Net neutrality in the United States is under attack again. The FCC is planning to vote on whether to repeal net neutrality policies on Thursday, December 14. Before that day comes, it’s critical to let your representatives know that you want to keep the internet free and open as it is now.
What Is Net Neutrality?
Net neutrality is the principle that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally. With net neutrality in place, internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast and Verizon cannot give special treatment to certain kinds of traffic (e.g. slower speeds for Netflix or YouTube streams while faster speeds for their own streaming services).
Without net neutrality, ISPs would be free to create “package deals” or “slow lanes” for sites that didn’t pay for the privilege of being fast. For instance, your basic Comcast internet plan could include access to MSNBC’s website (which Comcast owns), but charge you $5/month extra to visit any other news site.
You’ll see promoted tweets and videos from ISPs claiming that they support net neutrality. Do not believe them! They are liars, and their actions show it.
How You Can Effortlessly Fight for Net Neutrality
Since the FCC, and not the public, is voting on this repeal, you can’t do anything directly.
However, you can still make your voice heard by contacting your members of Congress. Using the EFF’s simple tool, you just need to enter your address and it will generate a letter to your representatives for you. You can customize the letter if you like, but the standard one works too.
After you enter your address, you’ll need to provide your name, email address, salutation, and county in some cases. You may also need to specify a topic for the correspondence — telecommunications or something like it is your best bet.
Hopefully our representatives hear the overwhelming support in favor of net neutrality and take action to prevent it being repealed. If not, get ready for this:
How have you fought in favor of net neutrality? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Long-time Slashdot reader speedplane writes:
Yes, we’ve all heard that net neutrality is on its way out, and it seems NPR was able to snag one of the few (the only?) interview’s of Ajit Pai on its effect. Sadly, NPR’s Rachel Martin stuck to very broad and basic questions, and failed to press Pai on the change of policy. That said, it’s worth a listen. Pai insists that "We saw companies like Facebook, and Amazon and Google become global powerhouses precisely because we had light-touch rules that applied to this Internet. The Internet wasn’t broken in 2015 when these heavy-handed regulations were adopted, and once we remove them, I think we’ll continue to see the infrastructure investment that will benefit digital consumers and entrepreneurs alike… I’ve talked to a lot of companies that say, look, we want to be able to invest in these networks, especially in rural and low-income urban areas, but the more heavy-handed the regulations are, the less likely we can build a business case for doing it." But New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says he’s spent six months investigating "a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC’s notice and comment process" for net neutrality, adding that "the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence." (Nine requests over five months were ignored.) And now over 65,000 people have signed a new online petition at WhiteHouse.gov calling for the immediate removal of Ajit Pai as the FCC’s chairman, calling him "a threat to our freedoms."
Meanwhile, The Verge has compiled "a list of the lawmakers who voted to betray you," with each listing also including "how much money they received from the telecom industry in their most recent election cycle."
Being a Star Wars actor has perks. There’s the money, and the fame, and, of course, the elaborate Lego sets.
Props where props are due, someone at ELLE had a good idea: in this video, while giving an interview to the publication, Daisy Ridley sits at a table and builds an elaborate Lego Millennium Falcon, complete with a little Lego Rey.
Advertisement
Even in the face of the complexity of an unsolved Lego set (that may or may not be missing a piece), Ridley is unflappable, although her interviewing is a bit more efficient than her building. If you can’t afford Lego’s fancy Falcon set this holiday season, live through Daisy Ridley. She’s living it up for all of us.
I became a huge fan of customer journey mapping (CJM) the first time I was introduced to it. And after a few years of mapping, tweaking and presenting maps, my team and I started looking for other more exotic uses of this technique. The law of the instrument at its best, I suppose. Well, seek and ye shall find.
Customer journey mapping is a visualization technique that helps marketing specialists, user experience designers, and product and business owners see the journey people take when interacting with products and services. It is a great way to put on your customer’s shoes and see where your business fails to deliver a great user experience.
The way CJM works is pretty straightforward: You collect user research data, break down the entire funnel into steps (i.e. stages) and describe each stage from multiple points of view, such as your business goal, the customer’s goals, touchpoints (the very moments of interaction), customers expectations and pain points, their thoughts and feelings, etc. In the end, you have a table that looks something like this:
From this table, you can tell at which points customers are not happy, and you can come up with some ideas to improve the situation.
