick editing and sharing. The photo in this post was shot the last time I was in Japan for cherry blossoms, and after reading about how cherry blossom season is going to be extra early this year, I felt it was finally time to finish the image. I transferred the file via Wi-Fi to my iPhone, imported it into Lightroom mobile, edited the file, and exported. Of course, our blog then down sampled the image, but that’s a different story…

The full list of improvements are:

• New: Full resolution output. Now, export and share photos that were captured on your device or that you added to your device at full resolution.
• Updated: 3D Touch support in the Camera Roll browser view. Quickly preview your image with Peek & Pop when browsing Camera Roll photos in the app.
• Fixed: Issue that lead to a potential crash.
• Improved: Various bugs and issues.

Lightroom mobile 2.2 is available immediately for iPhones and iPads from the App Store.

We’d love to know what you think, and don’t forget to rate it if you like it

-Josh and the Lightroom mobile team

In Sledgehammers vs Nut Crackers, Thomas Guest talks about pulling awk of the shelf to solve a fun little string-processing problem. He then shows a solution in Python, one of his preferred general-purpose programming languages. Why bother with languages like awk when you have Python at the ready? Guest writes:

At the outset of this post I admitted I don't generally bother with awk. Sometimes, though, I encounter the language and need to read and possibly adapt an existing script. So that's one reason to bother. Another reason is that it's elegant and compact. Studying its operation and motivation may help us compose and factor our own programs -- programs far more substantial than the scripts presented here, and in which there will surely be places for mini-languages of our own.

As I watch some of my students struggle this semester to master Racket, recursive programming, and functional style, I offer them hope that learning a new language and a new style will make them better Python and Java programmers, even if they never write another Racket or Lisp program again. The more different ways we know how to think about problems and solutions, the more effective we can be as solvers of problems. Of course, Racket isn't a special purpose language, and a few students find they so like the new style that they stick with the language as their preferred tool.

Experienced programmers understand what Guest is saying, but in the trenches of learning, it can be hard to appreciate the value of knowing different languages and being able to think in different ways. My sledgehammer works fine, my students say; why am I learning to use a nutcracker? I have felt that sensation myself.

I try to keep this feeling in mind as my students work hard to master a new way of thinking. This helps me empathize with their struggle, all the while knowing that Racket will shape how some of them think about every program they write in the future.

In the spring of 2014, Google released a standalone app for Android called Google Camera, aiming to give users basic camera functionality that was consistent across different phones. Over the last nearly two years, Google has been steadily adding features to the app, and many Android users prefer this app to their native camera.

Today, over on Reddit’s r/Android, users have noticed that the Google Camera app isn’t loading properly for users who aren’t logged in, or who don’t already have it installed. When visiting the page for the app in incognito mode or when logged out of the Play Store, the following message is displayed:

This warning usually means an app release is limited to certain countries because it hasn’t been released yet worldwide, but it could also be a sign that the app has been pulled from the Play Store in most regions for some unknown reason.

Whatever the reason behind the strange behaviour, it’s possible changes are coming to the app soon, or it might be about to disappear completely, or possibly only on select devices. Either way, if you’re a fan of Google Camera, stay tuned to find out if this is a change, or just a Play Store bug.

We started off 2016 with a bang, releasing our brand-new audio routing tool Loopback, and we haven’t slowed down. Below we’ve linked to several mentions and stellar reviews our software has recently received!

Airfoil

February brought with it major upgrades to our home audio streaming solution Airfoil, with new versions of both Airfoil for Mac and Airfoil for Windows. These updates have been very well-received, as users have been delighted to be able to use Bluetooth speakers along with AirPlay devices. In addition to praise we’ve received via email and Twitter, we’re honored to have earned a coveted 5 mouse review from Macworld magazine!

Just look at all those mouses in their houses! Or maybe it’s mice in their hice? Whatever! It’s a stellar review for Airfoil and we’re thrilled to have received it.

For more Airfoil coverage, including an in-depth look at just how you might use our tool for sending audio all around your house, see John Voorhees’s Airfoil review for MacStories. He pushed Airfoil to the limit, and it worked like a champ!

Loopback

Airfoil isn’t the only app to get a workout, however. Over on the Mac Power Users podcast, Katie Floyd and David Sparks took Loopback for a spin to help them create their newest episodes. It worked so well for them, that Katie made it her software pick of the week. It’s always gratifying to hear about our products being used on the podcasts we enjoy. We’re always thrilled when something we created assists behind the scenes!

Audio Hijack

Finally, speaking of podcasters, audio expert Dave Hamilton just posted a great tutorial on getting the lowest latency possible when recording with Audio Hijack 3. Most users don’t need to worry about, or even consider, audio latency. However, for some podcast setups, reducing latency as low as possible is ideal. Audio Hijack 3.2.3 introduced a hidden preference to help with this, and we let Dave in on the secret. He’s been so thrilled with the update that he’s now written about it so other podcasters can take advantage. We’re currently working on moving this setting into the main UI for Audio Hijack 3.3, but you can read more about how to access it now.

Lots More to Come

We’ve got plenty more in the way of updates due out soon, so as always, keep an eye on our site!

Mountains and Molehills

Thanks to Frances Bula for this — an analysis of London (UK) and the foreign buyers’ effect on real estate.  From the Economist. It’s a good read.

In 2014 foreigners bought one-third of “prime” homes sold in London (ie, those in the top 8-10% of the market), according to Savills, an estate agent. But this does not mean that the capital is being overrun by absentee investors living abroad. The definition of “foreign” is expansive, including Russian billionaires who never visit Britain, but also someone who has lived in London for years and uses her Canadian passport when buying. The high rate of “foreign” ownership is thus a function of the capital’s cosmopolitanism: about one in four Londoners is a foreign citizen.

Foreigners who do not live in Britain make up a smaller chunk of the market for London’s prime homes: perhaps 10%, says Lucian Cook of Savills. And outside the poshest neighbourhoods, non-residents are small beer: in 2013 the Bank of England suggested that they may account for just 3% of all property transactions in London.

The people who make up that 3% are still open to the charge that they push house prices up. If so, it is probably not because they buy properties and then leave them empty (so-called “buy to leave”). There is little evidence that foreigners are more likely than Britons to leave a property empty, suggests a report by the Greater London Authority (GLA).

 

Google is rolling out a pretty major update to the Google Photos app for Android that makes it easier to navigate around the app. Additionally, the update also renames the weirdly named ‘Collections’ to a more understandable term: Albums. Continue reading →

“Jujitsu? I’m going to learn Jujitsu?” Neo asks incredulously, as he’s plugged in to a machine for the first time since his rescue by Morpheus and the members of the ship Nebuchadnezzar. The operator Tank loads a virtual training program, and Neo clamps his eyes shut, his body jolting in response as the data floods his visual cortex. Seconds later, Neo opens his eyes. “Holy shit!” he exclaims and agrees to more – 10 hours more – “programming.” Finally, gasping, he exclaims to Morpheus, “I know Kung Fu!”

The Matrix portrays a dystopian future where intelligent machines have subdued and enslaved the human population, but the film’s display of learning technologies – information transferred directly and instantly into the brain – is the sort of thing frequently hailed as a worthy scientific goal: learning that is efficient, scalable, standardized, and fully automated.

So it’s hardly a surprise that a press release issued by HRL Laboratories, a research center jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors, would invoke the film to boast about research it’s published in the February 2016 issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

In the press release, HRL Laboratories claims that, akin to the technology in The Matrix, it has “discovered that low-current electrical brain stimulation can modulate the learning of complex real-world skills” and that “subjects who received brain stimulation via electrode-embedded head caps improved their piloting abilities.” “It’s possible that brain stimulation could be implemented for classes like drivers’ training, SAT prep, and language learning,” the lead researcher speculates.

The press release and accompanying video have been picked up by the media, most of whom have done very little to verify the findings, or hell, even read the journal article in question. From Techcrunch, for example: “Researchers Create Matrix-Like Instant Learning Through Brain Stimulation.” From The Telegraph: “Scientists discover how to ‘upload knowledge to your brain’.”

Actually, no. They haven’t.

Those headlines do not match what the research found, perhaps because the PR video does not match what’s been published in the journal, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, either. Or perhaps because the PR from HRL laboratories is deliberately misleading. Neither of the news stories in Techcrunch or The Telegraph mention the publishing practices of the Frontiers journals, which have had a couple of high-profile retractions and whose pay-to-publish model has raised some concerns. Neither mention that the researchers have a patent pending should the concept pan out. Ah, education-technology journalism. Never change.

