smorgasbord-design : usability

New Blog: Official Transition

2008-12-16T12:42:00.004Z

I've moved to WordPress and the new blog is at www.smorgasbord-design.co.uk the feed is at: http://smorgasborddesign.wordpress.com/feed/ and the FeedBurner version is

smorgasbord-design is moving

2008-03-31T13:35:00.003+01:00

I'm currently BETA (ahem) testing the new blog which will mean that this version will be migrating. I'll be re-directing the www.smorgasbord-design.co.uk address and the feed here will cease to be updated in the near future. In the meantime, take a look at this clever little robot. I don't normally post stuff like this so be happy.

And thanks to indexed for today's image.

A Perspective on 4 Years of Experience in Insurance

2008-03-27T12:57:00.004Z

Three months isn't a long time really, a quick Google reveals that three months is a reasonable amount of time to give a new idea a chance, to assess a situation, product deployment or the effect of an event. It seems that three months is a de facto minimum for gaining perspective.

In that regard I'm quite pleased to be writing this blog entry three months on from leaving The Company. The Company can now be revealed as Norwich Union Insurance. I worked there for four years, commuting (painfully) from Ipswich, then Chelmsford and finally spending my last 6 months walking to work from a kind friend's flat. In that time I progressed from graduate scheme new-boy, through customer experience consultant to Usability and Analytics manager and final to User Experience Architect. I then felt, and as it happens it was kind-of mutual, that it was time to move on.

I have a very high opinion for what NU are trying to acheive. The old way of selling insurance has gone, a new way - pile it high and sell it cheap online, has also begun to die and the newest way - bring back the advice, quality and protection, is emerging. Unfortunately all this has meant that the back-end systems and processes have had to adapt fast and when you're rooted in 18th Century Norwich rather than the agile origins of telephone insurance in Croydon (Direct Line) this is easier said than done. At the end of the day, re-skinning a website, courting the increasingly highwayman-like aggregators and affiliates, and ultimately making your volume product unprofitable was not going to cut it.

But: The systems are changing, the processes are being fixed by a team of genuinely visionary people that exist from bottom to top in the organisation and this takes time. A major internal IT project has, for example, crippled the agility of the business for the last two years and sucked every Exceed developer out of Europe but - coming out the other side - NU will be better for it.

Customers want, and expect today, to be able to see why their insurance is as expensive as it is, to change it at will - add drivers, upgrade courtesy cars, change addresses when they want. More importantly though they want to know that when they need their cover that claims will be dealt with courteously and efficiently. Sadly, despite countless initiatives and a huge amount of desire and investment, this still isn't working. Whilst TV appearances for the fraud team create great frothy PR, this dissolves away quickly and what is left behind is the kind of raw, unfettered and persistent displeasure visible on The Review Centre.

They're still listening, I know, and initiatives like Zuzzid and a thoughtful consolidation and partial u-turn on the use of Asian contact centres for the most difficult service requirements will, ultimately, help. A new dawn is coming (almost certainly with a re-brand and the final sweeping-aside of the regional marque) and with that I hope for my passionate friends and former colleagues that the company returns to winnning ways.

For me, my life has re-located to london, my role to one of the UK's brightest digital agencies and I look forward to blogging more about Ux, IA and the myriad of socio-cultural ephemera that has always interested me and burns that little bit brighter in the world's most creative city.

It's just another Web2.0 clone

2008-03-26T15:28:00.001Z

FOWD November 2007

From: elliotjaystocks, 4 months ago

| View | Upload your own

'Destroy The Web 2.0 Look': a presentation by Elliot Jay Stocks at Future of Web Design, November 2007

SlideShare Link

Unwanted Social Exposure

2007-10-27T17:36:00.000+01:00

The volcanic growth of Facebook has not gone unnoticed by people very used to being in the public eye. Prince William is rumoured to have a profile somewhere on the site, albeit under a nom de plume, various BBC journos and media celebrities can also be found interacting with their public, updating their status and sending each other fish for their aquariums. Whilst such individuals may have come to accept their images being in the public domain, many of us more insignificant mortals find ourselves increasing losing control of our online identity.

Facebook has a lauded interface for restricting privacy. One can customise their profile so that only their closest friends can view their photos, post on their wall and find out what books they have just read. This control even goes so far as to hide your Facebook presence from particular members.

Where these controls come unstuck is in the sensitive area of posting photos; a paradigm not restricted to Facebook of course. It is perfectly possible for your next door neighbour to post a picture of you on their profile featuring you sunbathing in your garden in the kind of bikini that would make Jordan blush. They can then tag this photo and share it with the rest of your street. Worse than that, there is nothing to stop someone defaming your character on their wall, something that must happen with monotonous regularity amongst Facebook’s younger user-base.

That there is nothing on Facebook to stop these actions occurring is not the end of the story. Fortunately the British and European legal system is, for once, moving quickly to adapt. Fuelled perhaps by the thought of celebrity action and the associated fees, lawyers are lining up to unleash legislation not just on the operators of such sites but on the users themselves. Of course, under such circumstance you can bet that Facebook would be defended and a recent article by Ashley Hurst (a member of the media litigation team at Olswang) suggested that e-commerce law could provide that such operations are simply hosts of defamatory material and it is the users that are responsible. Now that’s not particularly sociable of them.

It’s at times like these that we’d all do well to stop inviting our friends to become pirates and tickling vibrating hamsters and spend some time reading through the legals on the sites instead. When we sign up we’re reminded that “content that Facebook deems to be harmful, threatening, unlawful … [etc] “ should not be uploaded or transmitted. Of course, such catch-all terms and conditions can only be invoked to remove content when it has been spotted and objected-to. In the Web2.0 era this could well mean that the image has been circulated or the statement copy and pasted widely before action is finally taken at the source. The fact remains that users only have control over the content that they post and, this is often overlooked, this extends to people who have so far resisted the urge to join.

Facebook recently announced (although you may have missed it) that profiles were to become searchable from Google. Although this can be switched off by users, once again you cannot control whether your ex-girlfriend’s profile can be uncovered by your prospective girlfriend’s Google search and her bitter rants about your sexual prowess poured over and dissected at will.

All this only serves to fuel Facebook’s near-exponential growth. The only defence is ‘attack’, or at least vigilance. If you’re not a member you’ll not know what people are posting and saying about you. Best you get yourself signed up, who knows you might even uncover something delightfully salacious yourself.

Buyers aren't always users

2007-10-24T17:44:00.000+01:00

At The Company we've just been introduced to a new expenses system. This system for raising personal and business expenses has been deployed to replace the ageing paper-orientated process that existed before it. The old system necessitated the completion of an Excel sheet which was then printed, receipts attached and sent to Accounts Payable. The problem was that these were invariably untraceable. However, as an end user-experience it was pretty straightforward: use the most up-to-date template, complete, print, sign and send.

The new version is horrendous. This clunky piece of enterprise software (HRMS) sits on a preexisting bit of Oracle kit which manages a host of HR operations. Everything from logging an absence to checking your payslip and updating emergency contacts. For reasons of confidentiality I can't show you screens sadly but suffice to say it is a complete dog's dinner with some of the worst usability I have ever encountered. What's more, the launch of the new expenses system was preceded by a compulsory Flash-based training program. What's that old adage "if it needs instructions, it doesn't work" ?

I'm not denying that the old system needed reform to ensure service levels, audit and security were improved but at the expense of the end user?

What this exposed was the general piss-poor quality of enterprise solutions. Jason at 37signals' blog, Signal vs. Noise, posted a timely article today based on Khoi Vinh's Subtraction piece which highlights and tries to explain some of the failures of the expensive solutions. Essentially the suggestion is that it's not the end-users that are specifying, buying or deploying this junk, it's aspirational senior management who have been persuaded by a round of golf, a night at Spearmint Rhino and a good price to buy what's on offer.

I really wish you, and the people that buy this stuff, could actually see the end result. In a tight, cost and efficiency environment where every member of staff needs to behave as if the business was their own it would do these buyers good to understand the value of their purchase; As Jason so succinctly puts it: "There’s no camouflaging value when the buyer is the user".

(Oh, and we're forced to use Lotus Notes too, but don't get me started on that.)

The Pervasiveness of the Web

2007-10-23T19:29:00.000+01:00

Interface orientated blog Functioning Form have used a recent NY Times article to highlight a seep of web-orientated design onto traditional media. Observing rolling news channels and interactive TV offerings certainly shows a similarity with web layout. And not neccessarily for the better. Do we, for example, really benefit from ticking news items below the moving image? Well possibly we do but once you start adding weather data, traffic reports, time and date information, the channel and show identities and possibly a picture-in-picture you have really crowded the real estate.

Where these screens work are in silent environments. The gym, a foyer or reception or at a transport terminus (Liverpool Street sation, London pictured) where sound is muted. Then the moving image becomes semi redundant and the surrounding data (clutter) becomes the focus.

By contrast, the traditional viewer who is able to hear the sound is increasingly distracted, particularly if the story is cognitively challenging. Part of the explanation here may be due to the evolutionary psychology and the way we perceive the visual field. Our high resolution focus is limited to small cone (foveal vision) - items on the periphery (rod cells) of our vision are in low resolution and ignored until they move. Useful for spotting a predator sneaking up on you when you're focusssed elsewhere, also particularly distracting if a peripheral banner ad is blinking on a website or if a news ticker is scrolling on a TV screen. This triage of information is something we should respect, not attempt to interrupt for attention*.

Anyway, back to the main point. High-contrast visual displays and interactive TV programming is apeing the web. Even newspapers are starting to look more web like as online newspapers become less print-like. The trouble is, some of the bad interface stuff is making its way onto this old media.

* - caveat: I realise that distant high-contrast displays like those at train stations are sufficiently far from us so as not to be as profoundly affected by the strength-weakness of foveal and peripheral vision as you might a TV or TFT screen, indulge me.

Unwrapping Apple's Packaging Moments of Truth

2007-10-23T09:15:00.000+01:00

Regular readers (if there are any left after this ridiculous hiatus) will know that despite my vocational specialism in web user experience, my desire to comment on an array of customer experience issues is a recurring theme of this blog. Something which I have never touched upon until now is packaging design.

Inspired by a Design Critique podcast I wanted readers to consider the experience of owning rather than consuming a product. More often than not User Experience Architects (UEAs) like me will pour insight and design into the choosing and purchasing of a product or service. We sometimes refer to these as ‘moments of truth’. Experience design shouldn’t stop there though, because the experience itself doesn’t.

In the podcast they discuss the packaging of an iPod (the 1st generation Nano as it happens) which I also own. Where this resonates with me is the fact that I didn’t purchase this product, it was a Christmas gift and as such I didn’t have the purchase experience; my first interaction with the product was to unwrap the box. At this point I’ll skip to the end; the box for my Nano sits proudly on my shelf. I haven’t retained the box for some perfunctory purpose to store the Nano again when I come to move house. I don’t keep it so that I can put the Nano away every night either. I keep it because, in itself, it’s a beautiful little piece of design that is worthy of display.

That morning when I received the gift I remember distinctly being impressed with the occasion of opening the packing. The box opens like a book, or perhaps a limited edition CD, the iPod was recessed into the box and encased in a cellophane wrapper so I could see it clearly and see its virginal newness. The tape that stuck the cellophane wrappers down was printed in an established Apple typeface, the whole package (and I use the word literally and metaphorically) was an example of minimalism and lean design. It almost seemed a shame to ruin it by actually getting the iPod out. However, once having done so it remained intact and thus it remains on my shelf.

And I’m not the only one who was impressed. All over the web you’ll find blog posts, flickr photosets and suchlike documenting the arrival and unpacking of their iPods and other Apple consumables. Apple are thinking experientially about ownership, about the loyalty that owning one of their items creates. Hence why so many of their consumers are brand advocates. This is a wonderful example of marketing extending into ownership to create or strengthen a positive opinion of the brand.