Сustomer journey mapping is mainly used to find flaws in the entire path of the user, but I was curious if there was some unconventional way to use this technique. Turns out there is, and here the story of how it found me.
It’s Not A Journey Map… Or Is It?
After reading Baremetrics CEO Josh Pigford’s brilliant article about an email campaign that Baremetrics created to reduce churn and convert customers, our team at UXPressia decided that we needed something similar for our app.
Fast-forward a few weeks, and we had a sequence of emails ready to fly to our users’ mailboxes. They looked somewhat like this:
A chain of printed emails that we hung on our board (Image: UXPressia) (View large version)
These printed emails stuck around on our whiteboard for a while. Then, one day, while we were having coffee after a long and tedious CJM workshop, one of the participants glanced at the emails still hanging on the board and asked, “What’s this journey map for, guys?”
“Oh no, that’s not a journey…” — I was about to say that this was not a journey map, but I suddenly stopped. Our guys looked at each other. “Are you thinking what I am thinking?” Yes, our email campaign had stages and our business goals, so it could be. After all, we made a tool for mapping customer journeys, so it was a great opportunity for us to put it to the test. The question was: Is it OK to just cut out one channel from the entire user journey and focus on it solely?
On the one hand, customer journey mapping is all about a holistic approach, so it isn’t entirely right to focus on just one channel. On the other hand, we want to follow the “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” principle from the agile manifesto.
Besides, we tried our best to make our emails as personal as possible. Today, email campaigns are no longer carpet-bombing monologues. They are more of ongoing conversations in which we try to bond with our users. And customer journey mapping is all about finding a better and more personal approach.
So, why not try?
Everyone in the room started pitching ideas. Someone noticed that we had our goals linked to every email. “If we could add our user goals and see if both goals match…” he said.
At this point, it was clear that this was going to become a map. But two CJM sessions on the same day? You have got to be kidding. We took a break and agreed to sleep on this idea.
Doubts, The First Draft
The next day, after rebooting our brains, we gathered in the same room and asked ourselves, “What is the problem we are trying to solve here?” And is there any problem in the first place?
Well, have you ever seen how email campaigns are stored, organized and manipulated? We had a Google Doc with text and pictures, and it was kind of fine, although it was not easy to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole campaign all at once.
A screenshot from Google Docs, where we built the initial email campaign (Image: UXPressia) (View large version)
Our campaign was not very long and complex. It was a sequence of about 12 emails in which we welcome our users, give them tips and do some upselling.
Now, imagine if you had a longer campaign consisting of 50 emails triggered at different moments. I remembered my friend telling me how his company had an enormous spreadsheet file linking to different sources with multiple emails.
And there is no way to evaluate each letter out of the context. Setting up your campaign in some tool like MailChimp or Intercom would make your campaign a lot less messy, but you would still have to open each email to see the details.
This is how our campaign looked in Intercom (Image: UXPressia) (View large version)
Turns out that hundreds of people working on email campaigns have terrible experiences themselves while crafting a better experience for others. Trying to unweave webs of interrelated email letters scattered over a spreadsheet would drive anyone crazy. This had to stop.
So, we rolled up our sleeves and drafted the first map using emails from our campaign.
The first draft of our email journey (Image: UXPressia) (View large version)
By mapping out the whole chain of emails on a single canvas, we could finally see everything in one place. Timing, email texts, business goals at each stage, as well as goals of each letter — it was all there. Having it all aligned in such a way instantly raised (and even answered) questions like:
“Are we bombarding our users with a number of emails from the same person? Would it be more appropriate to introduce someone new?”
“Is the timing correct and in line with the overall experience?”
And these questions were way easier to answer once we saw the whole picture. This alone was valuable enough because this clarity turned out to be a huge time-saver.
For example, shortly after the launch of our campaign, we noticed a pretty high unsubscribe rate from our emails. We tried to understand why this was happening and what we could do to fix it. Then, we looked at our email map and realized that the time gap between the first two emails was quite short, so we increased it. Guess what? The unsubscribe rate slowed down. This would have been more difficult to troubleshoot without the clear picture we had from customer journey mapping.
Remember I said we were trying to find a better and more personal approach? That’s what personas are best at. And having a well-researched persona when creating this email campaign was a game-changer for us.