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Here’s my attempt to explain the research and the published findings:

HRL researchers conducted an experiment with thirty-two right handed HRL employees (thirty-one of them male, all of them western and well-educated; the researchers swear none were coerced). These individuals, who participated in four days of flight simulation training, were randomly assigned into four groups: one group receiving transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), one receiving transcranial direct current stimulation to the left motor cortex (M1), and the other two receiving “sham” treatment to one or the other region. Electroencephalography (EEF) and functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) were collected during the flight training and during assessments, which included completing a series of landing tasks.

There was no “instant learning,” and there was no “uploading of knowledge to the brain,” despite those very excited media headlines. Indeed, the effects of the transcranial stimulation on improved learning aren’t clear at all (nor is much of the science behind any of this terribly definitive), although the stimulation did increase midline frontal theta-band oscillatory brain activity (MFT), which previous research has correlated to working memory and mental calculation. (Yes, stimulating the brain seems to stimulate the brain. Neuroscience!) The researchers did see some reduction in learning rate variance among participants, but in many of the assessments, there was no statistically significant differences between the “sim” and “sham” groups.

This might be the key paragraph from the journal article’s conclusion:

A goal of this research was to determine if tDCS stimulation would improve training techniques for pilots in a flight simulator. Such improvements could drastically reduce time and therefore the cost of training a pilot, as it would in any training environment. While our results show decreased variability in training, it is too early to confirm or deny any useful improvements to simulation training until an understanding of the sources and contributing factors to the observed behavioral variance is achieved.

So the long and short of it, I suppose (and I'm being generous here): more research is needed.

But “more research is needed” doesn’t make for good headlines, particularly when you can churn out clickbait about the future of learning and technology by invoking a popular science fiction trope.

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Whether or not this is science or fiction, let’s consider why “Matrix-style learning” is so compelling. Stories like this seem to emerge with some frequency. (We might ask too, why do neuroscientific claims frequently go unchallenged by the press – but then again, so much education/technology journalism is wildly uncritical. Parroting PR is pretty routine.)

Science aside, let’s think about culture and society. What’s the lure of “instant learning” and in particular “instant learning” via a technological manipulation of the brain? This is certainly connected to the push for “efficiency” in education and education technology. But again, why would we want learning to be fast and cheap? What does that say about how we imagine and more importantly how we value the process of learning?

It’s worth pointing out that the researchers in the press release call their particular brain stimulation headgear a form of “personalization” – personalization in the service of more efficient (and yet still completely standardized) training and testing. And it’s probably worth noting too that this research involves simulation; with a growing chorus of corporate interests pushing virtual reality in education, let’s be prepared for an onslaught of claims about “brain-based learning” via VR environments. And I bet The Matrix, despite being an utterly dystopian future, will be invoked again and again as the future of ed-tech.

In 2015, the city announced a plan for priority snow clearance for some downtown bike routes for the upcoming winter.  With hysterical news coverage announcing a major snowfall for Tuesday of this week, this morning was a good opportunity to check up on how the city was doing on clearing bike lanes of snow.

To be fair, most of my bike into work was outside the priority area.

The Annette St. bike lanes were OK.

although as you can see, the habit that snow plows have of giving parked cars an extremely wide berth is problematic.

Dupont looked pretty good.

well travelled side streets like Shanly were also fine.

and Bloor was great.

The plowing of the contraflow lane on Shaw could be charitably described as indifferent.

and I’d give Harbord mixed reviews as well, although as this photo shows, the painted buffers do make a difference.

Overall, I’d say a grade between B- and C+.

Update: Shaw looked better the next morning. Looks like they did another pass with a plow, rather than the bank just melting back.

On the minus side, U of T had worked on a safe zone around Convocation Hall for pedestrians, but they’ve decided that this is a great dumping ground for snow. Note that they used to dump it on a nearby section of King’s College Circle, but this way they get to preserve about three precious parking spaces.

 

This post was originally posted on the Future Release blog.

A few weeks ago the Mozilla Marketplace announced it was shutting down payments. A few days ago Android filed bugs to remove mozPay from their codebase.

And with that a pile of stuff I worked on at Mozilla for a long time with a couple of awesome colleagues came to an end. I'm not bitter about that at all, in the end I became the biggest proponent of ending this project because I saw the costs it was occuring (lots) and the returns (almost zero) and impact it was having (zero). At Mozilla we need to be better at evaluating and ending things when they don't work. If you can't end things that work, how can you start new exciting things?

There's multiple reasons why payments didn't go anywhere, I'll detail the business ones in a later post. For a moment here's the technical things that stood out:

• mozPay was implemented in Firefox OS and later Android, which meant that web development was tied tightly to release timelines for phones.

• mozPay worked by putting a transparent border around the payment window, in an attempt to be unspoofable. Sadly this meant that the screen real estate got really small and was full of bugs as a result.

• mozPay had configuration in the platform, which meant that testing our dev and stage instances required continual re-configuration (something that got scripted through an add-on).

• The idea behind mozPay was flawed from the get go.

• The Marketplace was shipped as a web site because Firefox OS is about the web. But everything else on the phone was shipped as a packaged app. The advantage was that we could ship updates as often as we wanted. The downside was that every change had to be tested on every phone and OS we shipped back to the 1.0.

• Because everything else on the phone was not tested once it shipped, payments testing didn't get the benefit of the tools or expertise from Firefox OS. It was out on its own. I summed this up in a meeting once like this: "Either we are doing it wrong, or the rest of Firefox OS is, I'm not sure which but I know we are different".

• There wasn't a way to test it well at all really. There was no test framework from our payment provider. The only real way to test it was using real money.

• Because it was focused on carrier billing, not credit cards we were building a payments system for the web that couldn't be used on the web. Being in Canada, I couldn't test it at all, yet had to develop for it.

• Because there was no real way to test it or easily play with, it became opaque to so many people in Mozilla.

• At one point we couldn't even test carrier payments in the QA department in Mountain View because there was something wrong with carrier configuration for the tower that served the Mountain View office. We were asking people to drive away from the office and then test it.

• We were meant to be doing a UI that was consistent with both the Marketplace and Firefox OS. Both of which were not consistent with each other.

• We didn't own the entire flow of the payments, but had responsibility for it all, so that meant working with our payment provider to get minor changes done.

• ...and don't get me started on authentication for payments and the switch from Persona to Firefox Accounts. That will bring me out in tears.

If you think all the above sounds crazy, you are right. One time I went to DjangoCon Europe in Poland and said to my QA person "I'm in Poland can I test anything?". The reply I got was: go set up a Polish bank account, get a SIM card, get the SIM card billed to the bank account, get a phone, put the SIM card in and then try purchasing something. Ensure that when you purchase something it shows up correctly on your bank statement a few weeks later. I had one day free.

But the level of purchasing from the user clicking the button all the way through to what appears on the bank account was the level we were looking after.

We did have an awesome QA team who did heroic work under the circumstances, but all the above problems meant that this project was slow, moving, opaque and painful in many ways.

At an event in Delhi, India today, Xiaomi launched its much anticipated budget handset: the Redmi Note 3. Taking on the Lenovo Vibe K4 Note and the Honor 5X, Xiaomi has priced the Redmi Note 4 at an extremely attractive price point.  Continue reading →

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The automakers are firmly in the crosshairs of the digital ecosystems.

