Pay to play

Like every other iPhone app, we provided a way for people to signup from the app itself. However, Apple insisted we must use Apple’s in-app payments if we wanted people to signup from the app. Funny thing is, that’s not possible – their in-app payments can’t handle a subscription service like ours with upgrades, downgrades and volume discounts.

Beyond the billing mechanics, the pricing model for subscription software – 30% of lifetime revenue – is not an option. We can accept paying a one-off bounty for each signup, because that’s the value the app store delivers.

No sampling the merchandise

And anyway, our signup is free. People don’t have to pay to use a trial of Xero. Hence, Apple’s other policy – no trial versions. Apple says “Your website is the best place to provide demos, trial versions, ….” Except Apple then bans developers from that too “It’s not appropriate to include the link of your web service and references of the link in your app or your marketing text.”

After weeks of waiting and cryptic emails from Apple, we ended up on the phone with our judge & jury: a guy called Steve from Cupertino (alas, not the Steve). In a two minute phone call the ambiguities of written policies was cleared. If we removed the ability to signup from within the app we would get official approval, which we did and you can now get the Xero app here.

Straight to the top

It’s great to finally have our app in the App Store. Almost immediately we were featured at the top of the ranks. It’s been very popular. Which makes it really frustrating that people who discover the app can’t just try it out immediately. And it’s beyond frustrating that we’re forbidden from telling people how they can get a free login so they can try it out.

Double standards?

It’s unclear whether Apple is reviewing and rejecting all existing apps that have in-app signups and demos. There’s more than a few that we know about – Quickbooks Mobile is a perfect example – that don’t comply with this policy.

It’s worth noting the Quickbooks app released an approved update the same week our app was rejected.

We’d love to hear from other people who’ve had to deal with this or similar issues. Is there a loophole or a workaround that we haven’t discovered?

This is the same accounting app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch that’s also available when you login at m.xero.com. However, there are a few big advantages that come with installing the official iPhone version:

• Take photos of receipts and attach them directly to your expenses
• Use a 4 digit passcode to login quickly
• It runs faster, because the app is stored on your phone

We put together a fun video to illustrate some of the useful features of the app…

A lot of thought went into the design of our iPhone accounting app, focusing on ways to streamline the mobile experience: Quickly check your balances, quickly draft invoices with a few taps – even approve & send invoices straight from your phone, add expenses just by taking a photo of a receipt, tap to call customers & quickly add contact notes.

We think you’ll find it’s very smooth & snappy.

We also made the accounting app available on the iPad so you can get the same streamlined experience on the bigger screen. As always, you can still use the full version of Xero from your iPad (which we plan to make a bit more touch friendly).

Even though Xero Touch is available in the App Store, under the hood it’s running our standard HTML5 mobile web app. A big advantage of being a web app is that the data on your phone and the data in your accounting system are always in sync.

It was a slight ordeal getting the app thru Apple’s notorious approval process, but that’s a story for another day. With the iPhone version now approved our team is working hard on getting a version into the Google Android app store.

Let us know how Xero Touch is changing the way you do business. And be sure to leave a recommendation on the App Store. As always, let us know what other features you think would be useful.

Demand for Xero keeps growing around the world. Which poses a challenge: in order to keep up with the demand and keep up the quality of our product, we need to grow our team.

So we’ve been working hard on ways to dial up our recruiting efforts. One example is our new careers page, which explains why Xero is such an exceptional place to work.

Our team is very passionate and we want to inspire like-minded people to join us. The careers page not only explains what’s special about working at Xero, it’s also a great example of what makes Xero stand out – exceptional technology and design.

We also want to dispel a few myths about working at Xero:

• Myth #1: Xero is done, it’s feature complete.
  There’s a misconception we’re finished building the software and now we’re in maintenance mode. That’s absurd. That’s like saying Apple is done, there’s nothing new Apple can do. So far, we’ve just scratched the surface. Look at the state of global financial and business systems. They’re utterly broken. There’s no shortage of opportunities for innovation and disruption. That’s the scale of our vision.
• Myth #2: Accounting is boring.
  Is money boring? Is business boring? It’s true accounting is definitely painful and boring for people who use miserable accounting software. That’s the big opportunity we’ve seized upon. What if accounting is something people enjoy? How big is that opportunity? How fun is that challenge?
• Myth #3: Xero isn’t a startup anymore, now it’s a big corporate.
  At last count, Google was 25,000+ employees and growing exponentially. Facebook 2,000+. Xero is still relatively tiny at 120+. We’re no longer working out of a garage (or in our case, a cramped studio apartment). Those early days were fun, having no customers and desperately trying to build something from nothing. Now we have customers all over the world, we see the impact our software is having on hundreds of thousands of people every day. Without a doubt, being in a growth phase is WAY more fun. But we’re still very much the underdog, the challenger, and we still have fire in the belly to change the world.