Maybe this is not by design, but by accident. Maybe it’s the result of over-design; a marketing and design team that just don’t know when to stop? Who knows how much this packaging actually costs Apple. Is it the most cost-efficient packaging? Does it protect the item better than the usual bubble wrap and polystyrene? Is it environmentally ethical? To answer some of those questions we might well look at the 2nd generation Nano. This came packaged in a polycarbonate case, reducing the overall size of the box but retaining two core factors – clarity (the item was visible and did not require a cover photo - the item’s form factor was immediately obvious) and secondly, durability (the Nano was safely surrounded by shatterproof plastic). I can’t comment on the environmental aspects sadly but I’m sure Apple’s site has the answers.

Now this may seem a bit vacuous, after all we’re talking about the box for an MP3 player, but perhaps the type of device actually goes some way to explaining the effort Apple have gone to. Would you keep the packaging of, say, a new razor, if it was stylishly designed? Almost certainly not. Your MP3 player is not just a device to be used to perform a needed function, it is more personal than that. It reflects your style and your taste, it’s a personal accessory, a luxury item, a nice-to-have. Of course size helps here too – your new 50” Plasma might say similar things about your success and style but it’s a bit more impractical to store the box for that on the shelf. We need to look at items that compare in terms of cost, size and personal association, and for items that are similar we nevertheless find a dearth in experiential packaging.

I find it’s always worth putting a comparison alongside to illustrate the point even more clearly. Consider an alternative packaging style for consumer electronics, the clamshell. These hugely frustrating ultra-sonically sealed packages have no clear opening and require the consumer to cut them open. These are borne out of a fear from the manufacturer that their item, a highly portable and valuable product, will be divorced from its packaging and stolen. Their products are less popular and compelling than the iPod, Apple can afford to solve the theft problem not by introducing a clamshell but by ensuring customers have to ask for their product, they’re generally not left out on the shelf. Asking for the product only adds to the sense of luxury and exclusivity. Once again Apple have solved a problem in a way that enhances the user experience.

It’s certainly worth taking the time to listen to the (albeit lengthy) podcast over at Design Critique where Tim unravels these kinds of issues in some detail. The podcast discusses a fascinating paradigm of allowing non-dextrous patients (i.e. the arthritic) access to their medication whilst preventing the same medication from being accessed by highly-dextrous children. This problem and its leftfield solution is one which would prove to be a great interview question for aspiring UEAs

smorgasbord-design ... three months on

2007-06-30T17:06:00.000+01:00

Facebook had started to take over my web time until a week or so ago when I realised I'd not done anything on Last Chance Saloon for a while. Then I realised I'd not posted our wedding website yet either. Then it became clear that I was falling behind on the stuff I actually get paid for too. But frankly that doesn't seem to matter as regardless of how far I fall behind on that stuff, the other people who'll plug it all together behind the scenes are even further behind and even more under-resourced than I am. So where to focus my attentions?

Well, the invites went out for the wedding and since then it's been a bit of a whirl of RSVPs, sorting out groomsmen's attire, stag events (thanks Robin), website stuff (Marisa and I are getting there on that) and more. Floristry and church arrangements seem to be a never ending saga with the former causing the most headaches both financially and logistically. I'm sure we'll get there in the end but it's hard to think that I'll not resent the money and hassle on the day when I look around at all the hours of work and £s of cash that have been poured into it all. It's all well and good starting the whole wedding process with intentions of project managing the whole thing to within an inch of its life but it's another thing when you reflect on some of the principle reasons it was never going to work that way:

I'm not a project manager. In fact I'm not even half a project manager. I'm a thoughtful creative type who's easily distracted.
I no-longer live with my fiancee and, worse still, I live 3hrs away in Norwich.
My fiancee couldn't be less interested in the whole affair as she's got bigger fish to fry throughout the courts of England now.
Two years of intermittent planning enthusiasm is enough to stall the momentum of the best laid plans.
Financially it's all become so obscenely expensive that the scattering of luxurious touches has just been turned into paying someone a King's Ransom to re-arrange the deckchairs on the Titanic.

That said, there are moments of brilliance. The band, the invites, the reception venue, our enigmatic priest, my shoes ... so I'm quite sure it'll become more than the sum of its parts. I only hope SWMBO's employers let her have the day off now to enjoy it.

Wedding aside, Last Chance Saloon is careering along at a pace. A frankly bewildering generosity from the many nooks and crannies of The Company has ensured that much of the expense for our ludicrous project to drive to Rome in a tired old Volvo has been borne by generous benefactors. Some creative writing, a smattering of mediocre photography and a few long train journeys to Surbiton have resulted in an update this morning which starts to reveal more about the direction we're heading in (predominantly South West after we pass Paris).

The lack of a commute (Shank's Pony now gets me to work in under 5 minutes) has killed off my inspirational out-of-work thoughts around user experience and the intensity of the laborious projects i'm engaged on at work has stiffled some of my much needed thinking time. In a desperate attempt to nod myself back in that direction I have resolved to pick up listening to IA podcasts and have been networking on LinkedIn as well as joining the Information Architecture Institute to try and become part of a wider knowledge sharing community.

My intention this week was to write a lengthy piece about why Facebook has captured the imagination and web-time of millions of people who never before would have considered signing up with and dedicating time to photo-sharing, blogging and general social networking. Why, for example, is Facebook's growth causing people to peel away from Friends Reunited and MySpace in droves? I think I know why and, if you're lucky and I start to find some time amongst cars, weddings and work, i'll explain all next week.

Colin Turkington in-car with TeamRAC BTCC

2007-06-01T12:48:00.001+01:00

Pretty good quality in-car footage of Mr. Colin Turkington in the BMW 320 touring car at Thruxton in the BTCC

Moving on

2007-04-03T09:45:00.000+01:00

Morning readers. Just to let you know that I have recently moved house. My fiancee and I are still getting married but work and commuting and the landlady wanting to sell up forced our hand and I've ended up in Norwich with a good friend and she's ended up on Surbiton, Surrey. So I'm no longer a commuter ('one' breathe a sigh of relief) and it appears I'm not much of a blogger either. Attention has been diverted to setting up two 'homes', sorting out a huge 'to-do' list at work and generally catching up on life. This coupled with my archaic laptop at home, wedding planning and a general enjoyment of working on Last Chance Saloon instead has seen blog posting drop off for a bit. There's no point in me telling you all to hold fast since there's unlikely to be anything interesting on here for a while. In the meantime, take care and enjoy the spring sunshine.

John

Wedding Dances

2007-02-22T22:46:00.000Z

Of course, James and Julia Boggio's wedding dance video is a well-known thing at the moment, according to Richard & Judy the subject of "international debate" after it was posted on YouTube. My better half and I had considered a show-stopping dance routine for our big day (1st September...) but have stepped back from that having seen such displays as this and the equally well-rehearsed Thriller routine. Actually, if creating an impact was what it's all about i'd have been quite happy to have done the OK Go Treadmill Dance too with the best man and chief bridesmaid. Anyway, we're not doing anything like that, but kudos to those that do.

Last Chance Saloon

2007-02-20T12:41:00.000Z

A group of us at The Company are heading off in September on the infamous Home 2 Rome banger rally. To this end we have 'launched' a site to detail our progress, Last Chance Saloon. It's my first attempt using WordPress and is changing hourly as I get my head round customisations, CGI, MySQL and tweaking templates. It's going to be permanently linked-to from this blog but to keep up-to-date, here's the Last Chance Saloon RSS Feed (RSS 2.0) and the Last Chance Saloon Atom Feed (Atom 0.3).

Lost, bothered and bewildered

2007-02-14T16:34:00.000Z

‘Lost’ has jumped the shark. Back in the halcyon era of “Happy Days” an episode aired in which Fonzie water-ski jumped a shark. Considered the tipping point of the series, this moment has come to be know as the defining demarcation of a television series’ slide into the mire. As Wikipedia explains, these moments “are typically scenes that finally convince viewers that the show has fundamentally and permanently strayed from its original premise”.

I have watched every episode of Lost broadcast including up to episode 7 of season 3 and and anyone else who has will know exactly what I mean. Until this point Lost had taken a place alongside The Sopranos and 24 as being one of a new breed of multi-layered, complex television dramas that epitomised the rise of Steven Johnson’s Sleeper Curve.

Lost needed no ‘flashing arrows’ to indicate important screen elements, it had complex mythology, multiple plot-lines, cross-overs, time-slips and more. Yet in series three we’re treated instead to obvious placements of characters and props, heavy-handed flashbacks and dialogue that, with little regard for subtlety, hold the audience’s hand through the first episodes.

The series was criticised in season two for it’s complex mythology and the writers reportedly toned it down for season three preferring to focus on relationships but in doing so the story (and I’m beginning to suspect there isn’t really one) is becoming laboured and sentimental.

Adding to the criticisms, the writers seem to ignore fundamental parts of earlier series:

:: What happened to the cave or the mortal dangers in the forest from Season 1? They never get mentioned despite the fact that the cave would still occupy a useful function for the beach dwellers. The beach dwellers are all seemingly content with their existence yet it doesn’t seem that long ago that a stroll in the woodland would result in a ferocious unexplained chase and attack.

:: What about food? With the hatch destroyed are they all relying on the airdrops for stores? With Locke off wandering around trying to unravel the island’s mystery who’s hunting for boar?

:: What about ‘the button’ – with the hatch destroyed how is the electromagnetic status being maintained?

:: What about Walt and Michael’s captors? What about the illusion of poverty in The Others’ camp?

:: What about Rousseau, her experiences, her maps, the French annotations?

:: What about the numbers? The black and white stones? The island’s healing properties – (which incidentally didn’t seem to work for Ecko’s mortal injuries or Ben’s tumour)

By ignoring these elements from earlier series the writers have lost credibility. The very nature of the show has meant viewers have absorbed masses of seemingly incidental information with the belief that it will be required to piece together plotlines later in the series. Remembering characters in flashbacks, the maps in the hatch, the cross-reference dialogues. Investing this amount of time in a series needs to be rewarded and, in this regard, I believe Lost is beginning to pay more attention to what clips will get salacious edits up on YouTube (and subsequent audience figure increases) than they are with continuing to form a complex, well-considered and intriguing drama.

Documenting the user interface

2007-02-13T11:43:00.000Z

I recently spent an hour explaining to a potential colleague what it was that our team do. I’ve discussed this recently partly in reference to a recent Design Critique podcast but, as this particular person is closer to our business, it was possible for me to dispense with the coffee shop analogy.

Instead I chose to trawl through some of the documentation I produce. Since taking Dan Brown’s tutorial at User Experience 2006 and reading his excellent book I’ve become a bit of a documentation junkie to the point where the documentation is clearly overkill for certain smaller jobs. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to show off some of the styles and approaches I’ve adopted.

I tend to start with personas, which, as any number of user-experience articles will tell you, are a foundation stone for understanding how users interact with a system. This involves defining a group of users (generally from research data), building demographic profiles, and understanding their needs and motivations before sketching out the scenarios in which they might find themselves. I present each of these in a summary page and detail page . I am not a huge fan of using photographs to illustrate personas as I think the audience dwell on any physical appearance, so I have borrowed from Loz Gray’s work and introduced iconographic representations. These have the added benefit of being race-neutral and re-usable for various ages.

Having produced these, the next step in the process is to define a sitemap. The sitemap, such as it is, has a limited lifespan. In the next few years I doubt we will see many produced as the web moves away from individually coded static pages. Sitemaps do a great job of representing hierarchy, taxonomy and the long-view of how things fit together but they don’t really give us much insight into how, for example, a complex dynamic service application or something like Google Maps works. More and more I find myself representing stacks of pages in a sitemap rather than individually referenced HTML documents.

That said, in the absence of producing something more ambiguous, like a conceptual model, they are churned out continuously here at The Company. If I am honest, they are welcome relief for me as I am not a great fan of the chore of creating personas and prefer moving around boxes and arrows. I think this can be seen in the detail of my recent sitemaps, which present a considerable amount of information to the build team, the content developers, and the information architects.