• The Geneva auto show is in full swing and most of the automakers are all singing from the same hymn sheet.
• Top of the billing is VW which has said that it is convinced that it will become a leading provider of mobility by 2025.
• Many of the other automakers have said similar things, giving similar timelines, but crucially none of them have said exactly what they mean or how they intend to get there.
• If VW means that it will make products that can move then there is no problem but I suspect that it wants to become a company that sells products that are instrumental in the user’s Digital Life.
• For all of the automakers, this is crucial because Digital Life is increasingly becoming a factor in the purchase decision of an automobile.
• Therefore delivering Digital Life to a user in the auto in a way that is easy and fun to use but also unique to the automaker will improve preference and therefor pricing.
• It also gives the automaker an opportunity to have a much better relationship with the consumer which will also improve stickiness when it comes to buying another automobile.
• Unfortunately, most automakers are currently on a trajectory to become little more than handsets on wheels with a large part of their value accruing to the existing digital ecosystems.
• Apple, Google, Baidu and so on view the car as just another device via which they can deliver their services to users and the more important this becomes to the user, the less differentiation the automakers will have.
• Hence, I think that to preserve their brands in the digital age the automakers must achieve the following:
  • First. The automakers must engage the user beyond just a servicing relationship.
  • Most automakers practically forget about a vehicle as soon as it leaves the factory but if they take the time to understand what the users do and what they want from their products a whole range of possibilities emerge.
  • Second. The automakers must cease to deliver Android Auto and Car Play within their infotainment systems.
  • Both of these are highly detrimental (Android Auto more than Car Play) to the automaker’s brand and effectively reduce it to being a commoditising hardware vendor.
  • Instead the automakers need to deliver the Digital Life services that the user enjoys on his other devices in a way that is optimised for the use case in the automobile.
  • This is easier said than done but unless it is achieved, the automakers are almost certain to have no digital differentiation whatsoever.
  • Third. The automakers must keep the data that is generated through the use of their products and put it together with data generated elsewhere in the ecosystem to offer rich and engaging services to their users.
  • This is one example of why Android Auto is so dangerous.
  • There are four CAN Buses in an automobile that carry all of the critical data that allows the auto to function.
  • These four busses meet in the infotainment unit meaning that if the user gives Google permission, it will be able to suck out every piece of data the car generates.
  • This data is a key element that will allow a car maker to differentiate in the long-term meaning that anyone deploying Android Auto is likely to be giving that differentiation away to Google.
  • Fourth. Automakers must enable over the air updates for their vehicles.
  • There are all sorts of regulatory and process issues that need to be overcome to make this a reality but I believe it is critical.
  • Without OTA updates car makers will be unable to fix flaws in their software and unable to continuously improve their offerings.
  • Fifth. Automakers have to understand that good software is almost never the cheapest one on offer.
  • For many automakers writing software means creating hugely detailed specifications against which suppliers bid with the lowest bid winning.
  • To create a decent user experience in the car, the automakers need to think about design, security, stability and reliability and less about the cost.
  • I think that this will be an important element in creating a user experience that users are prepared to pay for.
• The game is far from over when it comes to the coming battle for the digital car, but most automobile companies appear to be completely unprepared to compete on a whole new level.
• An example of this is that car makers are already beginning to ship Android Auto and Car Play in the US.
• Just like it is now almost impossible to sell a handset in India without Google Play on it, the same may become true for an automobile.
• Once this happens, the war will be over and the automobile’s trajectory towards becoming a handset on wheels will be assured.
• This is why the auto makers have to act now or risk losing what could very well become the most important piece of their ability to differentiate in the long term.

I tried doing a more-or-less weekly newsletter of crated links, using Getrevue.co. I am abandoning that experiment because it was more time-consuming that it should be. Partly that’s functionality missing at Getrevue, and partly it’s that I’m more geared to just streaming what I come across, rather than deciding which N links are most relevant per week.

So, I have decided to try Flipboarding. If you’re interested check out Method to my Madness – http://flip.it/HUqR7. MtmM will probably divert some of the links that I have been posting here, but almost anything that requires commentary will wind up here, anyway.

People get married at various ages, but there are definite trends that vary across demographic groups. What do these trends look like? Read More

They joined the train at Cambridge, the halfway point on the line from Kings Lynn in Norfolk to Kings Cross in London. Two ladies, about 60 years old, dropping wearily into their seats with the air of relief worn by those who feel they ‘just made’ their train.

Still catching their breath, they began a detailed analysis of what had transpired at the station.

“I’d got there half an hour before. I always worry,” said one.

“Oh, me too, I don’t know how we missed each other!”

It seems one had waited on the platform, looking for the other, who had taken a seat in the waiting room of the station cafe. Each had thought the other was simply running late and had held out, with growing anxiety, hoping the other would arrive, before finally rushing for the train at the last minute. It was only in their hurried dash for the train they’d finally seen each other, running for the same carriage from different parts of the station.

“I tried to call,” explained the first lady. “But then I must not have your number, I couldn’t see it on that email, so I sent a message instead.”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t have got that. I don’t have one of those phones,” her companion replied. She produced her phone as evidence: an ancient Samsung flip design, its silver, metallic effect paint worn down to the cheap plastic in many places. It looked as if it may struggle to receive an analogue signal, let alone email.

They were on their way to an art gallery in London, seemingly part of a larger group of retirees who attended regular outings like this, using email messages to manage the arrangements.

“You must get a smartphone,” insisted the more progressive of the pair. “I love mine. I mean I don’t have one of the really top ones – I don’t need to spend all that each month – but it is still quite a good one, I think.”

The implication was clear. Monthly cost, presumably paid to the network from which she’d bought her phone, determined the capabilities of her phone. I couldn’t say for sure which model it was, but it might have been a smallish Nokia Lumia. If I had to guess, I’d say a 520.

“Must I? I don’t see why. I mean what can you do with that I can’t do with this?” the other asked, quite seriously, without a hint of irony as she examined the clamshell feature phone in her hands.

“Well, if nothing else for the texting. With this one I just tap and tap – and look it gives me the whole word, right there, and I can see it all. You won’t know yourself, it’s wonderful! I used to hate all that tapping away at those little keys.”

The killer feature of the smartphone for this particular user, it seemed, was the simplicity of text entry afforded by the onscreen QWERTY keyboard.

“I don’t know,” sighed the other. “I just don’t understand all this. I mean people ask me for my phone number all the time. It is like it’s a right these days, isn’t it? I mean, surely it is my right not to have one of these things! I don’t want to be reachable all the time!” Her issues with technology, it seemed, went somewhat deeper than simply lagging behind the curve.

“I mean, I did think about it. I do think about it. But they were too small. I could never get on with that. I liked the iPads, but they were too big. I’ve been looking and the phones seem to be getting bigger. I’m waiting until they’re just right. Bigger than that,” she said, pointing at her friend’s smartphone, “But smaller than the iPad.”

“Well, you could wait around forever,” cautioned the other. “But I’m doing so much with it already.”

“I’m waiting until I can really do something with it,” continued her friend, unconvinced. “When they get to the right size, I’m going to get one and I’ll put everything on it. I could have my whole life on there. Photos, letters… It will have to store all those things I’ve got on the computer. It’ll be my everything device.”

I was reminded of how most analysts scoffed at the Samsung Galaxy Note when it emerged. Experts cited the ergonomic limits of hand size and competing manufacturers nodded wisely and stated with confidence how screen sizes above 5 inches would remain a small niche.

Yet here, in this unguarded conversation between two users, we find the underlying motivations which established an intrinsic link between smarter phones and bigger screens. Imagine how different the research outcome might have been in a lab environment or swayed by the bias of survey questions? How would the feature phone user have answered if she’d been shown a prototype of a smartphone and asked about its size? How could the designers have asked their questions to reveal the deeper reasons behind her choices? Would they have found the link with the media on her PC, the notion she didn’t want it to be a phone at all, but rather a more pocketable iPad, for private consumption and creation rather than communication?

Just as the train began to arrive in London, the feature phone user turned to her companion, her voice dropping to a whisper.

“What’s that?” she said, pointing surreptitiously to the Blackberry Passport I’d been working on for most of the journey.

“I’ve never seen one like that,” her friend replied, intrigued.

“No, neither have I. But look at it. I could do a lot with something like that,” she whispered, her voice trailing off as the two of them packed up their bags and began bundling their way towards the doors as the train drew into London.

Who would have thought to include a 60 year old retiree with a Samsung flip phone in the focus group for the Blackberry Passport?

As you may remember from earlier in the week, the Raspberry Pi 3 is here! The latest version of the Raspberry Pi is the most powerful one yet, and brings with it a whole host of new features such as wireless LAN, Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy. In issue 43 of The MagPi, we go in depth into all the changes, upgrades and differences that you can expect from the Raspberry Pi 3.

We also have an interview with Eben Upton and James Adams on the creation of the Raspberry Pi 3 and the wireless radio that makes the new headline features possible. There are tips and tutorials on how to get started with Raspberry Pi 3 and finally a full suite of benchmarks so you know just how much more powerful the Pi 3 is than its predecessors.

Issue 43 has more than just Raspberry Pi 3 though: there’s a big Astro Pi update as Ed and Izzy are turned on up in space, we look at an amazing Pi Zero cluster board, hack Minecraft with the Bedrock Challenge, and all our usual array of projects, tutorials and reviews.

