the goose

Miller’s law states that

average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2

When I was in computers science school, this was pretty much the extent of our UX training.  Don’t put more than seven items in a menu and you’ll be fine.  It would probably be better off put in our business class.  Miller was a congnitive psychologist and his book on the limits of human congnition, was based on reasearch showing that, bascially, humans have limits on their ability to process information, and numbers.

This is a problem for me.  I’m trying to grow hundreds and thousands of customers, paying tens of euro a month for some service.  I can’t possibly keep each customer in mind and individually.  Also, there are hundreds of payments to keep track of – this needs to be simplified.  Most importantly, its hard to see the wood for the trees.  Some days, we only get 1 €18 payment in.  Its easy to freak out when something like that happens.  That is why we’ve been spending more time aggregating all the hundreads of transactions, from phone calls, to emails, to payments.  We’re fighting back against Miller’s law.

We built a pretty Minimum Viable CRM to gather the basic information.  It pretty much still works as described previously.  The only addition has been the ability to add notes by forwarding emails to a dropbox and the ability to initiate payments from the contacts home screen.

Thats not really what I’d like to blog about however.

On those €18 days, I tend to get a bit freaked out.  Because my brain is average and cannot really appreciate big numbers, percentages and more than 9 digits at a time, I need some way to ’see the wood for the trees’.   One of the most motivating (and therefore profitable) things about our CRM system is we are starting to have overview figures available to us.  How many calls were made this week, how many emails went out.  How many people upgraded.  Brian has a really nice post overviewing some of the fancier dashboards available online.

Aggregating live sales data down into average sale, average number of purchases per customer, conversion rate, really helps in the dark days.  Standing back, you can see how the whole thing comes together.  It makes the non-obvious, obvious.  Even though you might have had a terrible, day or week, having the total ‘broad view’ sales picture a click a way, can help you get back up and keep plugging away.  IMHO.