For example, this blow-up detail shows the relationship between pages (connecting lines), their hierarchy (top down), their category (blue background), whether they have had content produced (green circle), where they are hosted (colour of title), their reference number (top left of box) their wireframe type (top right of box) and, of course, their title (centre). In other pages, not shown in this detail, I have used the bottom left corner to indicate whether there is any embedded video on the page.

Granted a sitemap like this has gone through much iteration as the project moves through the design phase toward build (hence there are references to wireframes and content) but to me it shows the level of detail to which one can go whilst maintaining an accessible document. The classic example of which is C. J. Minard's seminal diagramatic map "Napoleon's March to Moscow".

From the early sitemap we can walk the personas and their scenarios through the screens and map their journey. Interchangeably known as user-journeys, task flows, page flows or scenarios, these documents demonstrate how well your information architecture (as seen in the sitemap) works. Again, I borrow here from Loz Gray and use an isometric style that I think promotes a clear view of the journey the user takes. Flat 3D boxes and arrows don’t really inspire or compel stakeholders, if you put up a nice diagram like this it becomes easier for your audience to visualise the journey and the sense of the user being ‘presented’ with screens. I have used this approach for the last five months across static and active sites, allowing clients to visualise everything from amending personal details to clicking through a knowledge store or finding help. With the shape set now firmly embedded in my Visio toolbox I can drag and drop shapes leading left and right, different arrow forms to represent strong, weak and conditional paths, decision points (an isometric diamond is a difficult thing to draw indeed), error points and just about anything the sitemap can show.

In several instances, the barriers between processes have jumped out at me when presenting them in this format. Missing links suddenly seem even more obvious, lengthy diversions and crowded critical paths are quickly spotted and revised.

The final step in my documentation journey is the wireframe. Having experimented recently with the low-fidelity ‘page description diagram’ approach – which to me is like describing the front page of The Times when a blurred photocopy would have been more effective – I have resolved to stick to medium-high fidelity wireframes. In part this is because I’ve always liked the creative construction side of wireframing. I’d feel cheated having gone to great lengths in describing personas, the sitemap and the journey the user takes only to be produce an ambiguous written description of a screen. A well considered wireframe still leaves the designers with more than a colouring-in job. The designers can add visual prominence, alter sizing and positioning and consider complimentary form and colour. What I feel the information architect’s job is to do is to say ‘here’s how the page should function, this is where they should look for x, this is where they will find y and these are the relative levels of prominence’. It is less prescriptive than the building architect’s blueprint but considerably less ambiguous than saying “the room in this house should have three windows, two electricity points, a wooden floor and four brick walls”. So, my wireframes show text placeholders, pseudo-latin text, layout, order, scale, complexity and also contain build or dynamic element-related annotation.

I’m pedantic and fastidious about version control and document referencing. All my documents are peppered with notes about page and document versions, titles, page references, disclaimers (“Wireframes do not represent the final design…”), client names, contact details and relevant key/legends. It is crucial when so much documentation is floating around that we have a clear view of what it does, who did it, for whom and when.

I hope this has been an interesting read, please do get in touch (john at smorgasbord dash design dot co dot uk or in the comments) if you’ve got examples of documents you produce or alternative approaches to this kind of stuff.

BBC Descend on Wormshill for EastEnders spin-off

2007-02-01T11:51:00.000Z

Having cleared the psychological log-jam of not posting, I’m now ‘in a place’ where I feel inclined to write a post every five minutes. Sometimes it takes posting an item to make you realise that it’s actually pretty painless and doesn’t take anywhere near as long as I remember it too. The biggest problem for me is hyperlinking. I always like my posts to contain a good smattering of contextual links, not just for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but because I think it’s good practise.

Anyway, found out today that my lamented home village, Wormshill, has been taken over by the BBC as they film some nauseating spin-off show for EastEnders at the local church, St. Giles. They’ve also been up at nearby Ringlestone, a hamlet, as part of a storyline centred up Jim Branning and Dot Cotton looking for relatives (according to the village gossip). Of course, this being a Web 2.0 world I’ve already updated the relevant Wikipedia article.

I’m not an ‘Enders’ fan and actually feel quite sad that the sanctity and anonymity of the village has been compromised like this and I only hope that the Parish Council and, in particular, the church funds have benefited considerably from having the land and environment swamped in this way. I fully concede that this is a NIMBY (not in my back yard) approach and in other circumstances I have roundly praised the BBC for their output. At least they’ve chosen a great little location, and one that I think typifies rural Kent.

For those of you who do watch, the episode is due to be broadcast as some kind of spin-off special during Easter.

Information Architecting The Coffee Shop

2007-01-31T12:08:00.000Z

As a user experience architect I often get asked what it is exactly that I do. A learned friend once explained to me that if you can’t explain your job to your mum then there’s something wrong. I never understood whether this meant there was something wrong with my mum, my job per se or just the title but either way it’s time to address that very issue.

I think I feel that my job is more of a re-labelled Information Architecture (IA) role than anything else but that’s even more ambiguous. Plenty of people have tried to define IA, notably Rosenfeld & Morville (“Information Architecture for the World Wide Web”), Wikipedia and recently, Tim, Tom and Chris Farnum. Having recently discovered Indexed I’m in a bit of a ven diagram mood so I’ll borrow from that and the Design Critique podcast to visualise IA as follows (left). I think this encapsulates what we as IAs try and do, to balance the three (oft-competing) requirements of users, the business and the content we have to organise.

You’ll notice that this definition isn’t tied explicitly to the web. It’s a model that covers all kinds of information interaction and whilst I could sit here on a blustery January day and bang on about web-based IA I think it’s time to talk coffee. It’s quite a good analogy I think for real-world IA, where non-web people can get a feel for what practitioners like myself do.

I occassionaly find myself in need of a new place to go for lunch or for coffee. In Norwich this isn’t easy to do, it’s fair to say I’ve tried most of the sandwich bars and decent coffee shops and what strikes me in the same way it does in towns up and down the country, is the organisation and presentation of the menu board. In London these places tend to be quite busy at lunch with a healthy queue in most places giving you plenty of time to look up and read the menu while you wait. In Norwich there’s not so much time, you’re asked for your order within a minute of entering the shop and if you’re new to the place that’s not enough time. Part of the problem is the bewildering array of choice. Lame stand-ups (and my Dad) regularly joke about the ‘I just want a coffee’ situation when walking into a Starbucks but, coffee aside, sandwich shops like O’Briens have a range of sandwiches, toasties, panninis, ciabattas countless hot and cold fillings, salads and soups. I like variety in my life (!) so I want to try something different and will scan the menu boards looking for combinations, unusual fillings, relishes and breads. This takes time and it’s not helped by poor information architecture.

If I was re-designing a menu board to improve customer journeys in a sandwich shop or coffee bar this is what I’d do:

:: Prioritise. Order the most commonly requested drinks/sandwiches in a section of perhaps 10 items on the far left of the board. Most people scan left-to right and would hit this section first. I would use till data to define the top requested items and order them accordingly. The only risk here is that this is self perpetuating, new people come in an order the same things everyone else does but the trade off is that they’re likely to come back and their natural boredom threshold will encourage them to explore other options later, particularly if the alternatives are promoted successfully…

:: Structure. Group similar items, all the hot food items in one group, cold in another. Then sub-divide, meats, fish, vegetarian. In each subcategory, order these by price, most expensive to least. If there’s a consistent pricing structure, promote it: e.g. bacon and cheese sandwich £2.50, toasted £2.90, think customer journey. People come in and decide first what type they want: sandwich (brown, white, granary), baguette, panini, soup or ciabatta (olive, sundried tomato) first. Then how they want it: hot, toasted, plain then filling. The menu should reflect that from left to right.

:: Display. Use a clear and consistent typeface. Have bold headings, use colour sparingly and intelligently (‘Hot Food’ in red for example), don’t add illustrations. Most people know what a cup of coffee looks like, or what a baguette is. Position the board high and use as much space for it as possible. If your bar has two entrances or queues, have two boards. Consider having a second smaller version close to the till. All too often brand typefaces are used that are fine for the shop logo, napkins or coffee cups but don’t read well from 5m away and 3m below. Use space, less is more. Listing every possible combination is pointless, especially if all your fillings are displayed individually, make it clear they can build their own and promote a few suggestions.

Change it. Be prepared to change the board regularly. When you stop selling lines or start selling new ones, adding them with stickers, hand written notes or another board breaks the structure. It’s like a library getting a new book and sticking it on the end of the shelf. It might get found but it’s more likely to be if it’s categorised and filed appropriately. Be prepared to listen to customers and analyse their habits. Are people saying and buying the same things, can they find your new caramel frappuccino or is it that they just don’t want one? Do you only seem to sell salads to vegetarians, do people know they can have their soup in an oversized takeaway cup?

Ok, so I don’t work in the restaurant trade but to me, that’s a good thing. As a customer I know about the problems I have and as an IA I know of some of the ways these can be solved. I’d love to know if Starbucks uses IAs to define its menu boards before the designers are let loose with their crayons and I’d bet that two thirds of small-town sandwich bars write their menu boards by consulting a long list of what they plan to sell.

Take a look at my very quick sketch of how a well organised menu could be set out. I hope this helps to bring IA alive for some people, feel free to feedback either by commenting on this post or emailing me … john at smorgasbord hyphen design dot co dot uk ... P.S. No more posts about coffee, promise.

UPDATE 3 Feb 07: The guys at Adaptive Path have posted about trying to explain what user experience architects do using a few options. Worth a read...

Coffee Barometer

2007-01-22T15:03:00.000Z

Have blogged in the past about coffee at The Company, Marc at Dancingmango and others have been discussing the barometric use of coffee provision to determine how employee-centric your employer is. for the record, we've got:

:: Option 1. Free vend, the classic Bunzl peculiar blend ... with a 'strong' button that adds nothing to the brew.
:: Option 2. Subsidised 'in-house' coffee shop, supposedly fresh brewed coffee at just under £1 for their smallest cup of Americano.
:: Option 3. Subsidised franchised 'Starbucks' where a grande Americano costs £1.40 and there's a 10 cup loyalty scheme.

Which I think covers all bases, quite appropriate given our line of business.

Supporting Common Pathways And Increasing Simplicity Through Disclosure

2007-01-12T14:37:00.000Z

Progressive disclosure is a nice term don’t you think? Seems kinda academic when you first read it and then it rather becomes clear, progressively disclosing itself, metaphorically revealing the meaning within. I love it.

Anyway, in UE it refers to the way in which we hide features and functions that are not required, revealing them as the user’s journey progresses. Jakob uses the analogy of the print dialogue box. Going to ‘print’ reveals a stripped down dialogue; page size, orientation, copies. If the user wants more, they click ‘options’ or ‘advanced’ and are shown zoom options, colour settings, resolution, duplex etc. etc.

Stretching the analogy further, we could consider the tree menu system to work as a progressive disclosure. We could think about other examples all over the place on the web. How about the checkout process when you can click to change the delivery or invoice address (and so receive a detailed dialogue) or you can continue to dispatch if the settings are as you wish.

So progressive disclosure is a way of describing simplicity to support the most common pathways. At The Company we try and get masses of this stuff into our online applications. Dynamic layers that open up additional areas of transactional forms when users require a non-standard interactions. We understand that almost everyone is a special case, there are no ‘standard’ customers (and as such we don’t do personas for standard customers). We restrict interactions to the most common operators and offer a second or third set of options on request.

There is a school of argument of course that this prevents people from ever finding these ‘power tools’ but this just smacks of poor design. Make it obvious that there is more you can do and people will naturally explore. Particularly if the first set does not meet their goal. If these request points become decision points (E.g. “have I done all I needed to do”) within the task flow, then that will inform the solution you design. A solution which will ultimately be task focussed and with clear expectations of effect of the user’s action. A notable failure to perform correct user research into an implementation like this can be seen in Word's hidden menus (aside: how to disable hidden menus in Word etc.).