Highlights from issue 43:

• Astro Pi switch on!
  Ed and Izzy have both been turned on, and make your own Astro Pi
• Minecraft Bedrock Challenge
  Hack Minecraft Pi to create this fun game for you and your friends
• Open-source licence guide
  Why you should consider open-source for your next project
• Raspiwhales
  There are Pis in space, and then there are Pis that ride on whales
• And much, much more!

Free Creative Commons download
As always, you can download your copy of The MagPi completely free. Grab it straight from the issue page for The MagPi 43.

Don’t forget, though, that like sales of the Raspberry Pi itself, all proceeds from the print and digital editions of the magazine go to help the Foundation achieve its charitable goals. Help us democratise computing!

Buy in-store
If you want something more tangible to play with, you’ll be glad to hear you can get the print edition in more stores than ever:

WHSmith
Tesco
Sainsbury’s
Asda
And all good newsagents

Order online
Rather shop online? Get it from The Pi Hut and they’ll deliver it almost anywhere in the world.

Subscribe today!
If you still want to start a new subscription with #40, with a free #PiZero and a free cable bundle, you can! Just make sure you select the right option when you sign-up online or over the phone.

We hope you enjoy this month’s issue! It’s so good we feel like dancing about it.

The post Learn more about the Raspberry Pi 3 in The MagPi 43! appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

As first reported by MacRumors, Apple has today launched @AppleSupport, a support account on Twitter:

Apple today created an official Twitter support account to provide customers with tips, tricks, and tutorials about the company's product and services. One of the account's first tweets provides users with step-by-step instructions on how to turn lists into checklists in the stock Notes app on iPhone.

Apple's presence on social media is slowly but surely expanding. This is now the second support account that Apple runs on Twitter, following last October's launch of @AppleMusicHelp which provides help and tips relating to Apple Music.

Dropbox is considering adding a chat component to its popular fire-sharing platform, according to The Information.

Citing two unnamed sources who were able to see the functionality in action, the website says Dropbox has been working on adding chat to its platform for the past two years, though it’s only in recent months — with collaboration apps like Slack gaining tremendous popularity — that Dropbox has accelerated work on the feature. In its current iteration, Dropbox sees the chat functionality it’s building out acting as a kind of “workplace” where teams can collaborate on files stored within the main app.

With more than 400-million active users attached to its core app, it makes sense for Dropbox to add this type of functionality to its platform.

On the other hand, the company, once a Silicon Valley darling, has lost much of the early momentum it gained in the early part of the decade.

Mailbox, the once innovative email client Dropbox acquired in 2013 for $100-million, shut down just last week, while Carousel, the company’s dedicated photo management app, is scheduled to wind down later this month on March 31. In the blog post where they announced their plan to shutdown the two apps, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and CTO Arash Ferdowsi repeatedly used the word “focus” to justify their actions.

For a company that seemingly wants to focus on its core product, adding chat to its platform seems like a me too response to recent success like like Slack. However, it should be noted in closing The Information reports Dropbox doesn’t currently see its chat functionality competing with the likes of Slack and Yammer.

Following up on the launch of the Apple Gaming Twitter account (and prior to that the Apple Music Twitter account), there’s now a Apple Support account on Twitter.

“We’re here to provide tips, tricks and helpful information when you need it most, and if you have a question, well – we’re here to help with that too,” says the account’s bio. Two hours after launching, @AppleSupport has already been verified by the social media platform.

Thus far, the account is mostly devoted to providing tips and tricks. For instance, @AppleSupport’s first significant tweet shows how to make a checklist in the iOS Notes app. As expected, those running the account are also busy responding to tweets from disgruntled users.

Follow the account @AppleSupport.

In case you’ve missed it, we at UserVoice blog are currently *obsessed* with best practices for customer feedback – how to do it right, how to do it wrong, how to onboard your co-workers, etc., etc. In keeping with this theme, we decided to talk to experts and get their perspectives on how to optimize customer feedback. This post is the first of a handful of influencer interviews we’ll be sharing in the coming weeks.

Sarah Doody is an NYC-based UX designer, consultant, and writer, who helps companies evolve their user experiences and assists startups in launching products.

After hearing Doody’s sharp take on the connection between user experience and product management on an episode of This is Product Management (highly recommended for both product and UX folks), I decided to reach out to her and pick her brain on how product folks can get the most out of user feedback.

Doody’s perspective is understandably UX conscious, noting that you should always ask yourself why you’re collecting feedback, consider user context, and err on the side of time-sensitive “micro-”feedback.

1. ASK YOURSELF WHY

 

“Without being clear about the why behind the research, there’s a risk that the feedback will be too vague and there won’t be any specific conclusions or findings,” she says, adding that, “To collect quality customer feedback requires that you consider the context.” Doody gives an example of a particularly context-insensitive, extended survey that Delta Airlines sent her to days after a flight — it was not close enough to the flight experience, much too long, and felt “like work.”

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“To collect quality customer feedback requires that you consider the context.” – Sarah Doody
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2. KEEP IT SMALL AND BE TIME-SENSITIVE

 

Doody suggests that you go small, evangelizing for “micro-feedback:”

“To successfully implement a customer feedback program, don’t try to collect everything at once. Instead, focus on micro-feedback — smaller bits of customer feedback at the right time in their experience. Identify the triggers or activities in the customer journey that you want feedback on and make it dead simple for the customer to provide feedback. You will collect more authentic information by seeking out smaller bits customer feedback more frequently rather than trying to collect a lot of information all at once.”

She offers Instacart as one example of a company who does this well: “A few minutes after a customer receives a delivery, Instacart sends a text message and asks the customer to rate the delivery on a scale of 1 – 10. Simply by texting back one number, customers can send their feedback from a mobile device – far easier than sending an email which leads to a survey.”

3. MICRO-FEEDBACK SHOULD BE RELATIVELY FREQUENT, BUT NOT ANNOYING

 

But it’s also possible, she notes, to do this poorly: “The key to collecting micro-feedback is that it needs to be contextual — and not interrupting a user. As a user, one of the most frustrating examples of micro-feedback that I encounter is when I’m on a site and all of a sudden a pop up comes up asking me for feedback or if I’m ok doing a survey. It’s the right idea, but the wrong timing. Another example is when you’re using an app, and you get a pop up that asks you to review the app. I absolutely hate these because they are interrupting whatever I’m doing in the app!”

She’s right – those “take my survey” solicitations are about as annoying as the spam “urgent message” phone calls I’ve been receiving where they claim they’ve found a way to drastically reduce my electricity bill. (If anyone knows how I can stop these, please send me a note. I will be eternally grateful.) There’s even a whole Tumblr called Eff Your Review dedicated to venting about in-app survey solicitations.

In sum: collect micro-feedback, but do it in a way that’s easy for the user and context-and-time-sensitive.

This is one micro idea that will get you…wait for it….macro results.

Further Reading

Check out Doody’s article on micro-feedback here: http://www.sarahdoody.com/what-is-micro-feedback-and-why-it-matters-to-your-user-experience/#.VqDc71MrJE4

You can also find her guide to collecting micro-feedback here: http://www.sarahdoody.com/microfeedback.

And stop by her tip-filled UX/product website, sarahdoody.com.

 

 

The post Product Experts Weigh In: Sarah Doody on Micro-Feedback appeared first on UserVoice Blog.

“You are kind of the mini-CEO – with all of the responsibility…but without any of the authority.”

-Josh Elman – Partner at Greylock, former Product Manager at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

Any “soft” skills or “hard” skills you need as a Product Manager all boil down to one core skill: Empathy.

I worked for 4 months with a fellow Product Manager before ever realizing he used to be a developer. He never mentioned anything technical, at all! What he did do was build by far the best relationships of trust with engineers that I have seen. He “got” them. In return, they respected him, gave him slack, and always put their all into the work they did with him.

“Software is a team sport”

I have been the least technical person on a very technical team and the most technical person on a fairly non-technical team. It all depends on how you work with your teammates’ skills.

Being technical can have its pitfalls:

“When you are an engineer going into product [management] and your engineer says to you, ‘Oh, that’s really hard to do.’ Your first instinct is, ‘Oh? Not for me…I could do that in an afternoon.’ I had to get over that really fast. That is not a productive outcome. Software is a team sport.”

Adam Nash – CEO of Wealthfront and a former Product Manager and Engineer

Now that the soft stuff is out of the way, let’s get down to it.