So please help us get the word out about what we have to offer, or better still – join us.

A few people commented on our choice of Word for creating templates, versus other options like CSS. Even though lots of our customers are amazingly talented designers (ie 31three, Squared Eye, Cactus Lab, …) and they know what {color:#333!important;} means, the reality is most people don’t even know what CSS is. But most people do use Word everyday, so they can easily tweak our default templates to suit their needs.

Even from a designers perspective, it’s important to point out some serious advantages to Word that shouldn’t be underestimated: headers, footers and multi-page design options are easy to implement and native to Word. Since CSS is a screen based formatting technology, print and document formatting is tricky – so you can assume some basic print formatting options won’t be possible. Nevertheless, we still want to add support for CSS templates, at some point. We’re also looking into supporting standard .doc files for creating templates, so you can use a much broader range of editors.

Remember: tell us about your templates & we’ll send people your way.

For several years running, Xero has been a sponsor of Summer of Tech, where university students get matched up with tech companies looking for interns. The program has grown over the years, and now includes design students, as well as comp-sci and engineering students.

While the program helps us cherry pick rising talent, we also hope to offer some inspiration for a whole new generation of students entering the work force.

In my final year of university, I did an internship at a place called General Magic. It was an amazing experience, kickstarting my career and giving me an extremely valuable insider’s view of what it’s like to be part of a high flying start-up.

As I’ve been reviewing some of this year’s design interns, I thought it’s worth sharing some basics I look for in candidates:

• An online portfolio with plenty of work samples is an absolute must. Without that, you won’t be considered. It should go without saying, the design of your portfolio is as important as the projects presented.
• An online portfolio also shows you know the basics of web production, coding and site deployment. To be an interaction designer you need to know basic nuts & bolts.
• I take notice when people have their own domain. It shows you understand the value of branding.

• The ability to write clearly and concisely. Design is communication. The words you choose show if you’re thinking about users and their frame of reference.

• Participation in social media is good to see, it shows an interest and involvement with tech and culture, plus some insights into your personality.

Specific design skills I look for:

• Information hierarchy and typography – page layouts that establish a clear order of importance.
• Visual style – fine tuned composition, lighting and color balance that triggers an emotional response.
• Simple usability – links, buttons and navigation follow common conventions, they look and behave the way people expect. Experimentation and innovation are nice, as long as the basics are covered.
• Craftsmanship – sweating the details, an obvious sign of passion for the process.

And some worldly advice as you set out on your adventures:

One final piece of advice – do a little research. It’s dead easy to know all about the companies where you want to work and the people you’ll be meeting. It makes a big difference when you express a genuine interest and some understanding of the people and their business.

Best of luck & have fun.

Anyone that’s followed me or this blog for a while knows that performance is a favorite topic of mine, one I’ve presented on a few times including at TechEd last year. The theme at this year’s conference was “fast by default”: I’ve always thought performance is the number one non-functional requirement for all software and Velocity is about making web software much much faster.

First the bad news: there are still web developers out there that still don’t understand basic web performance! If you don’t know the 14 rules then learn them! Having said that we at Xero often let ourselves slip into bad practices – it’s very easy to get complacent with performance, but everyone in your organization should be thinking about it – not just the performance team (if you even have one) – everyone from development to operations to QA to marketing needs to understand the impact that performance can have – it needs to be baked into the culture. This often means aligning performance metrics with real-world business metrics – if I speed up my website by 1 sec will that increase conversions? Or to put it more simply: will 1 second make me more money? This is stuff that is core at the big players such as Google & Yahoo & Facebook – but it’s relevant to any size organization trying to make it’s way on the web.