Progressive disclosure has another benefit: perceived hierarchy. By placing the most common activities on the initial part of the process, you are making an implicit statement about its importance; it enables them to prioritise their interaction. This prioritisation solves much of the problem above regarding the perception that the interaction only has a small set of features.

So, to get this right we have had to make some significant decisions: what is first-tier disclosure and what is second-tier? How many options should go into the first tier? (think of only a few … and then remove some), How can we make this initial feature set simple? How shall we reveal and direct users to the second tier?

Well we are solving these problems daily through some obvious UE techniques: Research – we know what our customers do on our site through metrics and qualitative usability testing. We use hierarchical design techniques, card sorting, site mapping and task-flow design to understand what takes priority. We also understand when a linear process might work better, where all features are provided by in a staged disclosure. The trick, as Jakob affirms, is to fit the design to purpose. Is there benefit in progressive or staged disclosure for a given task with a given user group.

Reading this far you will probably have a better idea than you did before.

Visual Guides for Tube Tourists

2007-01-12T14:18:00.000Z

Two posts today, though I’m separating them so that their headers stand out as separate articles … gotta think SEO …

First is a bit of a cop out. A guy at The Company writes an intranet blog with a central tenet of inspiring great customer service. He’s a bit braver than I, often approaching people in restaurants, shops and the street to interrogate them when they’ve been part of a great customer experience or solution to one of life’s problems. His eyes are always open and recently he took a trip on the London Underground (a subject I’ve mentioned in the past in relation to navigation analogies). I’ll let him take up the story (used by permission):

“…On the tube and got off at Westminster. Now I was off to meet a Customer Experience 'guru' and I had the address but as I was coming up the escalator I was thinking, 'I wonder what exit to take?'. Now, most tube stations with multiple exits have text based signs pointing to each exit. I was surprised and delighted to see the [picture left]:

You see, many tourists won't be able to read the text signs and even Brits like me can often navigate far better through pictures of “what I want to see when I surface” (when I don't know street names).

So, I asked one of the staff, 'Who thought of that, it's bloody brilliant'. And the answer, 'we had a quick team pow wow and the boss asked for ideas to make things better for customers, Trevor came up with that, was given a digital camera and went out on his lunch and took the pictures'. He then said, 'and the best thing is customers seem to like it, and us staff don't lose anywhere near as much time trying to explain directions to people who are a bit confused'. I am not embarrassed to say that I gave him a hug. He looked somewhat alarmed. I asked for Trevor but it wasn't his shift so I wrote a note of thanks and congratulations (ironically on a complaint form as it was all that could be found).

So, anyhow, be a 'Trevor' today. Look at things from your customers eyes - have a pow wow and just do it!”

Cool huh? Ironically the London Tube map was actually designed by Harry Beck in the expectation that users didn’t need it to accurately reflect geography and scale as being under ground meant there were no landmark reference points. Many stations, along with highlighting the colour and having a unique design scheme (e.g. tiling at Tottenham Court Road) feature imagery of nearby attractions in their decoration however it is when exiting the tube that features such as photographs of what’s available at each exit are crucial.

But even more, the point of this piece is to illustrate how great ideas only take a little prompting and really loads of people ‘think customer’ regularly. This idea might have arisen with a staff suggestion box scheme but I reckon it probably would not. Trevor wouldn’t have got round to it, he’d have had second thoughts – thinking it was frivolous. However, a quick pow-wow and boom! Idea’s out there, acted upon and getting men in suits all excited at the same time as expediting the passage of tourists around the World’s greatest capital.

Epilogue: Can anyone else think of any Tube stops that feature imagery of tourist attractions that are in close proximity to the station. For example, somewhere in the tile mosaic, wall designs or in the exit/ticket hall? The most obvious ones are Bank, St. Pauls (before rennovation), Baker St. and, to some extent, Victoria...

Welcome to 2007, Person of the Year, and welcome back monster workloads.

2007-01-02T17:05:00.000Z

What with freelance work and two major projects at The Company I am royally snowed-under en ce moment so apologies for the lack of posts. I've had plenty of thoughts and continue to archive random print outs with the intention of posting later. The situation should ease toward the end of January and, unlike the Ashes, I shall return.

With best wishes to you, the user (person of the year) and I'll see you on the other side.

Christmas presents obtained: stuff from Reiss, T M Lewin, White Stuff, Oliver Sweeney shoes a Garmin nüvi 300 if you're interested.

Oh, and finally, I'm listening to Unni Wilhelmsen (left) at the moment, absolutely stunning (and available on iTunes in the UK, look for the album Til Meg)

Legal Websites Failing To Make The Grade

2006-12-15T15:20:00.000Z

Got passed a link to a page on legal gossip site rollonfriday (ROF) today which exposes some dreadful websites. Firstly, the incomprehensibly bad Fletcher Lewis site. Explore the solicitor profiles by clicking the three chaps' faces (Jason, Jeffery and Matthew) ... worryingly this site makes use of sound ...

Though that was bad, it's so bad that it's quirky. What's worse is when you see a site like Turner Parkinson who have clearly seen the involvement of an agency and the end result is a fish-orientated theme with, as ROF puts it, "end of the pier caricatures" on the lawyer profile pages. The ALT text on the menu says "booLawyers", "booTP" and so on ... and their Terms and Conditions page asserts "Before entering our Website you should read carefully these terms and conditions," despite this being on a page accessed in site-furniture rather than on a gateway. At least Surrey-based solicitors Buglear Bate scatter their clumsy offering with no little sarcasm.

finally, just to prove they can get it right some times, Wragge & Co. seems, on the surface of it, to be quite effective. I just don't like the grey on white text contrast.

A provincial town reflects on the news

2006-12-13T17:41:00.000Z

Tim Fenton, an Ipswich local and BBC journo reflects on the effect of the recent events in Ipswich on the townspeople: "Community faces unwanted glare"

I used to love going for a run in Levington in the summer, riding out through Nacton and looking out for Copdock off the A12 on my way home from my parents' and in-laws' houses at the weekend. All locations featuring heavily in the unfolding events. As Tim touchingly writes "These are our places and we don't want them on the news."

:: Back to usability and user-experience articles tomorrow.

Ipswich Murders

2006-12-12T00:33:00.000Z

It's late at night and as I sit here typing away on my blog I'm waiting for my fiancee to arrive back from a Christmas party. Ordinarily these things are par for the course at this time of year and yet the recent news of murders in a town I grew so fond of in the past few years means that her trip home feels longer and more vulnerable than it should have done.

Of course, at present, the crime is restricted to a localised area and to a particular segment of society though this makes it no less obvious that it has been comitted upon young women lured into a situation in which they were compromised.

Tonight the airwaves resonate with phone-ins and new analysis about the implications and scale of such a local serial attack but for me, and for all its faults, I'm dwelling on the thoughts of the people of Ipswich. Derided tonight on the BBC as a "small market town", Ipswich has, in recent years, done much to shake off a crumbling reliance on industry and ailing agricultural manufacture. At a time when the town so desperately wants to stand out on the map of the British Isles with its committment to technology, sport and commerce, it hits the headlines for a sordid crime involving the oldest trade in the world, and the friendly Suffolk townies who competed admirably with the amiability I experienced in my years at York, are left mourning the loss of three daughters.

Questioning if price is everything: The moral low-ground of price comparison.

2006-12-11T12:56:00.000Z

So, uSwitch are in a bit of trouble. It appears that there may have been an attempt to encourage users of their site to switch providers by artificially presenting the results. To me this highlights a a growing concern about comparison engines and aggregators which is that they are not providing the sort of philanthropic experience to which they allude, and may actually produce inaccurate quotes/cover. These sites encourage you to compare primarily on price, they have commoditised - particularly in the insurance aggregator market - bespoke products. They encourage customers to compare apples with oranges and don't seem to take into account the all-important ancilliary factors such as customer experience, product features and loyalty discounts. By fueling a market where everyone switches all the time to the cheapest provider all that happens is that prices fall and margins are squeezed tighter and tighter to the point where the service you could have expected to receive in the past now resides in a poorly trained off-shore call centres, costs £s per minute to call and is increasingly unsympathetic to your individual needs.

Users and customers seem to be forgetting that sites like uSwitch, moneysupermarket and Confused have to make money. They make money when people switch and comission gets paid. Companies are rapidly wising up to this fact and are paring back their loyalty discounts and long-standing service standards to hack money off at the front-end and encourage more footfall through the front door.

Analogous to this have been the supermarkets. You can go into Tesco and see the price of an item compared to the equivalent in Sainsburys and Asda. The price transparency is thus designed to show how great they are at providing value for money. But once again this price-led marketing ignores the human at the heart of the shopping experience. Humans are not calculators and choose to buy a product through a subtle blend of price, product and emotion. Focussing all the attention on price leaves us all the poorer in terms of product and emotion. Take the current TV promotion for Iceland's frozen Christmas food range (feat. Kerry Catona). Touted as a cheap alternative to the traditional Christmas experience the marketing encourages us to spend less and indulge in a christmas of re-heating re-constituted meat and preservative-laden deserts, insisting that this must be better than the wholesome creation of a well-cooked dinner full of natural, fresh well tended meat, vegetables, sauces, spices and so on.

There's no doubt about it, premium insurance products, traditional utility products and organic food are all over-priced products that could do with having a tighter squeeze on them. The problem lies in the mass-market, middle-england purchases for which price transparency serves only to blinker the customer into considering short term financial gain and not lifetime value.

Emerging on the horizon to provide an alternative to this approach is a site called Wesabe. Wesabe is a community-based site for the review and dissemination of advice around personal financial services (read the Wesabe FAQ). A site that takes customer generated content to provide appreciable human comparisons of such products without dwelling on price, price price. Currently a touch US-centric, an increasing number of British and European visitors will bolster the relevance of the advice and experience for the rest of us. To me, these are some of the most encouraging uses of Web 2.0 thinking and I only hope that they gain traction and compete amongst the emotionally impoverished comparison engines.

Comment Moderation Applied

2006-12-05T10:48:00.000Z

NOTICE

Apologies everyone but I have had to switch on comment moderation after being repeatedly spammed by some berk in India (IP 59.184.12.255) trying to promote a dreadful search portal. At some point I hope to switch this off but in the meantime all comments posted will be emailed to me for review before posting.

Thanks for your patience and if anyone's got any ideas as to how I can blacklist or report this IP I'd appreciate it.

Viral - Or Is It?

2006-12-01T15:49:00.000Z

The UK is in the grip of the spread of two 'viral's ... firstly the clumsy Polonium trail following the death of Alexander Litvineko and secondly the Thresher's offer.

The first is a murky subject that hints not at a slick KGB operation but of something rather more peculiar. The second seems even more suspicious, when is a viral not really a viral? I recieved my first copy of the PDF voucher at the start of the week and then saw it appear in both personal and work inboxes on a regular basis, each time doubting its' authenticity a little more. Of course the blogosphere couldn't resist and one of the first on the scene was wine site Spitoon - in effect giving the promotion some further credibility. The cynic in me thought, "could a national brand really honour a 40% discount spread so emphatically amongst the public?" Well, today's news reports suggest that they do intend to and, furthermore, that this wasn't intended for anyone other than family and friends. (Spitoon once again picked up the story).

I don't believe them. They must have known the viral power of sending out a voucher with no restrictive Terms and Conditions and in a portable format. Their mistake was not realising the scale of the distribution which -they freely admit - will hit their profit margins hard. There's loads of similarly cynical blog chatter about this. This is, however, one viral where monetisation is an obvious outcome. Contrast this with other successfully distributed but low-profit virals.

They do expect to make a profit so it will, nevertheless, remain to be seen how good a Christmas the directors at Threshers will have.

Iraq War Raises Statistical Questions

2006-11-27T13:09:00.000Z

Some interesting data I unearthed today. The proportion of British forces deaths related to the size of the deployment is 1.58%. The US forces proportion is 2.13% (sources: About.com and icasualties.org). Does this reflect the danger of the theatres they are operating in or the quality of soldiering? It certainly does not represent quality of kit, everything you ever read about the war suggests the US have the world’s best equipment. But the highest casualty count by deployment is Bulgaria which has lost 3.25% of its troops.