As always, a good Product person brings it back to outcomes, and Lulu Cheng – Product Manager at Pinterest – lists the goals to consider when deciding which technical skills a PM should focus on:

1. “Trace a user issue (or set of issues) back to the underlying problem.”
2. “Estimate how long it will take to build A vs. B.”
3. “Anticipate implementation challenges with a particular proposal.”
4. “Brainstorm potential solutions to technical problems.”
5. “Identify opportunities that arise from new technologies.”

The Top 5 Technical Skills Every Product Manager Needs to Know:

1. Data Collection, Extraction and Analysis

Why:
1. You need to understand what your users are doing to make good product decisions.
2. If you do not understand how your data is collected, you cannot determine its integrity.

What to learn:
SQL
I hear this touted as a “must-have”- though I have worked with some great PMs who don’t know SQL, they end up asking the SQL-literate for data.

How to learn it:
I have personally used the interactive tutorials at W3Schools, and Codecademy’s Learn SQL and SQL: Analyzing Business Metrics interactive courses.
After that, ask your engineer to set you up with read-only SQL access to try product questions.

Feeling ambitious?
Try creating automated query scripts and tasks in Python.

3rd-Party Analytics Tools
(Mixpanel, Amplitude, Looker, Tableau, Google Analytics, etc.)

There are two key areas every Product Manager should understand regarding analytics tools:

1. Understand how each of these tools can help you answer product questions.
2. Understand how the underlying tracking is done and how it is interpreted.

As my fellow Product Manager at HourlyNerd, David Connolly, used to quip: “I think we should run an analysis on how much of our analytics we actually trust.”

Amplitude funnel tracking alone is nice…

…but Amplitude funnel tracking integrated with an Optimizely A/B test can really deliver an actionable insight! You should know why and how this is done.

How to learn it:
Dive into documentation. There are usually simplified tutorials and videos walking you through the main parts, but peek into actual code implementation. Also, ask Support and Sales.

2. Excel (Yes. Really.)

Why:
You can get a lot out of SQL and Analytics Dashboards, but a good Pivot Table and even some VBA could make data a lot more flexible, visual, and easier to interpret.

What to learn:
A. Pivot Tables
Pivot tables are easy to learn and help manipulate complicated data sets. They essentially pump out a dynamic filterable table or chart.

How to learn it:
Honestly, Youtube videos and Microsoft’s Support Site.
You can even combine your skills and learn how to Create a Pivot Table Using SQL

B. VBA
VBA is the coding language for Excel. It lets you build “Macros” to automate anything in Excel. Pull online data, automate data matching, etc. Helps you with “Don’t repeat yourself.”

How to learn it: 
StackOverflow for specific use cases (like matching data from different columns in different workbooks) and Microsoft’s Support Site for specific functions.

3 . Experimentation (A/B Testing)

Why:
Product intuition is great, but actually testing ideas with users is essential. Get buy-in or setup experimentation infrastructure for non-technical iteration on products.

What to learn:
Need a non-developer solution?

• Unbounce (landing pages – no development needed).
• Optimizely (Change copy/design on your own site without pushing code – can start with a single code snippet).
  

Need an internal A/B test?

• Determine how to design an experiment and hypothesis.
• Discuss with your developers what to track in your DB  and how to divide up your samples.

How to learn it:
First: What is A/B, Split, and Multivariate testing?
Then: What is statistical significance (basics)?
(Hint: Use Optimizely’s A/B test sample size calculator)
Finally: How to track an A/B test’s effect on your bottom line using your new Analytics and A/B testing skills

“How can I A/B test if I haven’t built the new feature yet?”

That brings us to #4…

4. Interactive Prototyping

Why:
Engineering time is too valuable to be wasted on iterations of products that have not been validated at all.

What to learn:
A. Non-technical:
There are plenty of interactive prototyping tools out there for the non-technical person.
Invision lets you upload mockups from design to make a clickable interactive prototype.
Proto.io lets you create interactive mobile app prototypes with drag and drop components.

UserTesting and similar sites let you send in these prototypes and get videos of users answering questions about the site. You should run interviews yourself, too, of course.

B. Technical:
That brings us to #5…

5. Learn *about* Code

“You need to understand what your engineers are saying, even if you have no opinion on the results of the conversations.”

Why:
This is hotly contested, but in the end, the necessity for this really depends on two things:

1. “What does your team value?”

Remember: Not everyone on a team needs to have the same skills. You can help each other.

You will want to learn enough to communicate technical details to non-technical stakeholders.

2. “What do your users value?”

Remember: As a Product Manager, you are the voice of the user.

Are your users technical? Some technical understanding is likely necessary to “get” your users.

What to learn:
HTML, Javascript

Nowadays, these tools are basic. This simplifies building prototypes, implementing 3rd party tools, or tweaking client-side A/B tests.

How to learn?
Countless courses are available online, but I suggest just starting with W3Schools and Codecademy or going to a weekend bootcamp.

Your Company’s Technology Stack

Understand what languages, frameworks, and architecture your company uses and why.

As Cliff Giley from The Clever PM puts it:

“…Microsoft C#?  …Java?  …relational…or non-relational databases?  Do you know the difference…?  A large part of your job as a PM consists of talking with engineers and discussing and assessing options to solve problems – you need to understand what they’re saying, even if you have no opinion on the results of the conversations.”

How to learn:
Ask an engineer about the stack and why it was used. Also, try to build a small app in your stack with one of the countless MOOCs or bootcamps to get a basic feel for what your team uses.

Closing Thoughts
If you learn to deal with data from collection to presentation, learn how to experiment, learn how to demonstrate ideas through a prototype, and learn how to speak your developers’ language, you will become a more valuable PM to all of your teams, and – most importantly – to your users.

Remember: “Software is a team sport.”

 

The post The Top 5 Technical Skills Every Product Manager Should Know appeared first on UserVoice Blog.

Editor’s Note: today’s guest article comes from ProductPlan Director of Marketing, Andre Theus who joins us to continue our recent customer feedback best practices theme by sharing some insight into how customer feedback should make its way onto your product roadmap.

Product planning and strategizing can be an exciting process — and not just for product managers. Often it seems everybody has an idea about what should go into a product: investors, executives, sales reps, engineers, customers, prospects, the IT team…the list goes on. That’s why being a product manager can sometimes feel like being a parent: You have to say “no” a lot.

If you’ve been a product manager for any period of time, you’ve likely found your challenge isn’t a lack of ideas, feedback, or data when it comes to building your product roadmap. It’s just the opposite — having too much information, and trying to sort through it all to decide what supports your product’s goals and what doesn’t.

It can be challenging. Someone on your marketing team will stop you in the hallway with an idea for a feature set for the next version of the product, which they’re “sure as can be” will resonate with customers. A couple of your executives will show you an article they read about a competitor, and they’ll suggest you change a lot of your app’s functionality because the article speaks highly about features in the competitor’s product that yours doesn’t have. And a sales rep will ask — even beg —  for a very specific, and very time-consuming addition to the roadmap because they have a “near promise” from a prospect to buy if it’s included.

But as a product manager, you are not merely an order taker. You are your product’s champion and its chief strategist — responsible for driving the product’s development and bringing it to market in a way that aligns with your company’s strategic goals. If you can’t identify the impractical or otherwise unfeasible ideas — and keep them out of your roadmap — who will?

Sift Through the Firehose of Ideas Strategically

You can’t afford to passively stand in front of the firehose of ideas and suggestions from every source, and include them all — or prioritize requests based on the degree of influence or power of the requestor. Instead, you will need to use your strategic knowledge of your product, market, and other factors to proactively seek out the information and business intelligence you’ll need to build the best product possible.

This intelligence is what will ultimately lead to the details of your roadmap: What the new product (or new version of the existing product) will include, for whom, why, and how it will advance your company’s goals.

Here are some great places to start gathering this business intelligence to help determine how to build your roadmap:

1. User Feedback

Obviously one of the best sources of feedback on how your product is working and where it needs work, is from the people actually using it.

Use whatever methods of communicating with your user base that work best for you. That could be making phone calls to specific customers for detailed interviews, implementing customer feedback systems like UserVoice, running online surveys, hosting user groups, or even asking your customer support team to point out specific users they know will have a lot to say about your product — good or bad.

But keep this in mind: Your users represent a skewed set of data. They, after all, have purchased and are using your product. Don’t fall into the trap of relying on your existing customer base as the sole source of information about where your product excels, where it falls short, or what should be included in the next version.