Fortunately most of the talks were at a deeper level – getting to the nitty gritty of performance. There were a few talks that tackled the subject of the inner workings of the web: John Rauser from Amazon was brilliant in tackling the usually dry subject of TCP and the problems inherent in a protocol that was invented almost 20 years before Google was, and Tom Hughes-Croucher from Yahoo! provided a detailed look at what happens in the lifetime of a single web request. There are still developers out there that don’t really understand what happens during an HTTP request and how much inherent latency there is in the Internet. We’re all at the mercy of the laws of physics (unfortunately New Zealand, the speed of light is a contributing factor when connecting to web sites hosted in the US) but there is still a lot that can be done to improve the bits between your computer and the web server. Probably the most interesting discovery was how simple things such as the quality of a user’s router can have such an adverse affect on web performance. In fact there’s a big push at the moment to get Internet Service Providers to worry less about increasing bandwidth, but rather focusing on providing better quality gear to their customers (it doesn’t matter if you have 1 Gbps to your home if your router can barely handle 5 Mbps). It’s also interesting to note the work that Google has been doing with protocols like Spdy to try to improve the bits of TCP that weren’t designed to cope with the size of the current Internet. Again – latency is the killer – Google have proven that improving latency has a much greater benefit on the speed of websites than adding raw bandwidth.

Also worth noting is the rise of progressive enhancement as the current pattern du jour of the web performance world. Talks from the Google Docs team, Google Maps team, Facebook and others highlighted how important this technique can be in improving performance when the basics aren’t good enough. Essentially progressive enhancement is about rendering the simplest page possible and then progressively enhancing it through CSS and progressively adding interactivity through JavaScript under the complete page is available. This is a user experience pattern more than a pure performance pattern – the idea is that content is king, and therefore by displaying the content quickly then it gives the perception of speed. I found this illustration on a blog post about progressive enhancement which actually is a very apt way of explaining it.

For the geeks this technique has the benefit of requiring you to construct your user interface in a loosely coupled and very explicit manner – HTML needs to be semantic and clean, CSS needs to handle all the styling, and the JavaScript needs to be unobtrusive, adding interactivity as late as possible in the page load. With that done you can then play with some interesting tricks like loading your JavaScript asynchronously or using on-demand techniques like RequireJS. Even though a lot of sites use techniques that may feel like progressive enhancement, it’s sites like Facebook that really take the concept to the limit.

Overall Velocity lived up to the hype and has definitely made me think about the thing we could do better at Xero. While we’ve done some good work there is still so much we could do to make Xero fast by default – which can only be a good thing for our customers.

At FullCodePress this weekend the Aussies took home the trophy. Their first ever win at the event, where the goal is to build a web site for a charity within 24 hours.

Xero helped sponsor this annual charity event, plus we made some additional donations:

• All 3 charities received a lifetime free subscription to Xero
• Each member of the winning team from Australia received a 1 year free subscription to Xero

In addition, we awarded special badges, one for each of the different disciplines. Read more about the winners.

I had the great honor to be one of six judges, which was a fun but tough job, an experience I wrote about here.

Most importantly, each of the charities – who dedicate their time and skills to support the community – now has an outstanding site to help them serve their communities better than ever.

Team USA is new to the event and they’re coming heavy, with a rock star line up of designers and developers including Jason Santa Maria and Liz Danzico.

In addition to sponsorship of the event:

• Each charity will get a free lifetime subscription to Xero
• Each member of the winning team will get 1 year free subscription to Xero
• Special awards will be given to team members with “notable character and talents”

As part of the fund raising, there are several public events happening here in Wellington on Thursday 17 June:

• 4 different web design and development workshops are available during the day
• Webstock Mini happens from 6-9pm (with presos by Jason Santa Maria and Liz Danzico)

Come along if you can, it’s guaranteed to be an awesome time.

Full Code Press is a great way for our profession to donate some time and talent to the community, while having a bit of fun. We look forward to seeing the awesome work each team delivers and we’ll be sure to let you know who takes home the big prize.

The article outlines key principles behind successful emails, listing things such as having clean layout and a clear call to action. The idea being that if you follow these guidelines your emails will be appealing, and people will respond more to them.

In our experience (and that of loads of other companies) it’s not just about making things look and sound great to get the best results, you need to go one step further and it’s all about testing – testing everything you can.

A/B Testing

Many of you have probably heard the term A/B testing or split testing. You can do it with websites, emails, phone calls and even the homeless. In the case of email, the most basic way to A/B test something is following these steps:

1. Identify a goal you want to improve on, e.g. increasing replies or clicks on a link
2. Make sure you can measure the result by using things like promotion codes, different link destinations or cool marketing software that does it all for you
3. Send half your customers the original email
4. Send the other half a slightly modified email
5. Check which email version improved your goal the most

Just remember, while you might be tempted to make lots of changes to improve your goal faster, it’ll be harder to determine what particular change did the trick.

Here’s what we did

We decided to A/B test something that’s just a small thing and often overlooked – the email subject line. We wanted to see if a company name at the start of the subject line encouraged more people visit our website.

