I've been testing out all you can eat music services like Rdio, Mog, and Rhapsody this week, and I realized that very frequently I make judgements based on details that are only a tiny fraction of what I'm experiencing. In the case of Rhapsody, I experienced a few pauses in my playback and decided it wasn't for me. With Mog I coudn't figure out how to add an album to my collection from my iPhone, so I gave up. Rdio, on the other hand, has basically done what I want it to do, so I've stuck with it. My trial process with these services made me realize that users assign a very disproportionate value to very specific details of products.

The fact that users can be really turned off by specific details can be pretty scary for those of us developing products. We all search for the one thing that we can change to make our product successful, but the reality is that it's one thousand little details that are keeping our products from selling. A user can make a split-second decision not to use your product based on one tiny detail and they're gone forever. They probably won't even let you know why they left. What can we do about this?

First and foremost, we have to focus our products and make sure that the features that exist work correctly and help our users accomplish their goals. Fewer moving pieces that are precisely focused on helping our users accomplish the intent of our products are always going to drastically reduce the likelihood of of them being turned off by the details. If your product is available on the web and on the iPhone, make sure that both interfaces support all of the features. If the iPhone version is missing some features, make sure that they're missing because it makes sense, not because you're cutting corners. Can you just cut the feature from both interfaces?

Even simple, focused products will lose their share of users. We've got to ask those users why they're leaving. After a user cancels their service or returns a product, or after they stop using it for a while, email or call them and ask them why they decided that your product wasn't for them. It seems like it might be annoying to users, but I've actually been surprised to see that very often when users leave a product behind they have some passionate feelings about the decision and are glad you asked. I try to keep the question as broad and simple as possible: "We're trying to make product X the best service it can possibly be. Why did you decide to cancel your subscription?" If you don't ask, though, you'll never know.

One last technique I've used to find spots where users are being turned away is, if possible, to mine data about what features are used immediately before users leave. Do users tend to try out a particular feature and then disappear? Do they go to a particular page in my website and then never come back? There can be some magic involved here, but there are times where making sure you're collecting plenty of usage data and then reviewing that data can yield some great results.

It's not absurd to look for big reasons that users are fleeing a product, but be sure to focus a lens on the finer details as well. It's hard work, but with a lot of listening and attention to detail you can really make sure that your product fits your users.

Today I read The Invention of Hugo Cabret. It really enjoyed reading it and it only took about an hour and a half to read. More books should be that length.The book was fiction but referenced Georges Méliès, an real-life early French filmaker and one of his most popular files, A Trip to the Moon. Fortunately we live in a time when you can find almost anything on YouTube, so here it is:

It went by without me even really thinking about it all that much, but 3 years ago, as of July 1st, I became a C#, C++, Ruby and Objective-C programming sysadmin customer support business strategy guy at Gnoso. I've really loved working on the most popular .NET code coverage tool and the little diabetes log software that could, despite sometimes fighting tooth and nail not to love working on them.

I can't even say how grateful I am that Peter took a risk to get Gnoso up and running, and then took a bigger risk to let me work on so many fun things.

Beyond me just being a sucker for usability over feature set, I don't want the top items in a store category to be copyright infringing, hideously designed apps. Using and writing apps is one of the biggest reasons that I love the iPhone.

Oh, and just in case you're thinking that the App Store probably can't be much better, here's the equivalent top free apps in Music, probably the closest category to the multimedia one on Android:

Android Store images from John Lech Johansen's great post about why the Android App Store sucks so bad.

Another awesome video by OK Go. Thanks for being the first to tell me about this one, E.

I've been absolutely addicted to Sondre Lerche for the past couple of weeks. This is one of my favorites of his.

Here’s the test. Take some normal people, where by “normal” I mean people who have never heard of TechCrunch or Daring Fireball. Give them brand new still-in-the-box iPhone 4’s and HTC Evos. Now ask them to make a video call to one another...

Apple wasn’t going to include a front-facing camera until they had software that made it useful in an iPhone-caliber way. HTC is happy to include a front-facing camera and leave its utility (and user experience) in the hands of third-party developers.

Gruber hit this one out of the park. 

Google's writing a great operating system and there are some great pieces of hardware being made to run Android, but Google's product development mentality inherently means that there will be rougher edges for users to deal with on their side of the fence.