More importantly, don’t build exactly what your customers ask for. Sometimes customers’ feature requests do not necessarily align with your product vision. As a product manager, you also need to bring to the table your knowledge of what’s feasible to solve their problem in the best possible way — which might not match with their feature requests.

2. Customer Support Product Feedback

Your customer support personnel are on the front lines gathering real-world user feedback. They know what the most common problems are with your product, what features customers most often call to ask for, etc.

As with your customers, you can communicate with and learn from your customer support teams in many ways. Take a customer support rep to lunch. Create a short online survey and ask everyone in the department strategic questions about their experiences with customers and the company’s products.

Don’t leave your customer support teams out of the product roadmap process. Including their feedback among the valuable information you’ll be gathering from around your organization will give you better real-world intelligence and will also help to better align everyone’s interests across the organization.

Imagine how much more effective you can make your products if you speak first to the people who field real-world questions and complaints about them.

3. Sales Feedback

Your sales reps are one of your primary liaisons between your company’s products and the people and organizations that ultimately buy them (or don’t).

When sales and product management don’t communicate, the business’s bottom line often suffers. If your sales reps know that a certain product or feature upgrade won’t resonate with their customer base, or that they won’t be able to sell it at the price your team has set, you need to know why.

Remember, after having dozens or even hundreds of conversations with prospective customers about your products, your sales team can represent a gold mine of business intelligence about how to improve your products — and how best to build or update your product roadmaps.

4. Competitive Landscape

Your goal, of course, is to create a unique and valuable product in the market. However, you can learn a great deal about the landscape by reviewing your competitors’ products.

You can gain valuable competitive intelligence by looking in less-obvious places than within your competitors’ products themselves. For example, check out blog comments or support pages where users are discussing your competitors’ products. This can represent another gold mine of intelligence for you. Learn what customers like about these products, what they don’t like, and what they wish they had.

Related idea: Do the same with your own product. Spend time regularly reviewing your social media channels and user support sites where your customers are discussing your product, offering each other tips, complaining, etc. There’s gold there, too.

A word of caution: While it’s possible to identify features you hadn’t thought of, be aware of the danger of using your competitors for inspiration. Simply using your competitors’ feature list for your roadmap is a sure fire way to launch another “me too” product that provides little in the way of competitive differentiation.

5. Analyst Research

Study industry reports about your category of product (from Gartner, Forrester and other analyst firms that cover your industry) to determine what types of products work, with whom, and why.

What’s often useful about these reports is the survey-generated data they gather from your target customers across the landscape. While it is relatively easy to create a survey for your own customers or prospects, it is much more difficult (and costly) to gather a similar set of responses from all of those target customers out there with whom your company has never communicated and has no relationship.

And remember: Studying only your own customers will give you a skewed picture about your products.

6. Analytics and Metrics

Evidence is far more compelling than your opinion — or anyone else’s opinion, for that matter. Your stakeholders and your other product roadmap constituents will be less interested in what you think or what your gut tells you than in what you’ve proven.

If you have real-world user data on your product — or, if you’re developing a new product, data on similar products you’ve launched in the past — then you already have an excellent source of business intelligence to inform how best to build your product roadmap. Let your own analytics help guide your decisions.

This data could be video of your customers discussing or using your product, user analytics, direct customer quotes or requests, etc. But it needs to be evidence,
not speculation.

Four Traits a Successful Product Manager Needs

Once you have gathered and analyzed all of this business intelligence, you will be ready to begin the next two stages of your product’s development. First, you will need to distill all of these ideas and business intelligence into a focused, strategic direction for your product. Then, you will need to communicate this strategy to multiple stakeholders, earn buy-in from decision makers, and ensure the appropriate teams understand their roles and have the tools they need to execute the strategy.

Navigating these stages will be difficult — you will inevitably face a series of fires, competing agendas, and, of course, limited resources. To deal with all of these obstacles, and others, you will need at least the following skills:

1. The ability to distill direction from ideas

When you step back and take an aerial view of all of the ideas and business intelligence you’ve gathered in your pre-roadmap planning and prioritizing stage, it will be time to translate all of this raw data into a clear, focused strategic direction for your product.

You will also need to be able to distill this strategy into a simple and straightforward message you can articulate to the many stakeholders who will need to understand this direction — executives, engineering, sales, customers, prospects, etc.

2. The ability to artfully say no

This might be the hardest of all skills to master. Product managers always work in the context of limited time, limited money, and other real-world constraints. As a successful product manager, you will need to be able to keep any extraneous items out of the the roadmap, to ensure the product stays on plan and meets its high-level objectives.

Just as important, though, you must also be able to communicate these tough decisions — often to powerful stakeholders, such as executives or investors — in a way that persuades these constituents the decision is necessary for the success of the product.

3. The ability to plan top-down — from vision, to strategy, to execution

Remember, the product planning and strategizing stages can be exhilarating — especially in an organization where the team is truly enthusiastic about the product. At these early, pre-roadmap stages, everything is possible. People often can’t help but get carried away in brainstorming all of their exciting ideas: “We should do this!” “And we could even add that!” “How cool would the product be if we did this?!”

Those ideas are a great source of inspiration and should be taken into consideration, but don’t simply plan new features without properly vetting them from a strategic perspective.

As the product manager, you need to start planning with an overall product vision. That vision must then inform your strategy, and any component of the strategy that doesn’t support the vision must go. Finally, the strategy must inform the details of the execution, and any detail running counter to the strategy must also go.

4. The ability to prioritize ruthlessly

Because product managers are often the single point of contact for everything that happens in a product’s development, they can often find themselves pulled into putting out fires — issues that are not important enough to affect the product’s success but that demand immediate attention.

As a successful product manager, you will need to stay focused on the strategic and to place these little fires in their proper perspective — delegating them to the appropriate teams, or simply setting them aside as the low-priority events they are. Your rule must be simple and consistent: If an issue doesn’t advance our product’s strategic goals, or the product vision, we don’t prioritize it.

Conclusion: Be a Great Listener; Be a Great Communicator; and Be Great at Saying No

A product manager’s job can be described in many ways. But there are three key functions of being a great product manager, and all of the other elements of the job fit into one of these buckets.

First, a product manager needs great listening skills. You will need to take in feedback from many sources. And because you are your product’s central hub, interacting with so many different constituencies — executives, engineers, customers, etc. — you will need to understand the subtleties of each constituent group’s unique dialect. Any idea, from any source, could be a terrific addition to your product — or a resource-draining failure. You need to be able to listen for that as well.

Second, when you’ve distilled this firehose of information into a workable strategy for your product, you’ll need to be able to articulate that strategy in a way that is clear and persuasive to all of your constituencies. Mastering this skill is the only way you will be able to earn the buy-in you’ll need to get your product development underway, and it will also be necessary to ensure that every constituent group clearly understands their role.

And third, you will need to artfully push back against the ideas, suggestions, and requests you deem do not further the strategic direction you set for your product. I say artfully because your constituents will often have strong feelings about including a specific feature or theme in your roadmap. Here you will need to bring in all of your other skills — analyzing data, building a case with evidence, and presenting that case clearly — to explain persuasively why you are including certain things on the roadmap and not others.

None of this will be easy. If it were, anyone could be a product manager. And you and I know different.
Want to learn more roadmapping best practices plus get sample roadmaps and prioritization frameworks you can use at your company? Check out ProductPlan’s new book (it’s free): Product Roadmaps: Your Guide to Planning and Selling Your Strategy. And best of luck at your next roadmap meeting!

The post How to get from Firehose of Ideas to a Strategic Product Roadmap appeared first on UserVoice Blog.

Throughout this Customer Feedback series, I’ve focused on methods and tactics you can use to improve your product or a particular offering. A Customer Advisory Board, or CAB, is your opportunity to tap into your most insightful, influential customers, and gather their opinions on where the market is going, or what they are anticipating in the competitive landscape. It’s the chance to pose strategic questions to executives, and amass trends based on their insights. It’s a focus group on steroids (all legal, of course).

What is a Customer Advisory Board and Why Use It to Gather Customer Feedback?

“A Customer Advisory Board (CAB) is a marketing program made up of strategic customers who work closely with company executives to provide guidance on corporate strategies, offer input on products and services, and address and create solutions to industry challenges,” says Ignite Advisory Group.

A CAB is a strategic source of feedback from people who have already purchased your products and made a commitment to your organization. A CAB typically consists of people who are at the executive-level, can represent their company’s goals and objectives, and are invested in seeing your organization succeed.

What kind of feedback will it get you?