What is also interesting is the proportion of deployment by population. 0.05% of the US population is in Iraq next is Georgia at 0.018% and then us at 0.013%. In this regard, the US has lost 0.0009% of its population in the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, the sketchy nature of the data means I am unable to comprehensively balance the picture with statistics on the percentage of Iraqi civilians killed, but some reports put this at 2.5% (source: BBC News article). Sobering stuff.

Young at Heart - Reviews

2006-11-24T13:12:00.000Z

Following my post yesterday about Young@Heart I’ve been directed to a selection of equally gushing reviews.

:: A manly appraisal by TV Scoop (Shiny People)
:: A long review of ‘Road To Nowhere’ at the Lyric, Hammersmith in September
:: A review by Helen which draws on her own experiences trying to set up something similar
:: A short musing by an American ex-pat living in the UK in ‘A View From England’

Young@Heart, An Extraordinary Documentary

2006-11-23T16:48:00.000Z

Every once in a while you catch a programme on the TV that really hits the spot. It’s all too tempting in the evening to settle down and watch trash. Celebrity guff and salacious docu-soaps for example. Channel 4 last night added a corker to their schedule which I enthusiastically plumped for above my normal diet of crap. Young at Heart followed a chorus made up from old people (average age 80) who have got together under a charismatic and visionary musical director (Bob Cilman) to render pop, rock, punk and soul numbers in a way that you’ve never heard. It sounds, on paper, to be a terribly saccharine fly-on-the-wall but it was actually a profound exploration of ageing, death and our perceptions of both.

As we followed the game chorus line through the obvious challenges of re-interpreting Cold Play and James Brown and as we did so we also explored their deteriorating health, their unwavering enthusiasm, commitment humour and no little talent. Therefore, by the time it came to say the inevitable ‘goodbye’ to our first member we were right there with chorus in insisting the show must go on. And go on it did, with a heart-string-tug in the middle of a penitentiary exercise yard as the chorus sung to a group of incarcerated who – to a man – gave a standing ovation and many did so with tears in their eyes.

The sensitivity with which Stephen Walker approached the programme was extraordinary and struck a fine balance of warmth over sentimentality and no little degree of humour without descending into mockery. Above all this was a documentary with proud characters, philosophy and emotion and if anything justifies Channel 4 and More 4’s mandate it was this.

:: Read Stephen Walker’s statement on the documentary (and his IMDb profile)
:: Find out more about Young at Heart (website down due to bandwidth restrictions)
:: CBS Evening News piece about the chorus
:: UMASS alumni article about Bob Cilman

:: Other viewers' comments and finally, clips of the Young at Heart chorus

The Flicker Fusion Explanation For Driver Performance?

2006-11-22T15:34:00.000Z

Got passed a good link today to an article by Robert Winkler which took me back to my Visual Perception classes at York (under the enigmatic Peter Thompson). It uses a sort of pseudo-science evaluation of the visual capabilities of hawks vs. humans and how this demonstrates the finite limits of driver reaction. I would be interested to see the reaction time differences between F1 drivers, WRC drivers, the public, and fighter pilots. How much is reaction time related to this ‘Flicker Fusion’?

Coincidence means this dropped into my inbox around the same time as I had my eyes re-tested and recently took part in my first Karting session. I suffer from a lazy eye and had hoped that this might explain my one-second deficit in average lap times against my colleagues. My optician had her doubts but I am convinced it explains this – and my ineptitude at tennis.

Any more insight into this kinda stuff really appreciated.

“We wanted no ghost to tell us that”: Acknowledging Our Expertise In Information Architecture.

2006-11-19T15:25:00.000Z

We’re moving offices at The Company this week and consequently I’ve unearthed some dusty print outs of articles I meant to read. Some of these will end up in blog items in the next week or so and the first to prick my conscience has been a 2002 piece by Jesse James Garret. It was written at a time when jobs were being cut left, right and centre as the ‘new media’ industry euphemistically ‘consolidated’ itself.

With this in mind, it is quite an introspective and defensive critique of the purity of information architecture (IA), seeking to justify the role’s existence. What Jesse James Garret astutely points out is the tendency to justify every decision we make as being supported by user research and testable to within an inch of its life. Personally, I have dwelt on this as someone with a rigorous empirical background in psychology where, if it was not testable it was not truly meaningful. Taking a 'step back' (one for you, Matt) it is worth considering the role of a print editor. When they make decisions on layout, content and indeed the customer journey through their product, they are not doing this based on eight people in a room telling them what they think. They are using their insight, experience and gut reactions. They are doing what they are paid to do – to make tough strategic decisions about what they think is the right way of doing things without having the safety net of user-research to fall upon.

I wish I made more decisions like this. I wish I was able to be more bold and say, “you know what, this interaction should look like this because my years of experience tell me it should”. Too often, perhaps, we sit and listen to customers tell us exhaustively what they want and then agonise about what they meant. To go back to the wants and needs argument that Marc McNeill so effectively summarised recently, how many people would have sat in a focus group three years ago and said they would need to upload video and share it with the world? Not many, but then came YouTube … likewise, who would have thought kids would want to be creating web pages, writing daily blogs and sharing their lives with the world on an unprecedented scale? Not a huge amount but then came MySpace.

Now, I’m not saying that IAs would have foreseen YouTube or MySpace ahead of their users – if we all had that foresight IAs would be being paid a lot more – but it does demonstrate that user-research doesn’t provide all the answers.

If we dwell on making the most usable sites as defined as the sites that pass the user test then we become no better than the teacher who schools their pupils in just enough to pass the exam. The exam in this example is no more reflective of the challenges of life than the user test is reflective of the continued experience of a website by thousands upon thousands or users. The trouble is, testing and metrics deal largely with the quantifiable elements of experience, time taken, click volumes, conversion. Unfortunately these are the predominant currency of business and unless you present such information higher up the chain your credibility is called in to question.

To return to the publishing editor analogy, the editor is top of the tree. Their decision is respected not just because of the experienced opinion but because in the hierarchy there are few people above them. Information Architects on the other hand sit lower down, we don’t have that power and all too often we find our work being passed up the chain, interpreted, interrogated and ultimately ignored as the wishful thinking of an idealist. Peppering a report or proposition with research is our way of protecting our ideas, wrapping them in cotton wool to survive the journey to the senior manager’s desk.

At the end of this journey what lands on the manager’s desk is a collection of research quotes and some proposed designs. What is missing is the insight, the explanation of how we leapt from someone saying they wanted to be able to change their address to a panel in a wireframe with ‘change my address’ on it.

Fortunately the assertion by Jesse James that IA as a distinct role would fade away have not proved correct and in many organisations there exist a team of such professionals. Granted, we have had to broaden our horizons and think about technology and business at the same time but, at our core, we can still be information architects.

Nevertheless the advice still holds true. We should trust our abilities more and occasionally eschew the temptation to commission research at every turn to support our work. We must be prepared to act on hunches and still show our working. Explain and annotate why we have made these decisions but not be afraid to say it was our personal decision and not the decision of 83% of survey respondents. These hunches and gut reactions allow us to work and react faster. Take AJAX for example – we have not had the time to test and research this stuff adequately but we are under immense pressure to deploy it sooner rather than later for the UE and technological benefits. We should be brave enough to generate great interfaces using AJAX implementations based on our experience and get this stuff out there without waiting for XYZ Ltd to fling something out and observing how they get on.

In time, I hope senior management will begin to trust these hunches and – when augmented by the right amount of research – will begin to believe the value of the small collection of experts in their web teams. I’ll paraphrase for my final thoughts: Research data and formal methodologies do not guarantee better architecture. Better architects guarantee better architecture.

The Excel 2007 User Experience

2006-11-17T10:26:00.000Z

Finally got round to reviewing a blog post from MSDN about the User Experience design supporting Excel 2007. Of course this is all related to my recent exposure to the Microsoft UE process but I’m very interested in this post as it interrogates the charting functionality of Excel.

I have always hated the generic purples, blues and greys of Excel charts that adorn the lazy man’s presentation, pin board or meeting notes. Ignoring the power of colour in visual communication (<- excellent blog link) and the need to engage their audience, many users of the ubiquitous spreadsheet simply deployed the wizard to create a generic chart. In this regard Microsoft approached the problem with the end-users’ problem in mind: how do I create a good looking and meaningful chart? When I create charts in Excel I take a (probably excessively) long time over the style and colour to ensure it’s clear and compelling. More often than not, I’ll begin my charting process by sketching out what I want to see before tracking back to the data to work out how I need to tell the Wizard to work. I consider myself and experienced (but not expert) user of Excel but it’s clearly the users without the time and experience who pump out the sort of drab chart output I described above. So the process needs to work for power users and novices. Sometimes the best charts are mutli-type or multi-dimensional. So, for example, you use bars with lines on two axes and maybe some colouring to demonstrate some other variable. Working out this kind of stuff the first time you hit the ‘make a chart’ functionality has previously been impossible. One of the great featurettes of photo editing software has been the preview functionality of applying changes. Adding this sort of creative sandbox to the charting process enables users to tinker and play with their chart in the wizard environment without getting to the end and committing themselves to the wrong design, only to have to re-launch the wizard to amend it.

The end result for customers has been a template heavy solution that suits beginners and non-creative types but where the design crumbles is its lack of support for power users. As one commenter puts it, the support for people working with complex data has made way for “fluff to make column charts with gradient colours”. Whilst Microsoft have to cater for the large number of business users that just need to present some simple data, the fact of the matter is the tool is powerful enough to be used to analyze far more complex data sets and by ignoring these users they seem to have missed a trick. However, one final ray of light, in responding to these comments it appears Microsoft continue to listen and, where possible, they’ll begin to introduce such functionality in later releases. Too bad their UCD wasn’t quite representative enough.

Do Users Want, Need or Desire A Startup Sound?

2006-11-15T18:00:00.000Z

Couple of quick ‘hmm that’s interesting’ links. Firstly, related to my Vista post the other day, here’s a short NPR piece on the new Vista startup sound. They only get to the nub of the matter towards the end of this clip so I’d be really interested in other people’s opinions on auditory feedback in interfaces. It’s not something Tjeerd mentioned last week but it’s clearly something Apple take seriously too …

Secondly, I’m always a fan of Marc McNeill’s posts over at Dancing Mango (etymology of the title?) so was delighted to read the ‘needs vs. wants’ item last week. Coming as it did on the back of Dan’s UX2006 session which had already got me thinking more profoundly about personas, this post is a good reminder about interrogating user motivation. Some of the comments it has received are a little rambling but worth reviewing all the same.

World Usability Day 2006: 14th November

2006-11-14T17:21:00.000Z

Rather lamely I'm going to link out to the Making Life Easy (MLE) blog today to reference world usability day. I wanted to do something at The Company to highlight everyday usability (which basically involved the setting alarm clocks problem) but that never flew so this MLE blog represents someone else's attempt to illustrate great and grim design. I think this image from the Boston UPA site (and postcard they sent out) illustrates the concept fantastically.

PhotoSynth and Vista. A Leap forward in User Experience?

2006-11-13T14:40:00.000Z

A lot of good stuff coming out of Microsoft recently. The presentation by Tjeerd at UX 2006 showed some lovely attention to detail for GUI design in Vista (even if some people insist it's a Mac rip-off) and then there's this PhotoSynth stuff from the Live Labs. I blogged about the demo video in August and now there's a working demo available. Be warned, you do need at least a Gig of RAM and admin rights on your PC.

Regarding Vista, There are plenty of jerky videos of Vista on YouTube but I'd read it straight from the proverbial horse's mouth here and take a look at Tjeerd's pages here.

Not sure if PhotoSynth quite works how i'd hoped it would but I do think there's a function of how many photos have been loaded in and how fast the PC is. Several times I clicked in for a closeup and got the other side of a building instead and I'm not sure quite how the 3D dot-map should work - is is a quide to the space you're in? Is each dot a unique photo?