Version A (red) had no company name in the subject line, and Version B (blue) had “Xero -“ added to the start of the subject line.

Having the company name in the subject line saw more people open the email, but the difference was so small it’s unlikely it meant anything. However, by not having a company name in the subject line meant we received around 70% more clicks through to the website.

What does this mean?

There’s a bit of guesswork in reading the results. Sometimes the answer is clear – a bigger button might attract the reader’s attention more. In this case it may be that the email felt more personal and human without a company name at the start, and people were more receptive to the contents of the email. Or it could’ve been sheer luck, and by sending the email again to a few thousand more people we’ll see the new data start to average things out to show a smaller gain.

The important lesson to take from all this is that by continually testing and measuring everything, even the very small things, you can discover your own best practices in everything you design. On their own these percentage improvements may seem tiny and disconnected, but compounded over time they can have a huge impact on the success of your business.

Things you can start testing now:

• Graphics
• Colours
• Call to action
• Headline
• Page copy
• Arrangement of email elements
• Timing – try sending emails at different hours or on different days

For the second year running we’ve been honored with a Webby Award. In 2009, we received two Webby Awards and this year we got one in the Web Services & Applications category. Being continuously recognized among the world’s best web apps is something we’ve very proud of.

But far more important to us is the daily feedback and support we get from customers all over the world. Thank you and keep it coming!

On that note, I just returned from a quick trip to San Francisco where I met with some customers and their accountants. They gave us really useful insights into how they work and how we can better Americanize things for the upcoming US version of Xero.

Notice how I spelled honored and recognized? As always, please leave a comment if you have tips for the US version of Xero.

With Eric Ries, Mike Davidson and the Xero-sponsored Kevin Rose all giving talks about entrepreneurship and creating a successful startup, there were some very excited people in the room itching to get in front of their computers and start making the Next Big Thing. As a relatively new hire at Xero, it was amusing to watch the more seasoned Xero crew nodding their heads in recognition at Eric, Mike and Kevin’s anecdotes about life in startup-land: endless hours of development, fast failure, and making a little money do a lot of work. Kevin had some great tips on hacking the press and the media: a particularly liked his idea of going along to conference parties to mix and mingle, even if you can’t go to the conference.

I was spot on with my prediction that we’d be hearing about augmented reality: though it was within a wider context of networked cities and the internet of things. Both Mark Pesce and Adam Greenfield painted pictures of a world where, with a richness of sensors available, we’ll be able to live our lives in a more self-aware way. For example: by having a personal profile of our DNA we’ll know which prescription drugs are safe for us, personally, to take. We’ll be able to drill-down on products at the supermarket so that we can see the vital statistics of the very cow that went into a 500g pack of beef mince. Our cities are going to become addressable, queryable, and even scriptable resources. We’ve had the internet absolutely transform the intangible world of services and ideas: now it’s going to transform the tangible world of bricks and mortar. Some city data is already being collected: and some of that data is personally relevant: but if that’s so, we should have the right to use that data too. Personally I’d love to hack my Snapper, One Card or Fly Buys data.

There was a lot of inspiration at work too, whether it was Rives with his spoken word poetry, Ben Cerveny’s extended metaphor on plant biology and software development, or Shelley Bernstein’s brilliant talk on how they increased Brooklyn Museum visits through social media initiatives, via Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube and more. It can be tempting to hold on to your content and retain exclusivity, but Shelley’s talk showed how when you empower people to share and use your content you reap huge rewards. Lastly, Scott Thomas’s talk on designing Obama was a huge privilege. The work they did on the Obama campaign was absolutely transformative. Political campaigns will never be the same.

Another great year from the Webstock team: do not miss the next one!

Our awards were for Best Web Application, Best User Experience and Most Outstanding Website.

We’re truly honoured to stand beside the other finalists in our categories – Pocketsmith, Eventfinder, Powershop, Ponoko, DigitalNZ, and NZ On Screen. It was a great evening celebrating some some awesome New Zealand talent.

Here’s Philip accepting the Most Outstanding Website award.

The awards presentation was closed with an amazing digital lightshow by The Darkroom centered around the 106 year old pipe organ. It’s an amazing instrument and if you ever get the chance to hear it being played I recommend going, there’s often a short series of free concerts every year. Here’s what the organ usually looks like during the day:

But last night  it was transformed into an incredible 3D fire breathing machine (amoung other things):

Here’s a 50-second snippet I caught on my rather ancient 4 megapixel camera (sorry about the quality) when pistons and steam were roaring and hissing from the machine before it was submerged in water:

Thanks to the judges, Webstock & ONYAs crew, finalists and everyone there for a great night. If other videos and photos come available I’ll post an update.

