I enjoyed both pieces, but as a software product management professional, I was left feeling non-plussed, yet unsurprised, that in both articles and a couple dozen thoughtful reader comments, virtually nothing was said about the quality of the Groupon product, the user experience, and how these impact the company’s bottom line.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand why so many business analysts observe the symptom (user engagement is down; cost to acquire users is up; average user transaction amount is dropping; etc. etc.), but don’t ask, “what’s up with this user and this product, at the level of individual interaction; what has changed; what’s going on and why isn’t it working the way it seemed to before?”

Why Groupon may be faltering at the individual-user level

I’m a Groupon Boston early adopter. I bought my first Groupon on June 1, 2009, when the number of Boston subscribers was 2% of what it is today. That first summer, I bought a Groupon almost every week. They were awesome, by which I mean excellent prices for interesting places and activities that offered a high-quality product.

Reading the Groupon message board for individual deals, you could see that the feedback on Groupon merchants was very high, on average. Most message board complaints were about users not understanding how the product worked, rather than about the merchant or deal itself.

Fast forward 2 years: I still use Groupon, but I only buy a Groupon every few months now. Anecdotally, I can say my Groupon-using friends’ behavior has changed in similar ways. There are a few, easy-to-describe reasons for our reduced engagement.

What has changed abut Groupon?

1. I bought too many Groupons when I was a new user, and couldn’t use them all before they expired. That caused me to slow my purchasing down.

2. I discovered more recently that Groupon “expiration dates” are not based in reality. Most are “valid” for a year after purchase, but in Massachusetts (and most states), gift certificates are required to be honored much longer, like for 5-10 years. I found this out when I called Groupon to ask for a refund of an expired Groupon that I had not been able to use, due to merchant error. Now that I’m going back and using all my old, “expired,” Groupons, it’s silly to buy so many that I have a glut of them waiting to be used.

3. The trust, if not gone, is less. This experience knocked Groupon’s “trustworthiness score” down several points in my estimation. They spend a lot of engineering time to make sure I get prescient warnings about my soon-to-expire Groupons. I went from thinking that was an excellent, user-friendly and customer-respecting feature, to knowing that it is an intentionally misleading and BS-filled feature.

4. Groupons just aren’t what were! There used to be some pretty amazing merchants on Groupon. These days, it’s an overwhelming clutter of every neighborhood nail salon and sandwich shop, and hotels offering dubious deals that may be found anytime on Hotels.com etc. I liked Groupon much better when it was just one, high-quality daily deal–easy; helping me out in my busy life; less to think about. Now that the quality has cheapened, I really need to check out the merchant to be sure they are reliable. I was willing to pay more for reliably excellent Groupons–and they didn’t need to be super-targeted. I liked the variety! These days, the individual deal message boards are full of complaints about crummy merchants–often in the form of warnings to other users, and sometimes even in the form of incredulity that Groupon would “once again” run a deal with a merchant who so badly mangled a previous deal that previous purchasers have never been able to redeem their original deal.

4. Amount per purchase. Because I now have generally lower confidence in the quality of Groupon merchants, I am not usually willing to buy the more expensive Groupons (>$50). In fact, I’m even hesitant about the $20 Groupons. When purchasing a Groupon for a restaurant, one also now needs to take into account that alcohol is no longer included. Turns out, it has always been illegal for Groupon to include alcohol in their discounts, but for a while, they did it anyway (VC money doesn’t always equal a good product but it does usually mean due diligence; it’s hard to believe they didn’t know they were outside the law on this one). If a merchant seems to have a poor reputation, based on user feedback, I will either skip the deal, or maybe spend ten or fifteen bucks. But why bother paying $50 for a discount on a product that may well be lame when I can spend $50 full price at a lunch spot I already know and like.

5. Upshot: The caché is gone and the romance is over, but we can still hangout…

Expo passes are $50 with early bird pricing, but you can pick one up absolutely free if you grab it before March 31st! Just use Promo Code CPBBEB21 when you check out. The code is also good for 25% of of a conference pass at full price.

Here’s the link: http://www.e2conf.com/boston/share/?_mc=CPBBEB21.

