I signed up to Dopplr, a social networking site for travellers, a good long time ago. After the to-be-expected initial flurry of activity, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve logged into it. Most of those times were because a friend had noted that they were making a trip to Glasgow in the near future (it was the same friend on every occasion). To me, that’s not a particularly good amount of usage.

I think one of the biggest problems that Dopplr faced in its early (and critical) stage is that it is yet another social network at a time when people were starting to grow weary of signing up and amassing their friends again. Myspace and Bebo had already started to become less commonplace, and Facebook was taking over. Given that a lot of people viewed joining up to a general social network as a potential hassle, the chances of them joining up to a single-application social network was not going to happen.

That’s the lesson here: if you have only one particular domain of interest (whether travel, music, art, business etc), don’t try to build a social network around it. It takes a lot of people to get these things moving and by the very essence of operating in a niche, you are extremely unlikely to succeed in capturing much attention.

A better plan: let people use an existing social network to use your application. There’s much less friction that way. You only have to convince people that you’re worth their time, rather than having to do that _and_ convincing them to part with their time to help your application work.

Given the abundance of music in the modern age, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find ways of getting music out to interested parties using traditional means. Most musicians don’t have the money or backing for widespread advertising and almost certainly couldn’t capitalise on it even if they did. Just because you’ve got a lot of posters or other advertisments out in the world doesn’t mean anyone is actually going to go and listen to your record. There are simply too many people trying the same strategy for it to be effective.

Rather than trying to convince everyone to listen to you in the hope that some might (the mass-market, lots of media approach), it’s probably a lot more fruitful to try the targeted approach.

Start by figuring out which other artists that you’re like and whose fans might like you if they had a chance to listen. It’s important that at this stage that you’re honest about who you sound like (you can’t trick people) and that you aim for relatively small bands (I’ll explain why later).

Got a nice little list of small artists drawn up? Go to last.fm and make a list of people who really like them, probably a hundred or so fans at first. Last.fm is going to be a gold-mine for this because:

• It’s full of people who care enough about music to actually document who they listen to (albeit passively),
• You can separate the hardcore fans from the people who merely listen to them occasionally.

Remember when you’re picking names for your list that you’re not aiming to hit everyone who likes any of the people that you think you’re like. You want to be selective, picking people who REALLY like as many of those artists as possible.

Got a list of people? Now write a relatively personalised message to each one, explaining why you’re contacting them, who you’re like, and that you’re a small artist who would like a small amount of their time. Give away a bunch of your free tunes and thank them for your time. My bet is that if you’re ever going to grow your fan-base that doing it in this way, with people who are engaged with following similar music, will be your best bet.

Why aim for smaller bands? Sure, you might think you sound like Radiohead, but promoting yourself to that fanbase won’t work: they’re too big and have too many fans. Trying to reduce the signal to noise ratio (the number of engaged to passive fans) is going to be too hard to do and, honestly, most of them won’t care about your music.

Now, take this approach and generalise. Whatever it is you do, whether it’s making webcomics, movies, art, anything at all, connect with the most engaged parts of the community that are most likely to like what you do, and enter into as personal a conversation as you can manage. If you try this, you can probably grow a decent community over time. This is obviously not the full story of how things like this can work (you can’t do a one-time, one-way communication and expect to get a fan) but it’s a better starting point than most people have just now.

When I first wrote about my Spotify Premium sign-up, back in Spotify: Week One, I had intended to do a quick update on how that was panning out each week until I had decided which way to go on a more permanent sign-up. As you’ve seen, that’s not really panned out.

I like Spotify. I like how fantastic it is for finding new music, being able to delve into recommendations you’ve had without a massive outlay. Several times over the last few weeks someone has said they like an album and I’ve been listening to it within minutes. That, to me, is excellent and almost certainly a game-changer.

The problem is that I don’t actually use it all that much. Several restrictions (that are outside Spotify’s control) make it less valuable to me:

1. Not being able to use it in the background. This is a killer for me. I only use Spotify on my iPhone and not being able to switch out to Notes or Tweetie is a real problem, as I do that all the time. I don’t like having to plan my usage of these other apps around the music I’m listening to and vice-versa.
2. Lack of decent 3G signal. I work in the city centre with a decent enough 3G signal, but still can’t get a good enough signal to stream an entire album. Typically, I’ve made it half-way through an album before having to pause to let the data catch-up. That’s not very useful.

Like I say, for these issues, Spotify is not to blame but I don’t feel I can live with them just now. I’m somewhat sad to say that I have not continued my Premium subscription, but may try it again in the future (if I Jailbreak, for example).

Many financial experts will tell you that when you save for something that it should be goal-oriented i.e. that it should be for something in particular. There are a number of things in the course of, say, a year that are worth saving up for, where there are no pay-monthly options, or those options come with particularly punitive rates and fees (I’m thinking various forms of insurance, bills etc). There are also usually items that people actually want to save up for: new cars, new furniture, new televisions etc. Whatever they context, people often want to save amount X for item Y by date Z.

In an ideal world, we’d all be excellent planners. We’d be able to set aside the right amount of money each month without any prompting, never dipping into it for other things unless absolutely necessary. In our far from ideal world, we’re not all great budgeters. People frequently pay for item Y from the last source of funds available to them before date Z.

It occurs to me that saving accounts could be a lot smarter in order to facilitate these kinds of transactions. For starters, let users deal with savings in the terms that they actually think. Rather than just being big pots that you move your money into, they should allow you to create many smaller but specific pots: one for each of the items that you are saving up for, with a label so you know exactly what it is for. The savings account should also let you specify how much is needed in each of these pots and the date by which you will need to have reached your goal. That means that at any point in time, you can then see exactly how close you are to achieving your goal.

Let’s go further: give the option of figuring out exactly how much you need to save for each item each month in order to reach your goal on time. Allow the user to automatically transfer that money in each month.

By modelling a savings account in the way that it would actually be used, you can facilitate much better user interaction. Rather than having to work out how close they are to a series of goals over a number of different dates, the account does the work for them. That’s a good thing.

Every Monday several online retailers that I’ve previously used tell me about their one-day only sales. That’s fine by itself, they can try and sell me things if they like; I can always ignore them or block them if I don’t like what I’m getting.

One of these retailers in particular used to be very focused. As I only ever bought gaming-related items from them, they would send me only gaming related materials. To me, that’s the right way of marketing your wares: have a think about what the user actually wants and see if you’re right. For a good while, they had my attention. Given the focus they had put on their emails, I’d usually go and look at the games they had on sale.

Lately, though, it’s been a lot less focused. When I click through onto their website, I no longer have the option of looking at just the items on sale that relate to my interests (in this case, the games on consoles I own). No, instead, they have all the items dumped into 30-odd item pages, with around 6 pages. To me, this is exactly the wrong way of marketing your wares: you’ve gotten my attention and then blown it by expecting me to scour through several pages worth of things I’m not interested in, for one or two things I may be interested in. I may see the first page, but it becomes increasingly unlikely I’ll go any deeper.

This is a pretty common problem: forcing users to do work to find the information they want. While you can prompt them to look at some things YOU want them to see, you can’t divert their focus from the things THEY want to see. Instead, as designers, we should be enabling them to find the things they want, to slice and dice their view of the data you’re handing them however they like. If that means categorisation, fine. If that means building a good search function, then do it.

Failure to focus attention is failure to design. If you haven’t done a good job of designing your information flow then users will begin to dislike your system without realising why. At that point, you’ve lost their attention.