Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

MiiStation Stats or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love it All

It’s now been a little over 48 hours since the launch of miistation.com, and the response has been … active!  A few key news sites and portals picked up on this impulse project (big thank you to those who helped spread the word!), driving traffic and – to our surprise, customers! – to Make Mii.  Here are some links to sites covering the service:

• MetaFilter (thank you Gen)
• Digg, and Digg again (thanks Sam)
• Kotaku (thanks Sam)
• Destructoid
• WiiNintendo

Maybe I’ve been in Japan too long but boy, if there’s one thing I realized I almost forgot about many Americans, it’s how much they like to talk :)  With any service that asks for money there will be critics, and Make Mii was no exception. It was interesting to see the criticisms divided into two camps though; non-scientific estimates put about 80% of the negative comments towards potential customers, and the rest towards the provider.  There were of course a few humorous if not positive comments as well.  Here’s a sampling of snippets from the comments section of a number of news site:

The negative:

Take your $5 and get a life. (digg)

Fat and stupid people will buy stupid crap like this just so they can have an extra couple minutes to continue being fat and stupid. That’s all I can really think to explain this. (destructoid)

These people need to be killed. (destructoid)

That’s the dumbest shit I’ve heard all day. (destructoid)

Can we please please put together a mob and kill whoever’s responsible? I mean seriously,if anybody deserves a very tedious and severe ass whoppin’ it’s whoever created this travesty of a service. (destructoid)

(There must be something about a website named Destructoid that attracts such an angry crowd.)

Slightly more positive feedback:

I’m not lazy, but my wife and I lack any artistic talent whatsoever. Two hours and our collaborative efforts look nothing like us. This is a great idea, I might give it a go; especially after seeing The Office mii’s yesterday. It will make playing tennis fun again until another good game finally comes out. (kotaku)

and

My wife and I were discussing just such a venture! Drats. (kotaku)

(Is there something about a service such as Make Mii which appeals to the married demographic?)

And the humorous:

Ok, send me your wii code and I’ll do your portrait for $5. Heck, I don’t even need your picture. I’m that good. I’m a designer! (metafilter)

But the more interesting part for us in all of this – as this project wasn’t about making a mint, anyways – was to find habits and patterns in the ways people navigate a website, particularly one involving photos.  We’ve heard strange stories about Yahoo! being the number one search term in Google, and we’ve tried to study website usability issues through books like Prioritizing Web Usability, but in the end valuable knowledge and insight comes from seeing users in action first-hand.  (Ok I’ll admit, it’s nice to make a few bucks here and there :)

One tool which has helped considerably in analyzing these patterns is the awesome Crazy Egg.  Something we’ve learned in just the first 24 hours?  People love clicking on images!  The analysis for the gallery page shows this very clearly.  Every photo in the gallery – both Miis and originals – was clicked on in no small amount.  Perhaps it seems obvious to expect that clicking on a thumbnail-size image should produce a larger version, or at least additional data of some sort.  But the heat-map feature, which is definite eye-candy, showed something more curious for images on the top page.  The image depicting the 3rd step for getting a Mii made shows a Mii holding a bowling ball.  For some reason, this bowling ball – a round, blue object somewhat 3D looking – solicited mouse-clicks from curious visitors!  What the…?  Aside from the “Get Started” button below it, nothing suggests the image is clickable.  The heat-map for the gallery page showed clicks fairly scattered across the images … so why specifically on the ball?

Turns out we may have another “urinal fly” story on our hands.  A few months back, long before this project started, I was told a story about a European nation having problems with inebriated men creating a mess in public bathrooms.  The fix was simple – put a sticker of a fly in the urinal, and all your mess goes away.  It’s a tried and true product.  Okay, so we’re not dealing with drunken visitors urinating everywhere (though I have no way of knowing), but it’s quite amusing to find that many web-surfers, partly out of boredom and partly in search of some hidden gratification, have a tendency, subconscious or not, to click on round button-looking objects.  A lesson?  With so much distraction on the Internet and considering the difficulty in getting, let alone retaining, eyeballs, hide little nuggets in your site when possible, like in Tastyapps.  Giving a user the sense of discovery can go a long way (see, I’m sharing Tasty’s site with you!).

There’s much more interesting information we’re gathering as the influx of visitors – and buyers, miraculously – continues to grow.  But I’m going to hold off on actual figures for a bit longer.  Suffice to say, our (albeit already cheap) hosting costs have been covered, and the research is fascinating.