Turn to your CAB for advice on key industry or segment challenges, product roadmap and vision, and even feedback on upcoming product releases. Don’t subject CAB members to usability tests; think of them as your most important and knowledgeable focus group. Depending on the composition of your CAB, you will likely have members who are focused on where the market is going, not where it currently is. Tap into this vision to make sure your products can get them where they anticipate they need to go.

The Facts

Collecting the Feedback: Moderate difficulty.
CABs are similar to focus groups, in that you need to prepare an agenda, provide enough context for members to understand how they can contribute, and ask well-constructed questions. But, CAB members have a lot more knowledge than many focus group participants, so they will likely have more to say, and will be more opinionated.

Analyzing the Feedback: Moderate
You’ll likely get very detailed feedback, but you may not end up with a clear consensus from the group, so will need to draw your own conclusions.

Reach: Narrow and Deep
Think about who you want to have on your CAB, and how they represent your customer-base as a whole. You have an opportunity to create a diverse panel, if you so choose, or to remain conservative and only invite happy, content customers. My recommendation: avoid the lovefest and include some agitators.

Scalability: Difficult 
Very manual and very time intensive to create a CAB, prep for them, conduct the meeting(s) itself, and make use of the feedback you receive. Very valuable and very high-touch.

Cost: Expensive 
You can convene virtual panels, yet you will get much more valuable feedback by bringing the group together in real life. You may choose to bring the customers to your office (or someplace nearby), or you might sponsor a session or breakout at an industry event which your customers are already attending. In either case, a CAB is an investment.

Pros & Cons

Pros… with Benefits

Dear CABby:

I could really use your advice. Our Product Managers want us to stay away from the CAB. They  insist it is a sales-free zone. So many customers in one place…I can just smell the upsell opportunities. Don’t they understand the potential sales?!

Signed,

I Love the Smell of Commissions in the Morning

Dear Smell:

Imagine you were a customer who was asked to reveal their plans and aspirations for the coming year, and you knew a sales professional was lurking around the corner, taking notes. Would you be open and honest? That’s not a trick question – the answer should be, “No, I’d have my guard up.” CABs are a place customers should be able to let their guard down. Be patient, more sales will follow.

Respectfully,

CABby

• Tactical Feedback: Provide Rich Product Feedback. One of the reasons customers may join a CAB is to see early, pre-market versions of your product and influence what actually gets shipped. CAB participants can help you improve existing products, validate new ideas, test-drive upcoming releases and provide generally constructive feedback on your product and features, while also challenging you on inadequate areas of your products.
• Strategic Feedback: Align with Your Customers’ Roadmaps & Business Strategy. A Customer Advisory board provides an opportunity for your to hear where your customers intend to go, and get insights into their Business Strategy. “Your customers—the consumers of your products or services – are the best (and surprisingly most often overlooked) resource to provide input to your company’s overall direction and business strategies. Such customers should be able to advise you on the products and services they desire, what they would pay for them and how they want them delivered,” writes Eyal Danon on MarketingProfs. He continues, “[T]here really is no one more qualified to counsel you on how to best target, approach and serve your client base. Your council can provide invaluable direction regarding which markets to pursue, how to capitalize on market trends, what customer pain points to address, which companies to partner with or acquire, how to best exploit competitors’ weak points, and how to position your company for optimal advantage.”
• Soft Sell: By giving customers a voice in determining the future direction of your product and company, and, by extension, getting them further invested in your product (both personally and emotionally), it’s very likely that you’ll see incremental revenue from CAB members and their extended networks. But tread lightly – it’s a fine line between asking for advice and feedback and turning CAB sessions into extended sales pitches (more on that below). Eyal Danon supports this point, “[O]ur data shows that B2B companies that have active and successful customer advisory boards enjoy a 9% increase in new business among advisory members starting after year one of advisory programs above non-advisory council customers.”

Cons… with Weaknesses

Dear CABby:

Really Influential Customer (RIC) asked me to include a feature in the next release, but it’s totally not on our roadmap. I’d feel dirty saying yes to RIC’s request, but I don’t feel like I can say no.

Signed, Dirty in Dayton

Dear Dirty:

Just Say No and explain why. RIC will understand. If RIC doesn’t, you weren’t meant for each other.

Respectfully, CABby

• The 1%: When defining the membership of the Customer Advisory Board, there can be a tendency to want to include your “best” customers – those who have already bought the most, or the ones Sales is counting on to buy more. Who to include, and whether you want the CAB to be representative of your diverse customer base, will determine how broadly applicable their feedback can be. If the CAB represents only your happiest or largest customers, their feedback will reflect those needs. Consider the overall composition of the CAB, the interplay between participants, and whether you need to impose “term limits.” This can be a highly influential source of feedback, so make sure it aligns with who you are building your products for.

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Is your Customer Advisory Board made up of “The 1%” of your customers?
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• More Feature Requests: A key reason customers agree to serve on a CAB is to have the ability to influence product direction. Or to put it another way, they want to ensure that the product meets their needs. Expect more feature requests.
• Saying No: Continuing from the previous point…it’s not just that there will be more feature requests, but you may find yourself in a position of having to say no, often, to requests which don’t align with your strategic roadmap. CAB members may expect special treatment; beware a scorned CAB member.

Using a Customer Advisory Board Throughout the Product Development Lifecycle

Dear CABby:

Our marketing people always hover in the back of the room during CAB meetings, and it makes the customers uncomfortable. How can I let the marketingfolk know it’s uncool and is impacting the output of this group?

Signed, Hovering in Houston

Dear Hovering:

The CAB meetings are too tempting for marketers desperate for good case studies.  You’ve heard of a swear jar? Institute a CAB jar, and make the penalty steep.

Respectfully, CABby

At what point(s) in the PDLC will this type of feedback be most useful?

Product Development Lifecycle:

• Phase 1: Conceive – imagine, specify, plan, innovate
• Phase 2: Design – describe, define, develop, test, analyze, validate
• Phase 3: Realize – manufacture, make, build, procure, produce, sell, deliver
• Phase 4: Service – Use, operate, maintain, support, sustain, phase-out, retire, recycle, dispose

Customer Advisory Boards can provide critically useful feedback at all stages of the Product Development Lifecycle:

• Phase 1: You’re planning your roadmap and investigating how to refine your existing products or which new ones to bring to market. A CAB can serve as a litmus test, providing insights into whether the market is ripe for your next innovation and whether there might be headwinds you will need to deal with.
• Phase 2: As the product comes together, frequently solicit feedback from CAB members to ensure it meets their needs.
• Phase 3: Before bring the product to market, validate marketing and positioning concepts with your CAB to ensure they resonate.
• Phase 4: Now that the product is in the market, how are CAB members using it? Where is it falling short? What alternatives or competitive products and services are they looking at? Use your CAB as a sounding board when it comes time to phase out or sunset a product-line or feature. They can help you anticipate problems and address them in your communications.

Best Practices / Pro-tips

Customer Advisory Board Charter and Key Objectives

To get the most from this group, spend time up front – before even recruiting any customers to join – defining the Board’s Charter and Key Objectives. As a product manager, you might be interested in:

• Market validation for new enhancements and expansions.
• Real-world feedback on how the product is being used along with insight into its strengths and weaknesses.
• Insights into competitive offerings.
• Industry expertise.

There are a number of great reasons for instituting a charter. Chief among them are it defines the goals and scope of the group, and it explicitly defines the non-goals for the group. If it will be a marketing or sales-free zone, for instance, you can define that at the outset.

There are a lot of other helpful tips about how to start a CAB in this post, “How to Found a Customer Advisory Board: Best Practices for Product.” It’s a superlative resource.

No Sales Pitches, Please

Chris Koch recounts how Cisco typically runs a CAB meeting:

“Brief presentations are given by Cisco executives, product managers, and other key decision makers who want to gauge market interest for new programs and products, discuss new initiatives within Cisco, or provide updates on focus areas considered at previous meetings. The goal is for Cisco to listen 80% of the time and to present 20% of the time. For example, after presenting ideas and gathering feedback, presenters come back at the end of the event to validate the concerns of their audience.”

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Customery Advisory Boards are for listening, not selling.
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They take a listen-first approach with a focus on gathering feedback and customers’ opinions. It’s not an extended sales pitch. Sales may result from CAB meetings, but that should not be an explicit part of the agenda.