User Experience 2006, London, “User Experience Documentation”.

2006-11-10T10:20:00.000Z

It was inevitable that I’d want to blog about my session yesterday at the NN/g ‘conference’. What is unexpected however are the amount of thought provocations that I noted down throughout the day with little ‘Blog’ tags attached to them, some of which will end up as fully-fledged posts, others of which are, on reflection, nothing more than idle guff.

I’m glad I chose not to lug a laptop into the city and thereby blog on the day, and I’m even gladder that I took the preliminary letter’s advice to wear several layers too; the room we were in at the Millennium Hotel in Gloucester Road was borderline Arctic during the morning session. Not that that seemed to bother the extraordinary amount of Scandinavians that seemed to be in attendance. I still do not know whether their predilection toward User Centred Design is the consequence of having a Scandinavian guru at the helm (Jakob) or whether it is simply one of those accidental cultural niches that seem to develop. Either way, they were there in numbers, speaking embarrassingly great English and having a justifiable confidence in their abilities. The second largest group of attendees seems to have been the BBC. Looking down the delegate list, I would suspect that half their ‘new media’ department were there in one form or another.

I was there to learn from Dan Brown. An erudite New Yorker (now resident in D.C.) with a dry wit and a decent book to promote. We were a tough crowd, not because anyone was particularly controversial but because despite his attempts to lighten to mood with references to his experiences as a proud new(ish) father something was getting lost in translation and our continental delegates seemed more keen to read ahead in their slide packs. For the record, I thought he was a solid and amusing presenter and frankly when you are dealing with a subject as potentially dour as sitemaps, flow charts and wireframes then any smattering of humour is appreciated.

Dan’s approach has been to simplify web development documentation into ten key deliverables split by ‘User Needs’, ‘Strategy’ and ‘Design’. In the session at User Experience 2006 we looked at personas (user-need), sitemaps, flow charts and wireframes (design). As always, the best way to learn is through a combination of practical exercise and demonstration of the good and the bad, with appropriate discussion around the same. Within fifteen minutes of the session starting, we were already in and creating personas. This was absolutely the right thing to do. As we picked these apart, we progressed through what must have been a cathartic therapy for Dan as he displayed a healthy portfolio of confusing diagrams, schemas and flows from his past, this was a theme persistent through the rest of the day. Dan’s honesty in showing ‘hyperdocumentation’ (by which I mean diagrams and data visualisation on a large and complex scale) from his own collection was a compelling insight to the workings of a man who’s mind he freely admits craves the release of encapsulating his thoughts on paper and on file. Many of his examples showed an exquisitely sensitive use of colour and design to convey a wide range of attributes. A document that seemed inaccessible at first was presented gradually until it made complete sense.

He was challenged repeatedly on his intentionally inconsistent approach to documents (ironically it was internal document inconsistency that prompted me to attend the session) and his response was considered: no two projects are the same; no two audiences for those documents are the same. Bear in mind at every planning stage for your work those people who will be reviewing the document, and the document’s purpose. It seemed that there is no need to slavishly follow a given set of rules (e.g. that personas must show x, y and z and that sitemaps should be formed of boxes and arrows) if the document’s purpose can be communicated effectively without doing so.

Before I attended the conference I blogged that it was expensive and that you have to pay for the privilege of learning from the experts. In Dan’s case and, at the risk of sounding sycophantic, I am glad The Company paid up because it was worth every penny.

I’ll be returning to the themes of documentation and providing examples of my own styles in the next few weeks. Tomorrow however I intend to run through some examples of User Experience tweaks in Windows Vista following Tjeerd Hoek’s plenary session demo at User Experience 2006.

Finally, quick hellos to some people I met at the session: Tero Tikkanen (Vaisala Oyj, Finland) and Nick Pleydell-Pearce (Global Beach [yikes! flash only site], UK)

:: Update with Dan's slides originally posted on slideshare which contain the examples not in our take-out packs.

Mum, today I got an A* in Information Architecture

2006-11-09T22:16:00.000Z

Remember my post about kids wanting to be User Experience Architects? Well this post from Adaptive Path proves that Information Architecture is so easy* kids can do it ... and they want to :)

* - I'm joking about the easy part. It's not and it costs lots to pay people like us to do it really ... (that's a joke too, sort of)

Browser Zooming, A Comparison

2006-11-05T12:58:00.001Z

I like running a daft high resolution wherever I can and so sometimes have to make use of browser zooming capabilities. Previously the only option used to be a text size increase function where the CSS allowed but now, as an IE7 devotee I can use their total page zoom function. It's not always great though and this week's post by UK Usability contributor Alastair, does a great job of explaining what does and does not work and why.

And by way of a co-incidence, Paul at Headscape talks about the same issue on Boagworld

Technorati tags: IE7, browser zoom, text size, usability

It Pays To Answer Customer Emails

2006-10-31T12:30:00.000Z

Online shopping isn’t all about click through, promotions and abandonment. It’s about the interaction between user, customer and business.

I’ve been looking to get a new jacket for winter. Commuting, and specifically walking between stations and waiting for connections, can be a chilly affair when the temperatures drop. I’ve done plenty of research offline and online. I’m a ‘brand advocate’ of The North Face (TNF) and spent time looking at both their US and Canadian sites to find the latest gear. I ordered catalogues from Cotswold and Snow & Rock and I spent time in stores like Blacks, Venture Sport and Field & Trek. Eventually I settled on the Plasma jacket, it wasn’t showing on the TNF site for Europe (it was still showing summer gear in October…) but thanks to Froogle.co.uk, I saw it was appearing on several online stores but I was nervous that I would be getting end-of-line 2005/6 stock as we’re in a transitional season.

I had good service last year from Snow & Rock and I liked their extensive and well-produced catalogue but they didn’t have the item showing in stock. Cotswold I wanted to give a chance to as I visited their store in Betws-y-Coed last year and was impressed. Finally, Venture Sport were the only company showing the jacket as available in the colour I wanted – and they’re local with a branch in Norwich and helpful staff…

Cue a salvo of identical emails to their various customer service addresses. All sent at the same time, last Wednesday. I received just one response, from Venture Sport two days later telling me the key information: The item is the latest version and the current stock wait time (7-14 days). It was friendly, succinct and useful. If I’m being picky I’d have liked a tighter delivery/stock estimate but other than that, spot on.

As a result I’ve just spent nearly £200 with them on the jacket and as of today (6 days later) I’ve still had no response from any of the others. The shopping experience wasn’t without its faults - I did get instant confirmation emails but there were three of them (two merchant receipts and one with registration details) but I was so pleased to finally be getting on with the order that I didn’t really mind too much. I was even able to add some additional delivery comments to ensure it reaches me through the complicated post system at The Company. When it does arrive I plan on spending even more money with them on a few additional clothing items … their prompt, friendly and efficient service has paid off. All because they responded to an email.

Corporate Mugging

2006-10-27T14:16:00.000+01:00

Working for a corporation (c.f. agency) has its benefits. We’ve got a Starbucks concession as part of the catering facilities on site and as it’s ‘double stamp Friday’ I thought I’d pop down this afternoon for my usual Grande Americano (data on the GA) (aside: ‘americano’ was originally a derogatory term sneered at Americans when they asked for espressos with hot-water in them to temper the strength, according to a Gaggia salesman & Wikipedia). Anyway, this afternoon I noticed a sign saying 250 china mugs had been half-inched from the café in the last 6 months. Clearly the appeal of having a worldwide mega-brand and, (specifically a twin-tailed baubo siren) on their desk is too much to suppress my colleagues' kleptomaniac impulses.

A Mouthpiece For The Enemy: Is It Right To Interview The Taleban?

2006-10-27T07:56:00.000+01:00

I've just added a comment to Peter Barron's entry on the BBC News 'Editors' blog regarding the recent airing of an interview with the Taleban. In my opinion it is a fundamental part of a free media in a democratic country to report all sides of a conflict no matter how challenging and unsavoury. The proliferation of WASPish outrage in the Daily Mail readers' responses indicates just how blinkered we have become in our view of the Middle East. I am no sympathiser of fundamentalism but I am no fan of anachronistic fascist ramblings either or a return to the days when, as one commenter put it, people cheered at the bombing of Hiroshima in part because it was reported reported it as a military success. Honesty, transparency and accountability are only acheivable from a balanced perspective. Read every paper, watch a range of news programmes, absorb the views and make up your own mind.

UPDATE: 27th OCT

The debate on Peter's post now exceeds 100 comments, some of them erudite, others depressingly naïve but nevertheless reflective of an almost 50:50 split of opinion. Because this is my blog and I like to bolster my own opinions, here's someone who shares a similar viewpoint to me [hope they agree :) ] ... and here's a technorati log of recent blog commentary on the post. Finally, Norfolk boy and journalism professor Adrian Monck's has had a bit to say about it too ....

(copy of my BBC Editors comment)

Leaving Logs ... And Checking Them

2006-10-24T09:04:00.000+01:00

Though I've had a good old moan about commuting in the past, I'm pleased to say my displeasure with the operator and subsequent criticism never developed into the scatalogical. This deranged individual has, however, served to highlight another curiosity, the British fascination with salacious and sordid news. The BBC's popularity tracker inevitably gets dominated by such stories on slow news days ... I'd love to see Auntie's server logs to see how deep into the site people go once reading stories like this, almost as if they're the hooks that get visitors in to the rest of the news content.

British Web Users Search Less - But Find More

2006-10-23T17:22:00.000+01:00

An update to my recent post about odd search behaviour, a colleague sent me a list to Jason Lee Miller's interesting article the opening paragraph reads:"Recent numbers are showing that Google is an even heavier hitter in the United Kingdom than in the United States. But it also appears that UK Internet users are conducting fewer searches, and finding what they need more often." The debate of course is whether this is a true cultural difference or one of coincidental accident.

UPDATE: 24.OCTOBER.2006

The search stuff just keeps coming. Boxes and Arrows have a great piece about search behaviours. Combine this with their notes on Quantifying the User Experience and suddenly I've got a compelling need to get inside our site's search logs ... what are people looking for and how?

Windows Live Writer

2006-10-22T17:47:00.001+01:00

Technorati tags: Live Writer

A significant amount of software has found its way on to my system this weekend. Got a webcam, got a duplicate email remover from Outlook (gave up on Google mail and ended up with 600 duplicates when I pulled the last few months mails into Outlook...) and got Windows Live Writer to help me update this blog more simply.

I'm not sure how this experiment will work out, particularly as it doesn't support the Blogger Beta very well (no label option), but it might at least allow some faster posting and an end to the days of poorly formatted posts or posts with clumsy pictures.

Seeing Red Over Bono's Hypocrisy

2006-10-19T13:50:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I posted a comment on blueblog (which had been feted by Product Red's blog) which was duly deleted today (irritating comment moderation...). In essence it pointed out that we should clearly all be doing what Bono says and not what he does. For the record I applaud the (RED) campaign but i'd rather take part without the preaching of a multi-millionaire who uses (like The Stones) every trick in the book to avoid paying tax that would partially benefit the same or similar causes. Graham Norton's had something to say on the subject which, I think, makes a valid point. Albeit it does rather draw the comparison that a crumbling road in Ireland isn't quite as desperate an issue as AIDs in Africa.

> More blog comment about Bono's nauseating hypocrisy

> Fergal O'Brien's comprehensive Bloomberg article, "Bono, Preacher on Poverty, Tarnishes Halo With Irish Tax Move" (16.OCT.2006)

Search And You Shall Find

2006-10-17T13:48:00.000+01:00

Each day I take a look at my blog stats and today I was mortified to find someone had found the blog not, as I’d hope, by searching for ‘web usability blog’ or a specific topic like ‘ambient navigation signifiers’ but rather “when does Primark in Doncaster open”. Looking at the search result, we can see that my blog is third but the summary returned shows no relevance to the intended search, yet still it was clicked on, why? Do users systematically work their way down the list from top result to bottom? Why do people not make an assessment on relevance before they click? In effect, is this confirming Jakob’s hypothetical question in 2001 that “Some People Are Too Stupid To Serve”? Todd Miller has a short article “In Defense of Stupid Users” which makes some valid points. Nevertheless, I do still despair of some people. Anyway, I hope they enjoyed their visit and, for the record, Primark in Doncaster is open 9-5.30 Monday to Thursday, 9-6 on Friday, 8.30-6 on Saturday and 10-4 on Sunday. (Their website has the detail but alas did not appear in the natural search for the original query)

>> UPDATE: Silly me, they were looking for details of a new store which opened 19th October. Some bloggers are too stupid to write...