– Update –

The full version of the digital lightshow is now available on YouTube – now that I watch it again from the angle of the production camera it is even more amazing.

The ONYAs celebrate New Zealand’s best websites and applications as judged by this industry.

We’re delighted that Xero has been named finalist in 4 categories:

• Best web application
• Most innovative
• Best user experience
• Most outstanding website

We’ll be crossing our fingers and rehearsing acceptance speeches in our heads alongside the other great companies and websites nominated in these categories – see you guys there!

• Chrometoaster
• YouDo
• NZ on Screen
• Boost New Media
• 3Months
• Codec
• DigitalNZ
• Eventfinder
• Pocketsmith
• DNA
• Powershop
• Ponoko and Origin Design

You can read about the categories and nominees on the ONYA’s blog.

“…what you’ve got to understand is this gadget [the iPad] disappears pretty quickly, you’re looking into pure software..”

What I think Carr meant was that that when you first pick up an iPad, you quickly and imperceptibly transition from the initial physicality of the iPad hardware directly into a mode of using and intuitively manipulating its software applications. Indeed, it’s taken quite a while for hardware and all its archaic quirks, settings and scheduled maintenance rituals to finally get out of the way and let software take centre stage.

But it’s Carr’s notion of “pure software” that’s the most interesting part for me.Software used to articulate itself very physically; whether represented on punch cards or stored on floppy or optical media, or because we were forced to engage with it through the medium of big old metal boxes, whirring fans and clackety keyboards. Using software was a physical experience; you could literally touch it. And even once it had moved beyond its physical stored form and was installed onto its host hardware, it then happily spewed its virtual contents back out again into the real world carried upon of forests worth of printer paper.

That is to say that with software there has always been something physical, something other than the software application that you needed to accommodate before you could make the best, fullest use of the actual software itself as its designer had first envisioned.

Or put more simply, we have become habitually used to a generally low-ball software experience; one that has always come pre-packaged with inbuilt compromise simply because of the physicality of the hardware required to project it into our brains.

So, the concept of an emerging new species of software, “pure software” as Carr put it, with apparently super-hero abilities to make hardware and the need to physically engage with a device just simply vanish, strongly resonates in my mind when I think about the future directions in which software design could go.

And the resulting feeling I get doesn’t sit a million miles away from the feelings I get about some of the early capabilities we’ve recently built into Xero. Not least in the example of the capability to have Xero spark into life at 1am (or any time of your choosing for that matter), automatically pick up and process your monthly billings into your accounts and then automatically email the invoices directly to every one of your clients.

All while you are fast asleep in bed, while your PC is switched off and no trees were harmed in this process.

By old-world-of-software standards, that’s pretty magical.

Does this mean that Xero is Pure Software? It’s debatable. But it’s going to be a lot of fun proving the theory.

Why was I disappointed:

• Lack of Flash support in the browser. Flash is everywhere on the web. We use Flash objects in our Xero charts and my little boy lives in Club Penguin. That lets down the ‘best browser experience’ claim.
• The camera didn’t make it, so obviously there is a version 2.0 coming soon. Also the big bezel looks very V1.  Version 2 will be nothing but screen. So the iPad creates a dilemma. I want one, but there is a better one coming.
• For business it’s not a note taking device so it doesn’t replace the A4 notebook I carry around in my bag.  With no stylus it can’t be a Microsoft One Note, but applications like Things will allow tasks to be entered.  For the iPad to be used in business it has to work like a pad – where you can write on it, but not look like you’re checking your email. Apps might bridge this gap. I assume that ActiveSync still works but connecting to Exchange is conspicuously omitted on the iPad site.

RWW also advocates holding off to version 2: 5 Reasons to Wait for iPad 2.0

Clearly the iPad overlaps the iPhone and the MacBook.  The question is, is there a space in between for an eBook reader and intimate lounge surfing device?But the bigger aspect of the iPad is the user interface style. Remember that iPhone and Mac OSX is the same operating core system, which is how Apple has been able to port the iWork applications across quickly. This is a huge competitive advantage to Apple.