Give CAB Members Time to Network

One of the biggest benefits to customers of participating in a CAB meeting is having the opportunity to network with a group of their peers. They do not often have the chance to share their knowledge or learn from others who are in a similar situation. So make sure to include a lot of time on the agenda for them to interact with each other. You will learn plenty, and gather, feedback simply by providing a safe space for them to interact.

Invite Grumpy Pants

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Invite Grumpy Pants to your CAB. Dissenting opinions can mean more constructive feedback.
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It may be tempting to only include happy customers on your CAB. “CAB meetings are not supposed to be a lovefest where content customers talk about how awesome your products are; they are a fertile source of information to help guide your company and product initiatives going forward, which can and should include conversation about what you’re doing wrong.” The “best” customers for your CAB are the ones who are willing to provide the constructive criticism you won’t get elsewhere. Best could be a happy customer or a curmudgeon – the focus needs to be on the feedback. A dissenting opinion often sparks great discussion.

Sean Blanda makes the case in The “Other Side” is Not Dumb that you should try to understand the “why” behind opinions that differ from yours. It’s an entertaining read that touches on the “false-consensus bias”, or the idea that everyone is like us. An effective CAB should not be an exercise in groupthink. It should dispel any perceived homogeneity of your customer-base.

Your Feedback is Dead to Me

Be clear about what you intend to do with the feedback from a Customer Advisory Board. Let participants know how it will be used and whether it will get special weight during the prioritization process (it will, whether consciously or unconsciously). Also let them know if Sales and Marketing will have access to their feedback, and whether it will be anonymous or identified. And finally, close the loop. Show them how their feedback has influenced your plans, and thank them profusely for their participation and insights. It’s a relationship, and works best when reciprocal. Otherwise, you’ll find very few takers for subsequent CABs, and this feedback channel will abruptly turn into a dead end.

TL;DR

A Customer Advisory Board is a strategic source of feedback from people who have already purchased your products and made a commitment to your organization. Turn to your CAB to understand market and competitive forces and get early feedback on whether your product roadmap is in tune with their needs. As with most types of feedback, make sure participants are getting something from the experience as well: CAB members will expect to learn more about your future plans and will also want to learn from, and network with, other CAB participants.

A well-managed CAB can become a group of trusted advisors you can rely on to give you an accurate view of how to make your product even more successful.

The post Customer Advisory Board Best Practices appeared first on UserVoice Blog.

Minus a decent auto-edit feature, Google’s otherwise superlative Photos app doesn’t have much in the way of extensive editing tools; it’s one of the few features that didn’t make Photos’ transition from Google+ to standalone app intact. Today, Google is taking a major step towards correcting that issue.

Launching on the app’s web client first, Photos now features a more extensive set of editing tools. Most notably, there’s finally an option to crop photos, including a set of presets that allow the user to change a photo’s aspect ratio to 4:3 or 16:9.

Google hasn’t confirmed whether these new tools will make their way to the mobile app, but given their straightforward nature, it’s probably a good bet they will make their way to mobile eventually.

Like many of Google’s other server side updates, this one is gradually rolling out to users around the world — I haven’t been able to access the new editing tools on my account. As such, check back later in the day if you’re still seeing the same old editing interface.

Casey Newton has a must-read story on the struggles of Pixite (makers of Pigment, among other apps) and the modern app economy:

For a time, Pixite was a shining example of the businesses made possible by the app economy. Like thousands of other developers, Pixite’s founders took what had been a side project and turned it into a full-fledged career. But the company’s recent financial problems illustrate a series of powerful shifts in the industry toward consolidation and corporatization.

For all but a few developers, the App Store itself now resembles a lottery: for every breakout hit like Candy Crush, hundreds or even thousands of apps languish in obscurity. Certain segments of the app economy remain vibrant — ludicrously profitable, even. Apps for massive social networks, on-demand services like Uber, and subscription businesses like Netflix and Spotify remain in high demand. Then there’s gaming: Last year, 85 percent of all app revenues went to games, according to App Annie. Supercell, the top-grossing developer of Clash of Clans, reported revenue of $1.7 billion in 2014. (It spent $440 million on marketing.)

The folks at Pixite have made some mistakes along the way, but the general shift on the App Store is undeniable.

Less than a week after Brampton City Council asked Uber to stop operating in the Flower City, Mississauga has decided to follow suit.

In a unanimous vote, Mississauga City Council voted to ask the popular ride-sharing service to suspend operations while the city re-evaluates its relevant bylaws.

“Innovation, technology and growth are driving competition in an established industry that has a long history of providing quality and reliable service,” said Mayor Bonnie Crombie in an interview with 680 News. “The debate about how to regulate Transportation Network Companies is not going away and we need to get it right.”

We’ve contacted Uber Canada to find out if the company intends to honour the request. We’ll update this article when we hear back from Uber.

We’ve added a new section with our thoughts on the eero, a simple mesh-networking device. Although it doesn’t offer the features or performance of our top router picks, the eero is a good choice for larger homes because you can easily add more units to scale up coverage without running cable. [Best Wi-Fi Router]

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
—Arthur C. Clarke

When a non-techie friend of mine moved to San Francisco, she overheard two guys talking next to her.

“What are you up to,” one of them asks?

The other replied, “Oh, I’m trying to learn Python.”

“Excuse me,” my friend interrupted them. “But I believe it’s called Parseltongue.”

(After living here for a while longer, she became very embarrassed. And though it wasn’t exactly what he meant, I still think Mr. Clarke would approve.)

In case you’ve missed it, we at UserVoice blog are currently *obsessed* with best practices for customer feedback – how to do it right, how to do it wrong, how to onboard your co-workers, etc., etc. In keeping with this theme, we decided to talk to experts and get their perspectives on how to optimize customer feedback. This post is the second of a handful of influencer interviews we’ll be sharing in the coming weeks.

Jeff Lash is the Service Director for the Product Management advisory service for Sirius Decisions. He is also the author of a well-rounded blog I and other product-happy folks read called “How to Be a Good Product Manager.” With that kind of title, you better believe he knows something about product management!

I reached out to Lash for some of his thoughts on how to best capture customer feedback. Here were my top three takeaways:

1. Be Proactive about Diversifying Your Customer Feedback Approach

Lash suggests that it’s important to reach people in a variety of different ways: “Some customers and users will be proactive about providing feedback — sending emails, communicating through sales or account management, or submitting suggestions through idea management portals, for example — but usually this is just the tip of the iceberg. Product managers need to remember that there are a lot people who will never actually provide feedback in this way, so they need to be proactive about identifying opportunities to understand customer needs, which usually includes techniques like one-on-one interviews and observational research.”

2. Don’t Let Daily Fire-Fighting Distract You From Customer Feedback

“At SiriusDecisions we ran a survey of product management leaders, and one of the questions we asked was about what skills the product managers on their teams most need to improve, and the top result was that ‘collecting product feedback and measuring product satisfaction.’

Some of this is because product managers are being pulled in so many different directions, which I have sympathy for, but at the same time, this is such a crucial part of making your product a success that you can’t let the daily fire-fighting or other internal responsibilities pull you away from understanding customer needs and collecting feedback.

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You can’t let the daily fire-fighting…pull you away from understanding customer needs…
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Sure, it might be quick and easy to just put together a survey, for example, but if that’s the only research you’re doing, the feedback you get may be biased and is likely only scratching the surface of what your customers are thinking. My colleague Rachel Young and I will be covering this in a presentation at the annual SiriusDecisions Summit in May — looking at the different ways that product managers and marketers can and should be understanding customer needs and collecting feedback.

3. Your “Voice of Customer” Program Must Go Beyond Features

“You can’t understand the voice of the customer without actually hearing the voice of the customer,” says Lash, suggesting that tech can’t and shouldn’t replace real conversation:

“Technology has allowed us to collect feedback from customers in a number of different ways, and do it more quickly and inexpensively than ever before, but that’s no substitute for actually talking or spending time with customers.

It’s also important to understand that “voice of customer” means many different things to different people. You may have someone in marketing or a customer experience function also looking at voice of customer, and often that’s looking at it from a much broader perspective which is important. Sometimes product managers look at things too narrowly — when they say “voice of customer” they really are mean “understand what new features we should add to the product,” but really the voice of the customer is going to including using the product but also things like onboarding, support, services, account management, and even billing and logistics.”

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“You can’t understand the VoC w/o actually hearing the voice of the customer.”
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The post Product Experts Weigh In: Jeff Lash on Quality Feedback and What “Voice of Customer” Really Means appeared first on UserVoice Blog.