The Rise of the User Experience Podcast

2006-10-16T13:59:00.000+01:00

The rise of the user/customer experience podcast. A brief summary of current offerings with their three most recent posts…

Boagworld (not strictly a UX podcast but relevant all the same):
> Podcast 53: Ecommerce Usability (09.OCT), 52: JavaScript Libraries (02.OCT), 51: Better Google Listings (26.SEP)

UXpod (Gerry Gaffney’s regular podcast)
> Ethnography (09.OCT) World Usability Day (02.OCT) Market Research (22.SEP)

DesignCritique (Products For People, “Encouraging useful and usable design for a better customer experience”)
> World Usability Day (15.OCT) Alarm Clock Critiques (29.SEP) Wristwatch Critiques (10.SEP)

IA (Jeff Parks’ Canadian-orientated Information Architecture ‘cast)
> User Centered Design (sic) (04.OCT) Plain Language and Usability / Business Process before Technology (01.SEP) Using Metaphors / The Information Architect as Universal Translator (01.AUG)

“Ambient Signifiers” Subtle indicators to make you feel you’re on the right path

2006-10-16T13:30:00.000+01:00

The web gives you the chance to do things that aren’t easily achievable in the physical word. It allows us to build metaphors and equivalent processes in a unique way. Take, for example, the fact that when you go to the supermarket you probably approach each aisle in the same order and generally from the same direction each time. Or, perhaps, when you go to your favourite spot on the coast in Cornwall you might take the same coastal path walk that you’ve done for years. Now, this is all fine if nothing ever changes, it becomes so familiar that you could do it without conscious navigation but what if they moved some items around on the shelves or they put a few houses along the coastal path, introduced some stiles and cut down a significant hedgerow? Though the route would be familiar it would not be implausible that you could get lost.

This happens all the time on the web. In fact, in the case of online banks, changing even the homepage style-sheet can result in hundreds of calls to a call centre to check that the site is still the same and is not a phishing cover-page.

Digital Patina
Back in 2002 when the BBC were doing a site re-design they introduced the idea of ‘digital patina’ (it may have emerged elsewhere beforehand, I’d be keen to know if it did) whereby a well-trodden path began to emerge online for return visitors. So, for example, if you regularly visited BBC Sport, the Sport section on the .co.uk homepage would darken over time. The point was not to ensure you always found the right link, your regular visits prove you had no trouble finding it, but rather it was to ambiently re-assure you that the site recognised you and was moulding to you like a well-worn pair of jeans. The BBC described it as ‘having a conversation with the user’.

In other cases this sort of subtle, unconscious cue of familiarity has a more direct role in keeping users on the right track. Underground or Metro networks the world over have to cope with both familiar and novice users completing the full spectrum of navigation paths from the short-stop to the long-haul. Over the years a host of navigation aids have been introduced: station names, coloured lines, matching carriage colours. In the case of the Tube in London the famous map takes its form from the very fact that the traditional ambient signifiers (landscape markers) do not exist underground. These are the obvious ones, but not everyone would realise that the ornate tiling at Tottenham Court road and at other parts along the network is a direct response to the need to introduce identifiable signifiers for the illiterate, which now work as effective ambient visual cues for today’s passengers. In Tokyo, the metro system is replete with unique chimes at each station, reminding the absorbed or dozing commuter that they are on the right route or perhaps providing an unfamiliar ‘wake-up call’ when they’ve over-slept or missed their stop.

Well Trodden Path & Visited Link Colours
There are two possibilities here for the web: Firstly, present some simple cookie-based JavaScript control of the CSS that identifies return visitors and applies style-sheet changes over time. Secondly, that the use of subtle, ambient cues is deployed across the site for everyone’s benefit. Taking these in turn it seems to be clear to me that the first is not widely applied, it didn’t even survive on the BBC and, as good ideas spread so rapidly on the web, I would assume that it simply doesn’t provide any benefit. The the well trodden path is retained in the users mind, much like last year’s footprints do not survive on the coastal path. It used to be the case that visited hyperlinks would be a different colour but this has declined over the years (through a natural coding evolution and the erosion of the ‘blue underlined’ hypertext convention) to such a point that users don’t expect this to happen and, from the usability tests I have seen, they don’t seem to be aware it is when it is employed. The only place where it still works effectively on a massive scale is Google, reminding you of which links you’ve tried.

Secondly, the subtle use of ambient signifiers to aide navigation is widespread on the better architectured sites. The use of relevant colour schemes (e.g. BBC channels online mirror their TV equivalents in colour and typeface), the subtle section colouring for Google, Froogle, Google Groups, Google Maps and Google Directory. But sites could go further. One cue which has developed by accident has been the use of different visual styles for secure or registered-user areas of sites. Traditionally many of these areas were built by IT departments whereas the main sites were built by marketing and creative agencies, the latter changing frequently whereas the secure/registered areas remain consistent. There is often a jump to a new window, occasionally stripped of navigation elements and so on. All of these visual cues remind customers that they’re not in Kansas anymore. Whilst there is a case for better brand alignment (particularly for reasons of consumer trust) which I and Marc at dancingmango (and here)have discussed recently, there is also a strong benefit from letting customers feel the join.

Still Logged In?
To end, two final examples. Sharing access to a PC (despite there being lots of capable hardware in the flat) means that I am forever going on to Amazon (UK), browsing around and then going to add stuff to my basket or wishlist before realising I’m logged on as my other half. Amazon are not good at making it obvious when you’re logged in. the “Welcome, John …” text is lost below the navigation tabs and I’m usually so task-focussed that the first thing I do from the homepage is search, ignoring the ‘recommended for you’ images which might have provided a first line indication that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d say this is a weekly usability annoyance that, even given the frequency that it occurs, as a user continues to thwart me. It genuinely surprises me that Amazon haven’t picked this up in testing. I simply don’t feel logged-in. On the flipside, the more contemporary styling of the US Amazon site instantly lets me know I’m in the wrong country without having to look for the $ signs. Finally, take a look at newsmap, a site I’ve mentioned in the past, try and work out what ambient signifiers are at work here … hint, it’s to do with recency and popularity…

The beauty of all this low-frequency stuff is that it doesn’t involve radical re-designs, adding noise to the page, icon development etc. etc. etc. It simplifies and clarifies the user experience. It makes sites feel bespoke or, in the BBC sense, as if they are having a conversation with you, but without needing to employ significant amounts of personalisation functionality.

References
:: “Ambient Signifiers, How I Learned to Stop Getting Lost and Love Tokyo Rail” – Boxes & Arrows
:: “The Glass Wall, The Home Page Redesign 2002” – Liam Delahunty
:: newsmap – data visualisation with ambient signifiers

"Stop Designing Products"

2006-10-12T14:36:00.000+01:00

My regular trawling of blogs turned up this gem from Peter Merholz of Interaction Gurus, Adaptive Path. It has a huge degree of resonance for me as it deals with customer experience outside the traditional ‘sell a product and then support the service of that product’ interaction and inspires us to consider the total experience creation that Apple recently demonstrated is so successful with the iPod + iTunes + iTunes ‘Holy Trinity’. Peter cites Kodak in an inspired slide (page 6) which shows just how thinking about improving an experience results in a pioneering product. Hiding away the complexity from the end-user, sound familiar?

This is system design, looking at what the end-user finds difficult in interacting with disparate processes, technologies and so on and producing either a sealed ‘closed’ system (Apple’s integration or the Kodak roll-film camera) or an open, adaptable application (Flickr, Firefox). This leads on to examples where the integration and experience-orientated design spreads across channels. So, for example, the same interaction experience happens offline (in stores, on the phone) as it does on the web. To some extent it’s all about empowerment in both cases, you interact, we do the rest.

Some very basic online examples:

:: your online bank invites you to ‘consolidate your finances’. You click a button and the bank calculates where your money should be best organised, it suggests an amount is moved to savings, your current account is maintained at a given level and you set-up a direct debit into an ISA … you then click to confirm and it arranges it for you. Job done.

:: your train company allows you to log-in to their site via a mobile device and click ‘I’m delayed’, you tell it what train you’re on and where you want to go to and it suggests the fastest alternative route … “get off at Ipswich and continue to Norwich via Peterborough”

There’s nothing worse than design that hints at this level of seamless integration and falls at the final hurdle. I recently moved house and was told about ‘iammoving.com’. The premise was that we tell them once and my address change is taken care of by populating my information throughout my banks, credit cards, loyalty cards, the DVLA, council tax TV licensing etc. etc. The reality was considerably different. Of the 40 or so suppliers I identified I had a relationship with, only three had electronic notification set-up, so I had to manually go through adding additional information, generating a PDF, printing and posting that and invariably partaking in more correspondence once they sent me additional forms. The whole thing became a huge pain in the arse frankly and I wished I’d just used our re-direct with Royal Mail to respond to anyone who subsequently mailed us.

Contrast this with Virgin Atlantic, their adverts currently convey a fully realised sense of experience. You don’t just buy an airline ticket, you buy a chauffeured trip to a pre-flight lounge, a simplified check-in process, a quality seat and in-flight service … they take care of you. I presume of course, I’ve not had the opportunity to try it out!

And it can be done in service industries I’m sure, I just haven’t really seen it yet. Hopefully someone reading this is responsible for customer experience in an organisation that can really benefit from this approach.

TrainBlog.co.uk - picking up the baton

2006-10-10T14:49:00.000+01:00

Recently I announced a self-imposed amnesty on blogging about the appalling customer service I had experience on 'one'. However, I am happy to pass the baton to these guys, TrainBlog.

Produced by Norwich-based agency Soup, train blog is a centralised repository for commuters' displeasure and, I suspect, the vast majority of that will be local. Interestingly, you can (in a very 2.0 way) add your comments by texting.

(B)log-in and see what other people have to say. Over to you....

“The Sleeper Curve”, MySpace provides tangible evidence of an increasingly intelligent generation.

2006-10-10T09:34:00.000+01:00

Last week I wrote an email to Steven Johnson, I didn’t get a reply. I don’t blame him for not responding, my email was a rambling list of questions and half-baked theories that, if I’d bothered to read pages 116 to 124 of his book I would have found the answers.

My thoughts had been centred around the use of social network sites and were building on ideas mooted in this blog about the “Noble Savages” of the web, the teens and tweens immersed in the likes of MySpace, Bebo and Faceparty. They were building too on themes discussed in the previous 115 pages of his book which talked of a rising “Sleeper Curve” of complexity in the social and cognitive functioning of recent generations. Johnson points to the scale and complexity of online gaming in virtual worlds, the multiple threading of plot lines, character complexity, reduction in signposting and chronological fracturing seen in modern popular television (Lost, 24, Sopranos) and the Emotional Quotient demands of that most-maligned genre of entertainment, ‘reality’ TV. I wanted to ask him whether he thought the mindless surfing and banal bedroom postings of teenagers in Woking really constituted evidence for an increasingly intelligent generation.

As it happens, I got to the end of the email and had started to answer my own questions anyway. Taking place within these social networks are a myriad of interactions the principle aim of which is to create more links, to find more people who are like you, who like the same music or can introduce you to new ideas, cultures, crafts and stimulation. In effect, people to whom you can relate. The manifestation of this is the buddy list, a publicly viewable incentive and tangible sign of success. Here, at work on the most ‘cutting edge’ popular technology, is that most rudimentary facet of personal development, conditional learning. The user learns with subtle, slow experimentation that adding a given song, mentioning a brand, blogging about a person, citing a celebrity or slating a school friend will encourage someone else to request to be added to their list. Over time these ‘new’ social skills are honed and polished in such a way that the most prolific of MySpace users can demonstrate a who’s-who of buddies, displaying the great and the good of their community.