What was revolutionary about the iPhone is that it is a Morphing Machine:

The iPhone is the information appliance that Raskin imagined at the end of his life: A morphing machine that could do any task using any specialized interface. Every time you launch an app, the machine transforms into a new device, showing a graphical representation of its interface. There are specialized buttons for taking pictures, and gestures to navigate through them. Want to change a song? Just click the “next” button. There are keys to press phone numbers, and software keyboards to type short messages, chat, email or tweet. The iPhone could take all these personalities, and be successful in all of them.

When it came out, people instantly got this concept. Clicking icons transformed their new gadget into a dozen different gadgets. Then, when the app store appeared, their device was able to morph into an unlimited number of devices, each serving one task.

This concept greatly simplifies computing. PC style computing of multiple overlapping windows and a file system is difficult for non technical users to grasp. The iPhone ease of use is now being applied to larger devices. And with the keyboard dock this maybe a great primary device for 95% of the population.

As you can see in the examples above, the operating system is practically invisible on the iPad.

So while there is overlap, the iPhone/iPad and Mac OSX allow Apple to play with both modes of operation. The iPad can become the simple to use computing device for the masses. Therefore iWork on the iPad is significant.

What I’d like to see now is the MacBook Air become more of a convertible device that allows the relaxed browsing experience of the iPad but still has the full multi-tasking power of OSX. But then I’d only need 2, not 3 devices.

What do you think?

Next February in Wellington (home to the Xero HQ), some of the best and brightest digital writers and thinkers from all over the world will gather to celebrate good design, champion web standards and  have fun.

Webstock is a true kiwi success story. Organisers Ben and Natasha Lampard, Mike Brown and Debbie Sidelinger have created something from nothing. They haven’t ripped off an overseas format or tried to emulate something that’s been done before. They’ve created something new, with its own identity, which now attracts lots of people from offshore. A tremendous achievement for the Wellington-based digerati who got it started by giving a couple of their heroes a few cheeky phone calls.

But it’s not just a web conference. Past events have touched on print media and journalism, television, film, distribution, logistics, central and local government, hardware, retail, libraries and information management, politics and law, games and game theory, organisational psychology, economics, product design, visual design, management theory, occupational therapy, architecture and even horticulture.  Horticulture?  Yes. In this modern-day web of things, even a a pot plant can have a Twitter account.

How can something so scattershot be of value, you may ask? If Steve Jobs is right, and creativity is just connecting things, Webstock provides an environment where those connections can spontaneously happen, where people can meet and talk and share ideas from many different disciplines. Instead of a hundred bankers talking past each other about the latest innovations in banking, you have a couple of bankers talking with journalists interviewing public servants arguing with artists collaborating with architects brainstorming with hackers: the sort of stuff that drives real innovation.The glue that brings these disparate disciplines together is the web and the wider internet, the potentiality of devices and communication protocols and networks that can be combined and recombined to create new businesses; and to decimate old ones. Last year Meg Pickard from The Guardian spoke about how her newspaper is bucking the trend and transforming into an online content community, while Adrian Holovaty of Everyblock described his vision of a world where every neighbourhood has a newsfeed generated from media, crime stats, local government and more. And he’s already done it for key cities across the US, open-sourced his source code and invited anyone to use his code to do the same for their own city.

Webstock doesn’t have a particular product to push. Unlike a lot of industry conferences, the tools are not the point. You’ll see people from Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google and Yahoo!, along with free software and open source advocates. They might argue and throw their tools at each other but they all have the same goal in mind: leveraging the power of the internet for the betterment of everyone; creating businesses that are smarter, more efficient and more fun than businesses that have gone before.

At next year’s Webstock I think we’ll see more about online communities, augmented reality applications, mobile, and the genesis of a thousand great ideas, the best of which will be turned into new businesses or campaigns or art which you’ll see and hear about in years to come.

Early-bird registrations finish on the 4th of December, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world. If you want to see where the next generation of entrepreneurs are going to take the world of business, you should be there too. Also beginning for the first time are the ONYAs, New Zealand’s independent web industry awards, sponsored by Shift. It should be a great night.

I actually have the opposite reaction. First, I’m genuinely flattered. It means we’re doing something worth imitating.

Second, when somebody directly imitates a design it can only result in bad quality — the very act of copying means cutting corners and it shows. Look at all the iPod knock-offs. They’re laughably inferior. Copying our design doesn’t hurt us, it helps us. It ends up emphasizing all the ways in which the copy is inferior, making our original design look even better by comparison.

I also don’t have a problem if people take our ideas and implement them well, or even improve upon them. Actually, it does bother me. In a good way. It challenges and inspires us to push things even further, so we always stay several steps ahead.