The Enterprise 2.0 Expo will include leading companies, like Avaya, Cisco, and IBM, showcasing the latest in collaboration tools and services.

The main conference will feature thought leaders on topics including:

• Social Tools and Technology
• Culture
• Unified Communications
• Mobile
• Video
• Governance, Risk and Compliance
• Sales and Marketing
• People, Culture and Internal Communications (IC)
• Architecture
• eLearning
• Community Management
• Onboarding and Offboarding
• Social Supply Chain

Enterprise 2.0′s website says:

“Our theme for Boston is “building social business with Enterprise 2.0″ with an emphasis on how real customers are using Enterprise 2.0 to enable more efficient, agile and highly productive workforces. But more specifically, what are they key value propositions Enterprise 2.0 has to offer and how is it stacking up in those areas? The agenda will approach this goal holistically and include key steps towards successful Enterprise 2.0 initiatives including; strategy setting and execution, tools and platforms, technology foundations, user adoption, external community engagement and lastly analytics.”

“Businesses are under tremendous pressure to drive performance and efficiency and this year’s conference will zero in on those objectives with actionable steps you can use to bring value to your business.”

Don’t delay! Get your Free Expo Pass today with Promo Code CPBBEB21 at http://www.e2conf.com/boston/share/?_mc=CPBBEB21.

Dunkin’ Donuts has been trying to convert in-store customers to registered users. A month ago, I gave their set-up a try. The site looks great, but my experience was disappointing.

The Dunkin' Donuts account registration process looks attractive but doesn't work well.

I documented my experience via an annotated screenshot, and sent it off to the Dunkin’ Donuts support team (eDCP@ddnedc.com) with the following email:

“Dear Dunkin’ Donuts,

I am writing to let you know about a highly unsatisfactory interaction I had with your website this afternoon. I ate at a local DD store today, and afterward decided to fill out the online feedback survey at TellDunkin.com, since the staff at the store had been excellent.

The survey went fine, and at the end, I was prompted to sign up for the Dunkin’ perks program. What a user experience nightmare! No matter what I tried in order to sign up, including multiple web browsers, I could not register. Every email address I tried was rejected by the system as already being tied to an existing perks account.

I have taken the time to capture and annotate some screen images of the buggy processes I experienced today. I hope you will take the time to review them, and to respond to me with some concrete information about why this happened, and how it is being resolved.

Thank you in advance…”

I never heard anything back, but I now receive weekly emails from Dunkin’ Donuts encouraging me to complete my profile so that I can get the most out of the DD Perks program. I even made another fruitless attempt to get registered.

Unfortunately, the otherwise lively, attractive, well-designed Dunkin’ Donuts website belies a total system that, at least for me, was less than functional.

CNN is reporting the “situation” as breaking news. What happened? A hacker? A massive snafu? Rolling blackouts? In fact, this was planned maintenance. Every site will have some unavoidable, hopefully planned, downtime. While it’s rare for a site the size of Twitter to be down for all users during the middle of the day, apparently Twitter found it necessary today. Such outages are usually announced in advance, as was the case at Twitter today (http://status.twitter.com). As seen in the screen capture below, today’s site-wide outage was publicly announced yesterday. I suppose most users don’t read the Twitter Status page. Maybe a heads-up on the home page would have communicated the issue more effectively.

Unable to connect with anyone quickly, and not finding any direct connections via my LinkedIn account, my brother advised me to blog about it here on my site. I have since deleted the contents of that post, as the issue has now been addressed and I don’t see any positive purpose in leaving the post up.

Late this evening, Boston time, I was able to speak with PBworks’ PR chief, who was probably less than thrilled to be getting a dinnertime cellphone call from some chick on the East Coast wanting to tug his ear about a suspect UX encounter (every site has bugs; it’s not a big secret!). But he was gracious and attentive, and a few minutes later I got a call back from the founder of PBworks.

These guys took my concerns seriously, listened to my bug description, and got QA on it straight away. Basically just what you’d hope to find out about a big player–that they care about the individual users and about making the user experience safe, secure, and comfortable for all.

I feel confident that the issue I picked up on is being addressed and that my account information is safe in PBworks’ hands.

Now if only PBworks could handle all my non-profit fundraising itself, and not just the information management of it…