The Biz

The word "usability" refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process. That's precisely what we aim to do with each quarterly service update.

As we push forward to our most recent set of feature updates, aptly called Spring '08, we're once again reaching out to you for your feedback, recommendations and feature requests.

This time, we've put together a brief survey to help us improve Voices.com and there's no opinion more valuable than yours!

Jakob Nielsen defines usability as "a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use".

Usability is defined by five quality components:

Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

Why Usability is Important

On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave.

There are plenty of other websites available, we understand this. Having you leave is the first line of defense should you encounter a difficulty.

Identifying Usability Issues Early

To identify a design's most important usability problems, putting together a small group of users has worked well for us in the past. Beta testing is a good way to identify usability issues early.

As you know, we're well past beta in terms of software development. Voices.com has been online for several years and generally received positive feedback on the design. However, it's a good practice to revisit the basics of usability.

Now, it's time to reach out to the entire community to ensure that you aren't running into issues. If you are, let us know.

How Changes Are Made at Voices.com

You may have noticed that from time to time, a link changes here, or a graphic there. This approach is known as "iterative design", and generally accepted as the best way to increase the quality of user experience.

Understand that we value your feedback, so please take a moment to complete the survey. Our team will work hard to apply your suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

"The customer is king" is one of the older cliches of modern business. While its never exactly false, the phrase usually pays lip service to the idea of customer experience rather than listening to feedback that results in change.

How does an online business make the most of customer feedback? One avenue to explore is the development of downloadable content, specifically audio, video and text resources that truly add value and give customers the experience they've asked for.

In today's business landscape, a customers are smart and have high expectations.

In the most basic form of customer experience, people have come to expect a seamless experience, regardless of which channel (live chat, telephone, email, online help) they choose to communicate with your organization. One-to-one communications with real, passionate people that work at a given company are the norm.

Blogs, podcasts and searchable FAQs are mandatory when providing knowledge about how to place an order or resolve a technical issue.

True that not everyone will be interested in subscribing to a daily blog post offering inspiring commentary, or education on-demand by means of free podcast, but there are those that will. And, it's those that do engage in the high-touch experience will be thankful that the resources were available.

For a small business, having the creative and technical know-how to create multimedia collateral is the first step. That's called production.

Next, a means of distributing the audio, video, text documents will be required in order to fulfill.

In practice, we've organized our resources in three categories which provide our customers with the opportunity to give us feedback.

AUDIO

All the podcasts are listed on a single page, with the most recent episode displayed with the podcast artwork, title and brief description of the show. By drilling deeper and clicking through to the individual episode, a customer can opt to subscribe to the podcast with iTunes.

Each episode includes show notes detailing what is being discusses during the podcast, as well as tags for quick reference and most importantly, a comment box giving the listener the chance to add their comments by typing in a few words.

VIDEO

The video area serves up tutorials and commercials. The tutorials walk you through how to use Voices.com, and on a more basic level, how to get started within the industry.

While the videos aren't much more than a narrated PowerPoint presentation, these embedded YouTube videos have been watched more than 50,000 in the past year alone.

TEXT

Aside from education and entertainment, most customers are looking for information in hopes of solving a specific problem. Enter the frequently asked questions. For this section of our "Help" page, we didn't just list the top 25 frequently asked questions, but rather developed an exhaustive knowledge base that we use both internally, and publish solutions, definitions, step-by-step guides on more than 500 topics within the field of voice-overs.

Customers can search by keyword and immediately see a list of matching solutions as well as a relevancy-match rating which suggests if the article has historically been helpful.

We commonly attach PDF documents such a voice-over rate sheets [pdf], user guides and other tip sheets to let users continue their experience offline.

As part of the feedback loop, customers can read if they found a specific solution helpful (a simple "Yes" or "No" works well) giving us some insight into what works, and which solutions need to be further researched or outright deleted.

WRAP-UP

Every business can add more value and meaning to their relationship with their customers. Creating, hosting and distributing online resources is a good place to start.

Remember to build-in a way to ask for and capture comments and other feedback from your customers. This information is extremely valuable as it will help you refine your materials and continue to be seen as one of the few online businesses that listens to their customers.

News: There was a relatively short outage on Amazon’s S3 storage service a short while ago. Voices.com uses Amazon to host audio demos, but not auditions or files uploaded for SurePay escrow transactions.

Amazon continues to have issues, for more information see the Amazon forum.

In short, there’s little we can do about this outage, however we are monitoring forums, discussion groups and news outlets to inform you once all our servers get back online.

As one person put it, "this is the equivalent of an unexpected snowstorm, it’s completely outside our control."

Some recommended actions for those suffering problems seeing cards or widgets:

a) trying control-shift-reload on the broken page
b) right-clicking on a broken widget, going to “This frame..” and clicking “reload this frame” (firefox only)
c) clearing your cache.

Any or all of these actions may help, but if Amazon’s service is still down at the time of reload, it will remain broken.

We'll keep you updated as the day progresses.

UPDATE

Good news! The Amazon S3 Outage was short lived. From all accounts, this issue has been resolved, and I'm pleased to report that all Voices.com audio files are back online.

Thanks for your understanding.

Photo by stevegarfield.

After the recent report that podcasting is on the rise in terms of both a larger listening audience and ad dollars spent on the medium, there's been significantly more chatter about how to start a podcast.

