Great apology note from Hulu’s CEO [via DF]:

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ’’It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’’ were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ’’Sunny’’ episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball…

The team at Hulu is doing our best to make lemonade out of lemons on this one, but it’s not easy given how poorly we executed here. Please know that we will do our best to learn from this mistake such that the Hulu user experience benefits in other ways down the road.

Mistakes happen. It’s how you handle them that really matters.

Related: Hulu figures out how to bring TV online [SvN]

Jason Fried

Feb 9-11, NYC, O’Reilly Tools of Change keynote
Feb 23-24, Miami, Future of Web Apps

David Heinemeier Hansson

Mar 6, Dublin, Future of Web Apps
Apr 3-4, Chicago, Flourish Conference

Ryan Singer

Apr 6, Toronto, Mesh U

I was looking at the Pinnochio Blu-ray page on Amazon last night and read “Expand Your Viewing Experience Beyond The Original Aspect Ratio Of The Film” in the product description. What does “Original Aspect Ratio” mean? We all used to have (or still do have) 4:3 CRT television sets. I know that Pinnochio was released in the ‘40s before Hollywood was shooting and presenting in CinemaScope or Panavision. So I went to the web and discovered the TCM Movie Database site.

The TCM Movie Database has an illustration for each film that shows how it would have looked in the theatre, on your 4:3 CRT TV, and on your 16:9 Widescreen TV. These illustrations clearly communicate exactly how the picture will be presented on the screen.

If numbers like 1.33:1 or 2.35:1 confuse you, or if your Dad asks, “Why is Wall-E letterboxed on your widescreen TV?” you can now reference these great illustrations. You can also learn more about theatrical aspect ratios by reading the article entitled Widescreen-O-Rama! at the always excellent Digital Bits site.

As interface designers, we want our work to look good and also to make sense. Every element on the screen should please the eye, and at the same time interfaces aren’t merely art objects. They have work to do. Interfaces need to provide information and clearly indicate the possible courses of action. These two factors—sex appeal and function, prettiness and clarity, decoration and meaning—they often co-exist when the designer is skillful. But still there is a potential for conflicts between how we want a design to look and how that design is understood by our customers. I recently ran into one of these questions of decoration versus meaning on GitHub.

Global navigation on GitHub

After you log in to GitHub, the global navigation appears at the right-hand side of the header. The navigation block is wrapped and held together by a rounded rectangle.

Look at the rounded rectangle that holds this nav block together. There is a grey border around the outside and the whole block has a light blue background. The border and background are decorative. They stylize the block and add visual interest. To help you see that these elements are decorative, I made a quick comparison with the original on top and a new version below with no border or background:

Continued…

Service operators generally suck at saying they’re sorry. I should know, I’ve had to do it plenty of times and it’s always hard. There’s really never a great way to say it, but there sure are plenty of terrible ways.

One of the worst stock dummies that even I have resorted to in a moment of weakness is this terrible non-apology: “We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused”. Oh please. Let’s break down why it’s bad:

“We apologize”
You say “I apologize” to someone when you bump into them on the subway, not if you spill your coffee all over them. Then you’re “really, really sorry!”. If your service is important to your users, it’s a lot more like spilling coffee all over them than it is like bumping into them when you go down.

Also, you should find someone willing to take personal responsibility. Even if it’s not directly their fault. There’s always someone who’s in charge, someone who stops the buck. Hiding behind a faceless “we” is weak.

“Any inconvenience”
First of all, if I depend on a service and can’t get to it, it’s not an inconvenience. It might bloody very well be a full-on crisis. An inconvenience is when I can’t get my flavor of milkshake at Potbelly’s or if there’s line at the grocery store. This ain’t that.

Using the word “any” makes it even worse. It’s implying that you don’t really care what bucket my frustrations fit in. Every feeling I have about this will apparently fit the “inconvenience” header. Wrong.

“This may have caused”
Again, this is slighting the very real experience that I am actually having right now. If this didn’t affect me, you don’t really need to say you’re sorry. If it did affect me, it didn’t “may have caused”. It caused! Stop wavering.

So what’s the perfect way to say that you’re sorry? Well, if I could come up with such a generic way, then it would probably sound pretty hollow pretty fast. There’s just no relying on a stock answer for these situations, but I’ve found the number #1 principle that helps me: How would I feel about it?

The most important part of saying you’re sorry is to project some real empathy. If you can’t put yourself in your users’ shoes, then it’s going to out wrong. So I try to pick a tone that’s proportional to how I would feel about the outage. Which is very situational depending on the length of time, the response, the updates, etc.

Oh, one more thing. Never, ever call an outage an “availability event”.

We’re going to be doing a 37signals Live show on Thursday now that I’m in town. Please join us with all your questions and we’ll do our best to answer.

We’ve been rotating some headlines and subheads on the Highrise signup page to see if they have an effect on signups. Answer: They do, sometimes significantly.

The test

Here’s how the test works. We used Google Website Optimizer to randomly rotate five different headline and subhead combinations on the signup page. We’re measuring the number of clicks on any green “Sign Up” button. We’re not measuring any specific plan, just that “someone picked a paying plan.” We ran the test for 4000 page views. Why 4000? The numbers didn’t change much after about 3000 page views, so we stopped at 4000.

Note: We recognize that switching both the headline and the subhead isn’t quite as informative or scientific as just switching the headline or the subhead. We’re OK with this. This experiment was part learning how to use Google Website Optimzer, part curiosity, and part conversion research. More detailed tests will follow.

The original: Worst performer

This is the headline we launched with. The headline asked people to “Start a Highrise Account.” “30-day free trial” was centered bold in the subhead. The rest of the subhead highlighted that Highrise is a pay-as-you-go service and that there are no hidden fees.

The winner: 30% better conversion than the original

This combo put the emphasis on the 30-day free trial by making that the headline. The subhead let people know that signup was quick (less than 60 seconds). The second part of the subhead asked someone to “pick a plan.” This was also the only combo to feature an exclamation mark. Would be interesting to run this headline against itself — one with a period and one with an exclamation mark.

Second place: 27% better conversion than the original

This one also promoted the “30-day Free Trial” in the headline, but instead of highlighting signup speed, we highlighted other benefits: Pay as you go, no long term contracts, no hidden fees, no surprises.

Third place: 15% better conversion than the original

This combo went back to the original “Start a Highrise Account” headline, but tacked on “Today” at the end. The subhead was the same as the second place finisher: Pay as you go, no long term contracts, no hidden fees, no surprises.

Fourth place: 7% better conversion than the original

This combo featured the winning “30-day…” headline, but replaced plan information in the subhead with quick customer testimonials plus a link to the buzz page. Even though this was the only design with a link away from the signup page, it still performed better than the original design.

What did we learn

We have some theories, but we’re curious to hear from you. Why do you think these combinations finished the way they did? What other combinations would you like to see us try? What other tests would you like to see run on this page? How else do you think we could increase conversion?