Archive for November, 2007

Phenomenal response to Catalog Choice Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 by Matt

HARDLY A MONTH HAS PASSED since we announced the launch of Catalog Choice, a website that MakaluMedia was chosen to design and develop by an amazing team of funding and supporting organizations, and the response to the site has been extraordinary.

In less than 25 days, more than 100,000 users have registered, opting out of more than 800,000 catalogs. And for us, as user experience designers and product developers, one of the most exciting statistics is the near 50% conversion ratio, meaning that nearly one out of every two visitors to the site has registered.

Update November 21, 2007: We are about at the one month point now, and have over 180,000 users, opting out of nearly two million catalogs!.

Catalog Choice has also been featured on the national television networks CNN, NBC and ABC (see videos below), and has been well received in the press and blogosphere:

The success of the site has served to validate much of our beliefs regarding user experience design. Some of principles that stand out include:

Simple is better. Less is more.
A successful user experience derives from near obsessive attention to detail.
Don’t outsource your user support. On the contrary, put your best people on it. People love getting a personal response from somebody that knows what they’re talking about. You’ll reap the benefits in trust, patience and tremendous value in terms of feedback to the process of continually improving the user experience.

We’ve also learned a wealth about effectively operating a high-volume Ruby on Rails application. (On one particular day, the ABC “Good Morning America” spot was the very top news article on Yahoo News, and we saw 20,000 new user registrations in a period of four hours.) Having a great hosting partner helps a lot!

Finally, this project is proof positive that talented and motivated people, supported by an effective agile process and paying a lot of attention to clear communications, can build a successful project, even if separated great distances geographically. Our Catalog Choice team includes MakaluMedia staff located in the United States, Germany, Spain and Ireland!

And with that, we bring this article to a close. Our next project milestones include one million catalog opt-outs, and hopefully down the road one millions users! And remember, if you’re located in the US, and ready to simplify your life while helping the environment, head on over to Catalog Choice and sign up for a free account:

http://www.catalogchoice.org

Be sure to check out the following video clips.