By that time, we had already defined our customer personas, so it was no biggie to take each email and read it as if the reader was our persona.
A Brief Example
In one of our letters, we asked our users to tell us about themselves, so that we could make some suggestions and offer personalized help just in case. We expected them to drop us emails with some really short stories. So we “read” this email to our personas. Hey, picture a bunch of fellows reading to a poster on a wall. Bonkers!
Our team reading email to personas (Image: UXPressia) (View large version)
We tried to understand why this or that persona wouldn’t answer, and we realized that what we had in mind was not the way to go. What if our business-owner persona didn’t have time to sit there and compose emails? What could we offer to eliminate this objection? A quick call? Meh. Maybe. An online poll with predefined answers? Better!
So, using personas certainly had a great impact on our email campaign in the end.
Campaigns For Different Personas And A/B Tests
Example of a CJM for A/B tests or multiple personas (Image: UXPressia) (View large version)
By the way, what if you have multiple personas in your email campaign? That poor spreadsheet! Unless, again, you use customer journey mapping. In this case, we’d be able to easily map different letters to corresponding personas — and even find where these emails intersect!
Example
In her case study, one of our customers told us an interesting story. She was working on a complicated email campaign for multiple personas. The tricky part was to bring together all possible scenarios and see which email she should write for each specific case.
And she was quite amazed by how customer journey mapping saved her a lot of time and effort. Once all emails had been mapped out, it became apparent which letters repeated, so she could merge them into one.
This applies not only to scenarios like this one, but also to A/B tests. Imagine doing the same without customer journey mapping. Ugh! But wait, the best part is yet to come.
Email Campaign On CJM Steroids
And here is it. Once we started putting our campaign on CJM steroids, there was no going back. Customer journey mapping offers a ton of sections that we could use to take our email campaign to a whole new level. We tried some of them, and the results were quite surprising.
User Expectations and Goals
User goals on our email journey map (Image: UXPressia) (View large version)
Adding user goals and expectations to our map cocktail changed the way we saw our email campaign for the better. When sending an upsell email, is this what our user expects from us at that very moment? Does the goal of this letter match the goal of our customers?
By that moment, we had already rolled out our campaign, so we had some stats on hand. And adding these sections and answering these questions made us realize why the unsubscribe rate for some of our emails was so high. Speaking of which…
Key Performance Indicators and Other Metrics
KPI section in our email journey campaign (Image: UXPressia) (View large version)
Now, what if we had real statistics under each email? Seeing how this or that letter performed enabled us to instantly find where our campaign hit the dirt. It did require some maintenance, but in the end, it was totally worth all the effort.
Quote or User Response
Quote section in our email journey map (Image: UXPressia) (View large version)
Because we believe that email campaigns are conversations rather than monologues, we expect our users to say something back. Why not add some of their responses to our map? They could be from a single quote or an entire response. And based on their reactions, we were able to draw an…
Experience Graph
Experience graph based on KPI and user responses (Image: UXPressia) (View large version)
The experience graph made it so easy for us to see the whole flow of our email campaign. Tracking performance enabled us to see which emails failed most and which did the best job. For us, this was priceless.
Problems and Ideas
Finally, once we had identified problematic emails in our campaign, it was time to think about what caused fails and how we could improve their performance. We pitched some ideas and started testing them ASAP!
Wrapping Up
An email journey map we ended up with (Image: UXPressia) (View large version)
When we finally called it a day (or, rather, a night), everyone was so inspired. Using customer journey mapping to map our email campaign turned out to be not just a huge timesaver, but a well of insights, too. Not to mention that we were able to achieve a 40% open rate! Not a bad result in today’s world, where users develop email-blindness syndrome.
Of course, using CJM for mapping email campaigns will not work for all cases, but it was a lifesaver — and not just for us.
One of our customers transformed their existing email campaign the same way shortly after our debut. What they did was compare the email journey they created with the customer journey map they already had. Once they saw all emails on a single CJM canvas right next to the customer journey map, they got quite a few insights, like:
The first email in the campaign promoted the web application heavily right after a user downloaded the mobile app. The business goal at this stage was to decrease the number of users leaving the mobile app, but they were encouraging people to do just that!
The second email was pushing people towards providing more personal data. But from looking at the CJM as a whole, it was obvious that the timing was completely wrong: It happened at the stage when the majority of users were not yet ready to share anything — they simply hadn’t yet perceived any value from using the app.
