Category Archives: Random Nonsense

Sometimes I just feel compelled to share nonsense, random thoughts, and sometimes just stuff I want to save

Fab.com – BEST unsubscribe process EVAR

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Fab.com's AWESOME unsubscribe page

Fab.com’s AWESOME unsubscribe page

The other day I got sick and tired of my inbox getting daily e-mails from Fab.com.  It’s a fine site, but I don’t need a daily e-mail from just about anyone. 1  Naturally, I sought out the unsubscribe link at the bottom of one of the daily e-mails and clicked.  What I found was not the bland “Please confirm this unsubscription action.” page, but rather a “Oops!  Perhaps we came on too strong!  Sorry about that, how about we dial down the crazy just a tad?  Would that do the trick?  Listen, baby, we can work this out.  Maybe just a few e-mails a week about things you might really REALLY like?”  I’ve included a screenshot above, I loved this page so much.  Heck, I loved it so much I closed the browser window and didn’t unsubscribe. 2

What I like about this page is that:

  1. It isn’t a robotic “confirm unsubscription” link, but a very human and personal sounding page.  Unsubscription pages are basically kiss-off pages where a company loses contact with a person.  In such cases, it’s easy to write off the user as a lost cause.  This doesn’t have to be the case.
  2. That personal sounding message really made me stop and actually re-think what I had come to that page to do.  Did I really want to unsubscribe?  Maybe I shouldn’t try to go cold turkey?  I really wouldn’t want to miss out on something amazing… 3
  3. I was presented with some very simple options for managing the e-mail frequency.  I could, with a single click, turn off whole swaths – or even whole days – worth of messages.  I’m guessing for many people, this might be the right way to tone back e-mails.  I think they could have gone farther with this – by adding a button where you could dial back the amount of e-mails.  As a tongue-in-cheek message, they could indicate the current level of e-mails were at an “11”4 and a javascript dial to bring it on down to a 1 or 2.
  4. The first full paragraph of the “opt out” message is particularly interesting.  Fab.com suggests that if you unsubscribe, they won’t be able to even e-mail you a receipt for an order.  Surely there is a middle ground between marketing e-mails and confirmation/order e-mails.  But, by eliminating the line entirely, they ensure someone who was once a customer of Fab.com is unlikely to unsubscribe since they’re more likely to order there again. 5  I’m willing to bet that Fab might have very slightly higher e-mail retention if they gave the option of turning off all-but-confirmation-style e-mails.  Even if that’s not the case, such a policy is likely to increase the retention of previous customers.

Here’s what I would do if I were over at Fab.com and helping6 in their e-mail marketing department:

  • Monitor and track the number of users who go to their unsubscribe pages and don’t unsubscribe.  If people don’t unsubscribe when they visit that page for the first time, I would make a point of having their e-mails dialed back, with as much as a 75% reduction effective immediately.  Later, this could theoretically be increased slowly.
  • Do some A/B split testing7 on whether a playful e-mail marketing dial has any effect on customer retention after they visit the unsubscribe page.
  • Do some A/B split testing on how the sheer number of e-mail messages sent affect the percentages of people hitting the unsubscribe links.  At the end of the day, you just don’t want a potential customer going to that page – nothing good can come of it.
    • Assuming there’s X daily sign-ups for the e-mail marketing, you’re going to want an unsubscribe rate of Y to be less than X.  If you never send a single e-mail it is very likely no one will unsubscribe.  On the other hand, if you’re pounding your customers multiple times an hour, you’re probably going to lose them all.  The optimal result for an e-mail marketing campaign is a difficult thing to pin down.  Success for a given e-mail isn’t necessarily a binary thing, but a sliding scale of success from “did not click unsubscribe,” to “did not mark as spam/junk”, to “opened e-mail,” to “visited site”, to “made a sale”, to “made a sale of an item featured in e-mail.”
    • Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn send reminders – usually reminding you about your friends and suggesting things you’ll want to see. 8  However, I probably don’t receive more than one e-mail a week from any of these sites.  If these older, more established, sites don’t e-mail me more than once a week, Fab.com should really re-think starting with a default of daily e-mails.

Please take all of the above with a grain of salt.  I’ve got a web based SaaS B2B business that would really benefit from more A/B testing and e-mail marketing, and I’m not doing it yet.  :)

  1. Well, except YOU!  I love getting YOUR e-mails!  They keep me warm at night! [↩]
  2. I finally did unsubscribe today, but that’s besides the point. [↩]
  3. Then again, I have yet to visit the site after my first visit some eight or nine months ago. [↩]
  4. After all, the user is at your unsubscribe page.  You stand a much better than even chance you’re going to lose them forever.  You might want to try to engage them a little [↩]
  5. More likely than, say, someone like me – who has never ordered from them. [↩]
  6. read: meddling [↩]
  7. That link goes to a post on this same site where I express my frustration with the WordPress ShrimpTest A/B testing plugin.  I’m sure it was a great plugin – but it hasn’t work with the latest versions of WordPress for some time.  I keep meaning to crack it open, poke a round, and fix it up a bit.  Alas, it has not been a priority among other items. [↩]
  8. I have friends? [↩]

The biggest inkjet printer ever

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Big Printer

Big Printer

The other day I wondered what people have done with their InkShields. 1 2  Then I got to wondering what people were doing to mount their InkShield printer heads and move them around.  Then I thought… hey!  It would be pretty awesome to attach an InkShield printer head to a Polargraph / DrawBot gondola.