So please, do us a favor, go ahead and copy us.

If you just write a checklist you’ll get screens full of text fields and checkboxes – a forbidding mélange of functionality that in essence meets every conceivable need but becomes an end-user’s worst nightmare. Since arriving at Xero a couple of weeks ago it seems there’s a real awareness about what customers are in a rush to escape from.

I joined Xero because it shares three ideas that I think are extremely important in software development. None of these are new ideas, but seeing a software company actually put them into practice is a novelty.

1. Trust in design

It amazes me that there are still software companies out there with no designers on staff. Or worse, they under-invest in design by recruiting young design grads who are paid a pittance to colour-in the creations of  brilliant but aesthetically challenged engineers. But skinning is not design. I was attracted to Xero because it puts design first. It has a world-class team of experienced designers who can take a set of requirements and use them as a springboard to excellence. But Xero also has world-class engineers. They provide top-class input, concentrating primarily on technical design, so Xero keeps humming. They’ve created a system that performs well, has integrity, and complements the product experience. By relinquishing control of the product experience to a design team, the engineers are helping create something that people not only use, but love.

Blindly following a spec might give you a correct answer, but without design, you won’t get the right answer. Xero wants to get accounting right, and that’s hugely exciting.

2. Some requirements are seen, not heard

Requirements gathering should be an exercise in anthropology. When you ask a person to analyse their own behaviour, they may tell you how they think they should behave, or how they think you’d like them to behave. And if they’ve been using a particular piece of software for a while, they may undergo an escalation of commitment where they think that the way they’ve been forced to do things is the right way, and despite a desire for improvement they cannot conceive of anything better. So, the solutions they propose end up looking like what they’ve already got.

By sitting down with people in their place of work or in their home and watching them, you might see things that they themselves don’t notice. Maybe they move data from one spreadsheet program to another or manually add spaces to a text file for import or other crazy behaviour. Or maybe you’ll notice that the sort of programs they have on their desktop, the news they read, the things they value – anything you observe can give colour to the final design.

Xero has looked at accounting anew, and has found that people have been doing crazy things for years because that’s what the incumbent software made them do. Finding that craziness and curing it with sanity is fun!

3. Story rules

In software engineering, processes are described using use cases and scenarios, and in Agile development with user stories. But when the story begins and ends on the borders of a software system, it lacks humanity. Tools like personas and context scenarios, as championed by companies like Cooper, help us design software around implicit user needs and create real stories that inspire designers, rather than constrain them.

Stories tell us the how and the why of good software. And you know you’ve got it right when the stories that you’re telling are elegant, inspiring and exciting. If your stories are plodding, repetitive, random, and nonsensical, you know it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

So are the stories around your software engaging or nightmarish? What crazy behaviour have you seen reinforced by bad software? Where does design sit in your development process, and who does it?

It was great to speak with some of the people who are at the cutting edge of intelligent web technology in Oz. Very cool people with some really cool ideas.  On day 2 our Senior Interaction Designer Grant Robinson presented a great session on rapid prototyping. He showed how the design team at Xero can quickly create a large number of prototypes of each feature that’s going to be added to the software, and compare them to ensure that what we release to our customers is easy to use.

Grant at Web Directions South 2009 (photo by phempsall on Flickr)

All in all an excellent couple of days full of clever ideas and great interactions. Looking forward to the cool apps and sites that come out of it!

Learning to use early business apps was straightforward enough, if sometimes a little cryptic to begin with. However once you’d managed to memorise the different menus and keystrokes, away you went. Watching people use first and second-generation business apps was productivity personified, played to the accompaniment of the sound of hundreds of key clicks as they rattled through reams of order entry documents, often without even looking at the screen.

Software used to be billed as ‘Easy to use’ or ‘User friendly’ but apparently both these terms should have been banned by advertising standards councils in recent years because watching someone using most business software today is like watching an antelope trying to open a packet of cigarettes*.Why?

Two reasons.

The first is competition. The business software industry has been locked in Mortal Kombat with itself for years where ‘Bigger, better, faster more…’ has been the only battlefield directive. This is entirely understandable in the context of a capitalist economy where the short-term ability to compete determines the long-term ability to survive, but the unsightly wreckage of this functionality arms race lies strewn across the screens of every modern day business app.

In simplistic terms, software that was once simple has gotten progressively more and more complicated and moreover, we have learned to accept this as the unavoidable price of progress. In other words, we compromise. Which conveniently is the second reason software is over complicated today.