The third email promoted the blog, which indeed had some great content. But the content was focused on just two personas, whereas the email campaign was sent to everyone. The majority of users were obviously not interested, so they kept unsubscribing.
These were not all of the insights they had, but even with these, it was pretty clear that the campaign needed some rethinking. Even more importantly, they already knew what had to be changed.
Anyway, here are some ideas about when transforming an email campaign into an email journey map will work for you as well:
You are working on a massive email campaign that you want to be consistent and well crafted as much as sympathetic and humane.
You believe that your team should try CJM, but people hesitate to engage because of the time commitment and unclear value. Seeing how it works for one channel would be less time-consuming and might help to convince your team to try a full-blown customer journey map after all.
You want to present campaign content to clients or stakeholders (which would be way more attractive than the bunch of separate files mentioned before).
The worst-case scenario here is that you would put your emails in order and save a lot of time in the long run.
Plus, you can do the same thing not just with emails but with virtually anything, be it call scripts for support or sales, alongside postal or face-to-face interactions.
Oh, and one more thing. We created a free template you can use to start mapping your email journey now! It has a predefined persona and all the sections we used in our own journey map.
But what about you? Have you tried using CJM for email campaigns? What insights can you share? Do you know of any unusual uses of CJM? Share your ideas in comments!
Today’s Photo Of The Day is from Norway. The Norwegian Home Guard (in Norwegian “Heimevernet” or just “HV” for short) works as a rapid mobilization force in the Norwegian military. It was founded in1946 and has land, sea and air defense units, with volunteers and conscript personnel with backgrounds from all branches. The Norwegian Armed […]
The FCC may be bent on killing net neutrality, but that doesn’t mean you have to stay silent or offer mostly symbolic protests. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a web tool that makes it easy to ask your members of Congress to fight for an open internet. All you have to do us plug in your address, personalize your message (if you like) and hit "submit" — your representatives and senators will receive your concerns and hopefully do something about it.
The FCC is likely to vote in favor of gutting protections on December 14th given its current composition and refusal to investigate anti-neutrality spam, but there’s a hope that Congress might raise the issue of defending net neutrality and even implement some safeguards. If nothing else, this puts your opposition to the FCC’s moves on the record. Politicians need to know how you feel if they’re going to act on your behalf, after all.
Doctor: The MRI shows unusual activity in the laziness region of your brain. Normally, I would recommend brain surgery, but your brain also registers an unusually high level of happiness. Wally: So… how do we handle this? Doctor: I’m going to operate on myself to make me more like you.
In some cities, the most common electric vehicles are likely to be two-wheelers like bikes and motorcycles. But cities aren’t really designed for them — you have to compete with cars on the road and at charging stations. BMW and Tongji University think they can do better: they’ve developed a concept, Vision E3 Way, that gives e-bike riders their own roads. The paths would be safer and reduce traffic congestion, as you might expect, but they’d also take advantage of the electric nature of the vehicles to make two-wheel riding more accessible.
The routes would typically sit above regular roads, and would be decidedly cozier thanks to covering and a cooling system driven by purified rainwater. An automatic speed limit (in the concept, about 15.5MPH) and AI-driven traffic management would prevent the faster vehicles from crashing into scooters. And you might not even need to own a machine to use it — BMW envisions a rental system where you’d pick up a bike at an access point if you need to get across town in a hurry.
You won’t necessarily see something like this in markets where cars dominate, like North America. A system like Vision E3 Way could be very useful in countries like China, however. It’s not just that many more people ride bikes in these areas — it’s that high population densities could necessitate separate, automated roads to keep traffic flowing. The challenge is getting cities to take up the idea. Even if these roadways don’t cost much to build, it’s no mean feat to significantly alter the urban landscape.
Every day we get closer to The Last Jedi, more and more snippets of footage come out. But today, dear reader, instead of delightful shots of Poe Dameron drifting in an X-Wing or Luke Skywalker emotionally entering the Millennium Falcon, we have something sinister. Something cruel.
DON’T HIT THE PORG, CHEWIE! Ever since the fluffly little darlings wormed their way into hearts, we’ve been excited for the Chewbacca/Porg relationship. This little guy’s feathers were even designed to make him look a little like Chewie! And yet, the poor porg is swept aside, all so Chewbacca can do something like not make the spaceship they’re in crash or save the day or whatever Wookiee co-pilots do.