I could see how an InkShield might improve a Polargraph.  You could theoretically have a small sensor to test the ink levels and pump more ink in from a larger reservoir – and never worry about a pen running out of ink again.

I could see how a Polargraph might improve an InkShield.  With a DrawBot string setup, you wouldn’t need a huge or expensive XY gantry – just a lot of string, two motors, and some other bits and bobs.

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  1. An InkShield is an Arduino shield that allows the Arduino to control an inkjet cartridge. [↩]
  2. Photo courtesy of iLEZ iLEZ [↩]

Driving Lessons from Google

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Google’s self-driving car

Google’s self-driving car

Last Monday I noticed a funny looking Google vehicle while driving back home from Palo Alto. 1  It was a white SUV with a big Google logo on the back passenger side door.  Traffic was heavy and I didn’t get to look at the vehicle very long.  I’ve seen the Google streetview car before – and this was not it.  The streetview car has a tall device mounted on the roof with what appears to be four cameras pointing forward, right, left, and back.  The vehicle I saw last Monday had a device the size of a small toaster mounted to the roof with four white pipes – and it was spinning very fast.

My guess was this was the Google self-driving car.  When I saw this article the following day, picturing the exact vehicle I saw, I was certain.

I have to admit, when I saw this vehicle I was tempted, for just a moment, to drive slightly recklessly and unpredictably to see what Google’s vehicle would do. 2

My superego won out over my id, and I just observed the progress of the Google self-driving vehicle.  I wish I had seen the vehicle earlier so that I could have observed more of the vehicle’s behavior from behind it.  Here’s what I saw:

  • I was in the #3 lane on I-680 North and the Google self-driving vehicle34  was in the #2 lane.  Traffic was heavy during the late-afternoon early-evening commute and even though they were in a faster lane, we were probably both going no more than about 35 MPH. 5 6
  • They must have left at least at least 5 car lengths worth of traveling distance in front of them.
  • I didn’t see them switch lanes – except to take an exit.
  • Interestingly, with the ebb and flow of traffic, the Google vehicle was at times far behind me and even a little ahead of me.
  • Even though Google as a corporation is a person, and Google was likely present in that vehicle, it did not drive in the HOV/carpool lane.

If Google can drive for 300,000 miles without an accident, including travel in heavy traffic, I suppose there’s a few lessons we can learn:

  • The ebb and flow of heavy traffic is enough to basically normalize any efforts to “get ahead,” so you might as well drive as slowly, conservatively, and with as much following distance as Google
  • When traffic is congested, it might help to be in a lane farthest from the on/off ramps7
  • Always carry two backup passenger/drivers in your vehicle
  1. Photo courtesy of Saad Faruque [↩]
  2. My guess – reduce my website’s PageRank and delete my Google+ page.  That’s worse than a ding on your driving record, right? [↩]
  3. Along with it’s two passengers. [↩]
  4. Prisoners?  How do you tell a self-driving vehicle you need to get out and pee? [↩]
  5. The traffic was so bad that my Android phone, with the Google Maps directions showing me the way back home, displayed the dreaded deep-red path that indicates congested traffic. [↩]
  6. I mention the Google Maps traffic congestion metric because I assume their vehicle was using the same information I was to make informed driving assessments. [↩]
  7. Google didn’t have three physical people present, so they couldn’t be in the fastest HOV/carpool lane [↩]

Wacky Realization #8565748

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Shadows

Shadows

I had a lot of driving to do this last week. 1  For work I drove about 11 hours total on two separate days combined.  Then, on Friday, I drove another 4 hours or so to visit some friends.   Thankfully, driving back Saturday was only 3 hours.

Driving back at around dusk on Saturday meant lots of glare, lots of long shadows.  And then it struck me…  There must come a point when the Earth rotates relative to the Sun such that an object on the surface of the earth could cast an infinitely long shadow.  And, really, this should happen twice a day.

Now I think I have a new mission.  I need to find someplace on our planet to stand such that either at sunset or sunrise I would cast an infinitely long shadow.

  1. Garry via Compfight [↩]

Has it really been that long?

