I received the following notification from a product I’d recently signed up for:
You saved 3 minutes this week by using Text Blaze.
Underwhelming, right?
I thought so, too.
Text Blaze is a nifty Chrome Extension that works like a keyboard shortcut but for autofilling your online content.
I was immediately attracted to this San Francisco-based startup after watching its pitch at YC21 Demo Day .
As soon as the presentation got over, I visited its website and signed up for its product. I immediately created text snippets for the following use cases:
- Repetitive texts I enter on different websites e.g. “*: This is the original question I answered. I’m repeating it to help me make sense of my answer in case it’s moved to / merged with some other question that I didn’t answer.” on Quora
- Special characters e.g. INR symbol ?
- Frequently used HTML code e.g. snippet for my customized Horizontal Line
.
In the past, I had these text snippets saved in a Word document and would copy-paste them to the web. While this worked, it was not very convenient. Which is why the product concept of Text Blaze resonated very strongly with me and triggered immediate action from my side.
Now, I simply type the shortcut on any webpage and Text Blaze fills out the snippet text on it e.g. If I type 
, Text Blaze fills out the Prediction Check text shown in the following exhibit.
I find the Text Blaze way very much more convenient.
Over time, I make regular use of its snippets in my everyday life. Text Blaze has become a MUST-HAVE product for me.
But you may not get that impression from the message in the startup’s latest email: “You saved 3 minutes this week”.
Three minutes during the entire week seems like peanuts and not worth talking about.
Text Blaze delivers convenience. I couldn’t find any direct quantitative measure for convenience. All metrics I found were proxies e.g.
- Time saved
- Improvement in ratings
- Increase in conversion rate.
While the proxies are not wrong, they fall way short of conveying the proximate value of convenience. Like how time saved, the proxy used by Text Blaze, is too lame to convey the true value of the product to me.
I wish there were a quantitative measure of convenience.
I consulted a couple of User Experience professionals and none of them is aware of any.
I take this opportunity to appeal to leaders of Digital Marketing / Conversion Rate Optimization firms to collaborate on developing a quantitative measure for convenience. Since adding convenience by removing friction is the raison d’être of UX, such a metric will elevate the appeal of their field to the next level.