So rude. I thought better of you, Chewbacca, I really did.
If you are an avid reader and are always looking for a new ebook to check out, the online options can feel limited. But, if you know where to look, you can snag free ebooks to read online, download to your computer, or transfer to your Kindle.
from the most well-known authors, these four websites have you covered. Plus, you can take a look at other genres besides the classics like humor, thriller, science fiction, or romance. So, take a seat in your favorite chair, grab your laptop, and prepare to immerse yourself in a wonderful story.
Planet eBook is an attractive site that offers classic literature for free. Some books are out of copyright and are offered to you in an entirely legal fashion. But, be sure to click the Copyright Notice link on the ebook details page for any restrictions on that particular book.
Right now, Planet eBook offers just over 80 books to their readers, all of which have been carefully selected. True, you will not have the buffet of thousands that you may find on other sites, but you can rest assured that each and every piece of writing on Planet eBook is of outstanding quality.
All books on the site can be downloaded as a PDF for reading at any time. So, you can enjoy titles like Wuthering Heights, A Tale of Two Cities, or Great Expectations without distractions. Again, the selection may not be enormous on Planet eBook; however, if you want a quick and easy way to find the best of best when it comes to the classics, this site delivers.
ManyBooks works in the same way as Planet eBook, offering classic literature for free. However, where Planet eBook presents a carefully selected array of literature, ManyBooks handles everything in bulk (as the name truthfully implies).
The Best Ebook Reader: 7 Models Compared An ebook reader is a must-have item for book lovers. You can carry thousands of books in your pocket and recharge once a month. But what’s the best ebook reader out there? Read More
. Plus, you can read online or download your pick as a PDF.
To find a book, you can browse by genre, author, title, category, or language. You can also look through the popular selections, the site’s recommendations, and featured authors.
There is also a User’s Public Bookshelves area where you can look at books collected by others, which is a great way to see what ManyBooks readers like. Just click Recommendations on the left and then scroll down to User’s Public Bookshelves.
As a bonus, ManyBooks provides discounted ebooks and you can subscribe to their email newsletter for deals right to your inbox. Or, you can subscribe to the site’s RSS feed for updates on new titles. ManyBooks is a solid way to find an entertaining classic or author you want to explore.
Classic Reader resides somewhere between Planet eBook and ManyBooks. It offers a large selection of fiction, non-fiction, drama, and young reader options. You can also browse through the poetry and short story sections for some light reading.
Once you choose a book, you can read it online. Since the site offers a basic appearance, this makes reading those books you choose a nice, unobtrusive experience. Each book’s table of contents makes it easy to pick up on the chapter you left off when reading online.
And, if you prefer to download a book, you have that option, but only if you sign up for a free account.
Classic Reader may not have as many titles as some other sites, with just under 4,000 at the time of writing. However, you can still enjoy a classic from Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, or H.G. Wells. And, if you have a favorite author, you can view all ebooks available from that author as well as read their biography. Overall, Classic Reader may not be the prettiest of this bunch, but it is definitely worth your time.
With over 54,000 free ebooks, you will definitely find a good read on the Project Gutenberg site. You can search for a specific title, look at recently added books, or check out the Top 100. If you want to browse through offline options, for example, if you have a slow internet connection, the site offers a catalog specific to those types of books.
There are a few things that make Project Gutenberg stand out from other free ebook sites. First, you can either read the books online, with a reader like Kindle, or download them to read later. Second, you can send the books to Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive with the click of a button.
Third, you can access the mobile site using the link or QR code provided on the main page. So, reading on your mobile device is perfect for work breaks or bus rides. Finally, if you sign up for a free membership, you can bookmark those ebooks you are reading online, which is handy for picking up right where you leave off.
Project Gutenberg provides select books in a variety of languages from Chinese to Yiddish and categories from animals to technology. For a huge collection, a number of reading avenues, and a few little extras, check out Project Gutenberg.
How to Find Infinite Free Kindle Books to Read Here are 10 awesome websites that will point you towards infinite free Kindle books. If you are ready to curl up with a new book, bookmark these sites to save yourself some money. Read More
What is your personal preference when it comes to ebooks? Are you in love with romance, always up for an adventure, or like to go back in time with a classic? Please share your thoughts with us in the comments below and let us know your most favorite book of all time!