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2012. calendarI just fired up OpenSCAD, my 3D design program of choice, and then it occurred to me that it’s been quite a while since I’ve used it.  A quick search for *.SCAD files on my hard drive revealed I haven’t updated any OpenSCAD documents since 5/13/2012. 1

That’s more than two months!  How can this be?!  I’ve got a pile of ideas stacking up.

How do you organize your ideas?  I created an e-mail address for myself “ideas@DOMAIN.com,” jot down the ideas, and send them to myself constantly.  If I have paper, I’ll sketch the idea out, take a picture, and e-mail the picture to this same address.  I think I probably send myself about two or three e-mails a day.

I can’t wait to jump back into OpenSCAD and work on some of these ideas!!!

  1. Photo courtesy of Asja Borošvia Compfight [↩]

Dear Google, this IS my name

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Dear Google,

Your user policies apparently require anyone using Google Plus to provide proof of an established online identity or have my Google Plus account deleted.  I have been using the name “MakerBlock” for two and a half years now.  I probably have as many friends and acquaintances who know me by this, my chosen name, as I have friends and acquaintances who know me by the arbitrary name chosen for me.  In fact, when it comes to an online identity, I’d say 99% of the people who know me don’t even know other names for me.

Here’s part of the problem with your online identify policies.  I’m not trying to be mysterious.  I’ve had online cyber stalkers before and, it is very likely I will again.  It’s actually becoming a more frequent problem for people with professions similar to mine. If this website, my Twitter account, or my Google Plus profile became associated with my given name, I’d probably need to soon abandon one or more of them.

Aside from safety issues, there are other totally legitimate reasons I’d want to use a non-given name for any of these accounts.  I do enjoy a little slice of anonymity and freedom that comes with not having the people I work with or for know about this website or online social networks.  It’s nice to have a place to vent about work, employer, and/or client frustrations.

In any case, why do you even care about my given name?  You know my IP address, which websites I own, you know where I live, probably all of my e-mail addresses.  You are in my phone, have my credit card number, and know where I work.  Why, for heaven’s sake, do you want to take this little piece away from me?

I have friends I would like to connect with through Google Plus, but associating Google Plus with my given name would essentially mean I wouldn’t be able to use Google Plus.  Your policy notice indicated that if I don’t appeal by 7/11/2012 you’ll delete my account.

MakerBlock IS my name and if I can’t use it online for Google Plus then I guess you need to delete my Google Plus data.

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The bad kind of downtime

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Twitter Fail WhaleFailin’

Personal downtime?  Good.

Server downtime?  Bad.

My other website (perpetually unlinked to) is sitting on a server which is apparently in Las Vegas, Nevada. 1 They also, apparently, had a power failure and then an air conditioning unit failure and shut it all down.  And, it’s going to be down for at least 4-5 hours.  I only have one website on that server, and it’s the only site I have where uptime really truly matters.

Oh, and about 50% of my e-mail comes through that site.

Ugh.

  1. Photo Credit: Ben Ho via Compfight [↩]

I don’t know why it bothers me, but it just does

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Catcopter?!! Where's the back button?!Catcopter?!!  Where’s the back button?!

Make Magazine posted that they would not be linking to the dead cat quadcopter. 1 That’s something I can get behind. 2  The problem is – I struggle to be able to articulate or even rationalize why I feel this way.

I think Make might have the same problem.  However, as one Make commenter points out, they’ve blogged and posted about animal taxidermy, even bizarre taxidermy before.  For some reason, the catcopter is just different – and I’m not sure why.  Is it less dignified for a cat to be spread-eagle/crucified on a quadcopter or for someone to make a snake/turtle or duck/mouse hybrid?  Is it more horrifying to see a hovering cat in an unnatural position or a parakeet wearing an impossibly small suit with feet/claws where the wings should be?

Whatever the reason, I just had a much stronger visceral reaction to the catcopter than to any of the above.  Quite separately from the tweets and blog posts yesterday a coworker forwarded me the link to the original blog post.  (He saw it posted to some website called… Facebook?)  His reaction was to laugh uncontrollably to see a hovering dead cat and he found the look on the cat’s face to be comical, whereas I found it horrifying.  He sent it to me because it involved a quadcopter and he thinks of me as a gadget kinda guy.34

Even if I was a gadget guy, I’m pretty sure I would never be a mount-a-dead-animal-on-a-robot kind of gadget guy.

  1. Photo Credit: Dino Abatzidis via Compfight [↩]
  2. Full disclosure:  I’m a cat person. [↩]
  3. Actually, I don’t think I’m a gadget kinda guy at all.  I don’t own a Blu-Ray player, an HD or flat screen TV, any kind of gaming system, a fancy stereo, watch, or iAnything.  I only got a new phone a few days ago when my last one of 2 years, a Motorola Droid aka Motorola Trusty Brick TM, gave up the ghost.   I might own four or five robots – but I’ve built every one of them. [↩]
  4. Tinkerer, Maker, Hacker – yes.  Gadget guy?  No. [↩]