We tolerate and don’t complain. And even if we did complain, software companies probably wouldn’t do anything thing about it.

Because if you’ve just spent the last twenty years painstakingly engaged in the software development equivalent of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, (I know it only took Michelangelo four years, indulge me), and one day the Pope drops by to review the finished work, screws up his face and says ”Don’t you think it looks a bit busy? …” – it’s going to be a short conversation. And anyway, no long established software company would ever lightly entertain the prospect of a radical redesign even if it was the right thing to do, for fear of disenfranchising its entire user community should the redesign veer too far from the accepted, if dysfunctional norm.

After twenty years of using business software but after only two months of using Xero myself, one of the things I really like about Xero is that – in gamer parlance – it only has one level of difficulty; Easy – and there are no Hard or Expert settings.

I’ll readily concede that this is partly because Xero is still relatively young and fresh – just as its older software counterparts once were – but also because usability and interaction design have been foundation priorities from the start, both concepts which didn’t exist when Xero’s old world counterparts first emerged.

Why is ease of use design and user feedback so important to Xero?

Because our monthly pay-as-you-go billing model means that we effectively renegotiate with every Xero customer every month. In order words, we need to convince our customers to stick with using Xero 12,000 times a month, and the moment any customer feels like they’re being asked to compromise more than they’re comfortable with, they can drop us like a stone.

That’s putting your money where your mouth is and that’s why Xero doesn’t have a Hard Mode.

* Thanks to Stephen Fry for his awesome software usability simile.

Which is great, but now the final selection depends on you.

My proposal is based on a talk I’ve given before that explains our design process at Xero.

We are pleased to announce we have been named the winner of two Webbys in The 13th Annual Webby Awards.

These are considered the internet’s most respected benchmark of success, also called the ‘Oscars of the internet’. This year they received nearly 10,000 entries from over 60 countries, marking the largest number of entries in its history.

Both Xero software and the Xero marketing site were nominated in the Banking / Bill Paying category. The Xero application won the Webby Award as well as also winning the People’s Voice Award in this same category.

One of the Xero team will be flying to New York for the star studded ceremony, to rub shoulders with other Webby Award winners like Trent Reznor, Lisa Kudrow and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

The Awards are not only renowned for acknowledging internet brilliance, but also for their five -word-acceptance speech rule – we’ve started work on ours already.

Having people vote for us in the People’s Voice award was incrediably rewarding, seeing comments like these really make us feel we are helping out small business owners all over the world:

Xero is fun to use and makes keeping track of everything a breeze. Moving from M**B to Xero was like moving from the ark to the spaceship. Amazing. Best online user interface I know.

Xero is THE best thing since ‘sliced bread’. Thank you Xero for making scary accounting things so easy.

I’m a raving fan of Xero. A web developer myself, and this application is so beautiful it makes me want to cry . It’s intuitive and very user friendly. Sheer brilliance

If Xero was a person I would like to give them a big hug, I am no longer scared about accounting and I owe it all this brilliant piece of software. Accounting with xero as sad as it may sound is actually fun, I am addicted for life! Xero won me over from all the other competitors (even the free ones) with its lovely interface, easy-to-use workflows, and excellent and relevant help (go the tech writer!).

Xero Accounting usability review

It’s a real thrill when people get what we’re doing.

Thanks Scott.

At the Web 2.0 Expo I picked up some really valuable tips that I wanted to share.

Stephan Spencer did a great session on SEO. Here are some of the key takeaways I got from it:

• Anchor text (the text of inbound links) is one of the greatest determining factors in setting page rank for your keywords (we want to rank high for online accounting so please link to Xero with that anchor text!!!)
• Avoid duplicate content on your blog (main page, post, category page) because it dilutes page rank, instead use excerpts to increase keyword traffic and concentrate Google juice to your permalink blog post page. Spencer has a detailed write up on SEO for blogs.
• Conserve Google juice for high value pages by using nofollow on low value pages (ie, privacy page, terms of service page). I’ve dug into this a bit deeper and there’s some controversy over this advice.
• Google serves different results for different locations, not just countries, but down to the city level
• Track and fine tune unique and precise meta descriptions and page titles to boost keyword ranking
• Measure and fine tune visit-to-signup conversion rates on a daily basis for high value pages
• Short URLs result in higher click thrus from search results. The theory is that people innately trust that the source is more precise.

Here are slides from a few other awesome sessions that provided great insights and advice:

• Eric Ries’ session on building and running lean startups (slides with audio)
• Awesome panel on customer metrics strategies for activation/acquisition/retention