First and foremost, podcasting is about the content, not the technology. It's easy to get overwhelmed with technical details and special equipment, but it's really not that complicated.

Today, we're going to break it down into three simple steps; production, distribution and monetization.

PRODUCTION

Planning topics to discuss, possible guest interviews, and your show's length in advance will go a long way when producing a professional sounding podcast. Since you'll be recording your project in an almost live fashion, you will have the flexibility of going back and re-editing sections prior to committing your show as "podcast-ready".

Since nearly everyone has heard a radio program, you should expect that your listeners have grown accustomed to hearing material produced in a certain way. Here is a suggested framework for mapping out your production.

For best results, each podcast episode should be recorded at the same location using the same microphone and microphone positioning. This will create a consistent sound for your podcast episodes from week to week.

The best way to start your mix is think ahead with the end goal in mind. You most likely have a vision of what you want your finished podcast to sound like. Your goal is to maintain that sound from the beginning to the end of your podcast.

Balanced the volume levels of the voice-over(s), music and sound effects. You are now ready to export your podcast recording into an MP3, then upload the file to your web host for distribution.

DISTRIBUTION

Hosting

The purpose of web hosting is that you need somewhere to store your MP3 files, making them available to the world wide web. Look for a web host that will provide you with sufficient disk space for at least a years worth of podcasts. This would be 500MB of web server space.

A few good options include Libsyn and even WordPress has a podcasting solution now.

You can read more about podcast hosting options here.

Syndication

Inclusion in iTunes is a must as it's currently considered the default place to look for finding new podcasts. The Zune marketplace is growing quickly and Odeo is set to make a come back with it's relaunch within the next few months.

A service like Feedburner, which is owned by Google, is a smart way to ensure that your podcast RSS feed is formatted correctly for all the pod-catching software.

MONETIZATION

Once you've developed an audience and are getting some traction in terms of number of downloads per show, you can explore monetizing your podcast.

There are two primary ways that podcasters generate revenue from their podcasts, and they are ads and subscriptions.

Ads

Everyone loves free content and the no-cost element makes consuming to your podcast easy for new listeners and encourages word-of-mouth activity that's not typical of its paid counter part.

The ads could be audio ads embedded at either the beginning or end of your podcast, or ads known as inserstitials where the host of the podcast promotes a specific podcast.

Leo Laporte, host of This Week in Tech is currently running a campaign for Audible that is really more of a segment. Guests on the show share their favorite audiobooks and then they settle on the audiobook of the week. Naturally, it's very informal and comes across in the form of a book recommendation, rather than a sales pitch which is extremely effective.

Subscriptions

For more sought-after audio content such as training material, subscriptions are a great way for podcasters to monetize their programs.

The Project Management Prep Cast is a series of 80+ shows that prepare project managers to take an exam. It shares exactly what they need to know without all the irrelevant material. In short, this podcast is a time saver and maximizes the listening experience for project managers.

Similarly other training material can be packaged and sold a e-courses for distance learning, an approach to education that's been on the rise in the past decade.

Summary

Now that you've released your podcasts and are gaining a listenership, you can now take steps to measure and evaluate your success and take your podcast to the next level by expanding your audience.

There are plenty of great Internet marketing resources out there. Ebooks are great, as well as Internet marketing podcasts.

And, if you haven't yet, download the FREE Small Business Podcasting Kit.

This past weekend I was in Calgary, Canada's fastest growing city and current hot spot for the young and wealthy. Wealthy from the booming oil and gas industry that's known as the oil sands. You see, Calgary in many ways is the new business capital of Western Canada, and as we know that in business, time is money.

In my visits with friends and the opportunity to network with new people, I find it amazing how little time there to make a positive impression.

If you recall a few months ago, Voices.com ran the 60 Second Pitch contest in an effort to hone your business networking skills.

Only recently did I realize that an equally good skill is to be able to communicate exactly what you do in 5 to 10 seconds.

In those 5 seconds (likely just enough for a single sentence) your only goal is inspire a follow-up question from the person you're speaking with.

As an example, I was often asked, "Dave, where are you working now?" I'd reply by saying something like "I run this great Internet company, Voices.com", which would lead them into asking "what does Voices.com do?"

See how easy that was?

In your travels have you found an easy way to say what you do in 5 seconds or less?

Share your one-liners below.

I never stopped believing in the power of podcasting. Not only does audio does work in ways that video can't, but it's far more memorable. Just think, you can probably remember a favorite song from high school, a jingle from a decade ago or even a one-liner from a commercial that seemed to just stick.

In 2000, Fortune magazine said "Voice" was going to be one of the major trends of this decade. While most companies were building telecom applications, we built a marketplace for voice talent.

With the advent of podcasting and the mass adoption of the iPod, the voice industry has seen a surge in growth.

.: 13% of the US population have listened to a podcast (up from 11% in 2006)

.: Today, Techcrunch is reporting that eMarketer estimates that there was a 285% increase in size of the US podcast audience in 2007, a growth to 18.5 million.

In fact, I authored "24 Sources of Podcast Statistics, Podcasting Market Research and Broadcasting Industry Analysis", an extensive report that gives you a snapshot of the market including podcast usage, the podcasting audience, podcast demographics and the advertising market.

Just look at the Amazon / Audible deal and you'll see that there is indeed a massive industry that simply doesn't get the limelight it deserves.