Perhaps some of these kids (though by no means all of them are under 21) would have demonstrated these skills and abilities offline in a different time, but I contend that these sites have taken away some of the physical limitations of real life (time, distance, health and beauty) to allow a greater number of people to become popular in a world that previously would have excluded them.

[note: the image on this post is a Univ. Claifornia visualisation of a social network on Friendster]

Some of the most unlikely people now have Macs

2006-10-06T10:43:00.000+01:00

Sat on the train the other morning minding my own business (well adding ratings to my iPod – more on that later) when a woman sat herself opposite me. She dived into her generic handbag and whipped out a MacBook, a big one too. I smiled to myself at the pervasiveness of this brand and then it all became clear; she dived back into her back, past a floral umbrella and deposited an Innocent smoothie carton on the table. I wanted to take a look under the table and see if there were Birkenstocks on her feet and then I realised I didn’t need to look as I’d already got a full house, she was wearing square, thick-rimmed specs.

If anything puts me off buying a Mac it’s this creep toward commonality (and maybe Steve Jobs’ insistence on wearing black shirts tucked in to jeans with all the collar buttons done up).

But back to the ‘pod. Last weekend I was clearing up my hard drive after the traumatic but oddly easy transfer of all my music and photos to a Buffalo Linkstation. I saw my old shared music folder and thought I don’t need to share that anymore, cue changing of file access rights. A few hours later after I’d reset and returned to do some more work I discovered iTunes wouldn’t open, complaining that it could find or change the ‘My Music’ folder. But I’d carefully saved that hadn’t I? I’d made sure when I changed the location of the music that I’d retained the .itl and .xml files with all my playlists, a year’s worth of ratings and play counts …

However, the priorities changing meant that windows had lost information about which ‘My Music’ folder I was now using and, despite attempts at file recovery and re-installs of iTunes, I couldn’t recover any of this information. Gutted. Ok, so the music was safe on the Buffalo, but the thing that really makes iTunes and the iPod work is use, a worn path that indicates favourites, preferences, moods etc. etc.

The solution was complicated and basically involved a session inside RegEdit (a 'how to' guide) to find the keys pertaining to My Music (a Shell Folder) and restoring these to a given location. TweakUI hadn’t been any help as it didn’t even show ‘My Music’ in the list. That done iTunes restarted, I switched to an Ethernet connection and imported 30GB of music again and began to set-up a host of playlists.

Fortunately the iPod had retained a load of ratings and play data so I made sure that, before I re-synchronised it I printed off a few playlists to go back and re-rate. I should consider it a positive. Hindsight allows me to rate more tunes in context and complete a process which I’d got bored of about three months after getting the pod, in a few weeks of long commutes I should have begun to get that wonderful sense of ownership and familiarity again.

And the best part about it? I don’t blame Apple one bit, it was a Windows cock-up caused by a naïve user error. Apple are blameless. In fact, after a weekend trip to the Apple store in Bluewater to show my fiancée the New Nano I’ve decided I’m getting one too (despite middle-aged frumpiness and Steve’s black shirts), sticking my worn first-generation Nano on eBay. But, before I do, any takers at a good price?

Body off Baywatch, face off Crimewatch ... do customers prefer it to function, look good or both?

2006-10-03T21:51:00.000+01:00

Fortunately in the blogosphere (eeugh) someone somewhere will be talking about a topic that's pertinent to your current interests. This week my regular read of Marc’s dancingmango site hit a nerve (in a good way) by talking about transactional regions (“Most retail banking web presence is just not connected”). At The Company my colleagues and I were recently debating whether transactional areas should look different from static ‘brochureware’. I think they should, or at least that it doesn't matter if they don't. In the olden days, Jakob used to say that web-based applications shouldn’t ape browser interraction. But this was before XHTML and JavaScript reached near universality and the vast majority of users expect a rich interface.

Marc’s spoken in the past about breaking free from linear form completion in a wonderful post (“Shoot the wizard! Designing a real world form”) and I support this idea of complete user control. Where I differ from him, and to return to the point, is that I believe customers appreciate a pared-down approach to look and feel on transactional sites. Yes there are legacy issues and, from our own back-end, I know these things tended to have been built by systems guys rather than web designers but the effect has been that there tends to be less distractive marketing guff (page bloat is another thing .. see below) and provided they’ve been interatively designed and user tested, things tend to work functionally.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I think the future will see us move to a more conversational web and increasingly customers will eschew sites that hark back to the days of padded table cells in favour of sites where the brand fits their expectations and aspirations - but we’re not there yet. We’re still, as consumers, focussed on speed and task efficiency and so sometimes keeping the box of crayons away from the menu board helps keep this focus. That said I am aware of situations where non-native web coders (and by that I mean teams where the day job is back-end code) have been left to develop the presentation layer and the result is bloated code, high page weight and long download times. Not to mention accessibility and cross-browser compatability issues.

In short, I don’t think we need to sweat it too much when transactional elements measurably work but don’t look great but I do think we need to worry when we separate static from transactional for cost and infrastructure reasons only to find that we’re suddenly using a top-nav where a left nav was before and the page loads would test the patience of a narcoleptic sloth. Marc cites some great examples where this disconnect has resulted in sloppy coding on transactional sites (HSBC image and First Direct image).

My final caveat is that this holds true for financial services sites and the more tedious transactional elements online. It’s pretty brand dependant; Lloyds TSB for example don’t need an exciting online banking service, they need one that’s quick, fully functional, compliant, compatible and secure. On the other hand if the Apple store was all this but visually dry and plain you’d start to feel a disconnect with the brand because, for someone like Apple, their consumer brand runs right through the entire customer lifecycle.

National Customer Service Week

2006-10-02T10:46:00.000+01:00

Just a short post to direct people to the National Customer Service Week website ... some of my 'favourite' non customer-orientated companies are listed on the participating organisations page.

User Experience 2006 Conference: What I expect to see/hear...

2006-09-29T10:52:00.000+01:00

I’ve booked myself in for a day at User Experience 2006 on the 8th November to take part in Dan’s documentation session. As with most things NN/g you have to pay for the privilege of dealing with the most well-known and popular user-centric consultants so I hope I, and The Company get value from the session. (UPDATE: See Web Analyst, apparently John Boyd's session in Seattle left some people wanting)

Having been fortunate to have taken degrees in psychology and information processing I feel that the science behind UE is a given. Where I have had issues in recent years has been in converting my academic reporting and methodologies to corporate environments. A director doesn’t want to read a journal-formatted paper and it’s rarely appropriate to approach each project with academic rigour when the focus is on the baseline. Furthermore, your colleagues haven’t all come from the same background and so working together produces discrepancies in documentation and techniques.

The intention is therefore to consolidate my experiences to-date and emerge from this session with a standardised set of deliverables for real-world projects. Deliverables which will inform and empower the decision-makers and clients surrounding our projects with comprehensive data, insight and solutions.

Later on in the day I’m hoping to attend the session on Windows Vista. I think we have problems sometimes dealing with disparate teams across locations and so on but read this:

"...[the talk will cover] the challenges and ultimately the successes the user experience team achieved in driving product innovation and quality, despite their working in a largely engineering-driven culture, and having to collaborate, over five years, with several thousand people across multiple divisions at Microsoft Corp"

Crumbs. That's scale!

GRO Website Usability Improves

2006-09-29T10:49:00.000+01:00

Took a look at the GRO website again yesterday after mentioning a difficult process last year in ordering certificates. Well, despite clinging on to the default ‘no’ option for the reference number (see original post for explanation), I’m pleased to say that they have re-structured the body content on the page to highlight certificate ordering within each registration category. In a delineated ‘shortcuts’ box you can click through to a generic ‘ordering’ page. There are still too many click involved from the homepage to get to that point but it is an improvement from having to dig around in text on the page.

Now, if they could just fix that right-hand menu on the category pages…

one Amnesty Announced

2006-09-27T12:24:00.000+01:00

I hereby announce that most noble of things, an amnesty. An amnesty that is on the long-suffering staff of one, my commuting nemesis since 2003. However, before this officially starts I need to add a few qualifiers: that the amnesty lasts until at least December, that it exists notwithstanding a catastrophic service failure and that it begins only after I’ve had my final constructive words to say.

A couple of things have brought me to this point, this zenith of invective. Primarily, a desire to avoid being a one-track blog as the principle focus for it must be my day job, web user-experience. Secondly, frankly I could do without entering into dialogue with staff at one who are as impotent as I am at changing their corporate culture, even if they’re trying nobly. Their hands are tied by process, budget and management and until their bosses (Dominic Booth particularly) start reading this and understanding the pain, there’s very little point. Organ grinders and monkeys.

But, as I say, before the amnesty, one (ahem) last post. Yesterday I applied for my new season ticket. When you complete the bi-annual NX appraisal of one they ask you whether or not you’d choose to use the service again but, like many commuters, I have little choice and so, whilst disgusted by the service, I am forced to hand over money. Money this year which amounted to £4,480 (Chelmsford to Norwich annual season ticket) which is an incredible sum. To put this in to perspective this could buy me a reasonable second hand 2001 model Golf 1.9TDi, or it means that if you work as a one call centre advisor you’d probably have to work from January to mid April full-time on no pay just to cover the season ticket cost from your salary.

What does this get me? It gets a journey time of 1hr 30mins in the morning and 1hr 15mins in the evening at roughly £6.30 per hour. (There’s a cruel irony that when the journey time is longer I pay less per hour so perhaps I should be grateful for delays.)

Now, imagine I’d spent the money on that Golf. Imagine the frustration then if when I went out to drive it, one day a week it simply would refuse to open and let me drive it for ten minutes or so, without telling me why leaving me standing for an undeterminable amount of time. Imagine if, on the coldest, windiest days after work I turned up at the car park and it wasn’t there, for two hours. Imagine if when driving home it just stopped and sat on the side of the road without explanation every 10 minutes for a few minutes. Or as soon as the weather warmed up the air conditioning would pack up and be entirely unserviceable until October when it would work again. Or perhaps if I got in the car only to be told that I’d have to transfer to another one which would drive me somewhere else and leave me in a car park at Stansted Airport for two hours with several hundred other Golf drivers, little advice, no shelter and a requirement to push and jostle to get on a bus to go to another car park when the Golf would then be able to drive me home.

You’d be pretty irritated by your purchase wouldn’t you? But at least your £4480 would last for more than a year, probably – in the case of a Golf of that age - another ten years. With one, I pay for that level of service and it lasts me 12 months at which point I’ll have to pay over £4500 for the same again despite assurances that next year I might get new seats and someone would re-paint it.

I’m not saying that the Golf could get me to work in the same time, the drive from Chelmsford to Norwich is automotively grotesque and it would cost me money in tyres, petrol and maintenance. The point is to get some perspective on experience and service expectations.

The final subject of my criticism is the ‘one’ website. Yesterday morning I didn’t know the cost of a season ticket between Chelmsford and Norwich (blissful ignorance) so I thought I’d have a look on the web. I anticipated it would be a simple process of selecting start and end stations and clicking ‘Go’ or similar. Well, this is genuinely the route I took and the customer journey I experienced (download PDF document 670kb).

We’re nearly at the end now just to say that there are things that one get right:

:: The staff at Ipswich station. Before I moved to Chelmsford I commuted from Ipswich and the staff there were almost entirely excellent, friendly and helpful when things inevitably went wrong.
:: The ticket buying process at the counter/on train. With chip and pin this now takes less than a minute.
:: Delay Repay (-ish). Some recompense for delays but for annual season ticket holders not using season direct it would be nice to have the cash or vouchers for the on-board catering. A week of free coffee in the morning would be a nice touch.

Just think of all the things my £4480 could help to add to that list (reliable punctual trains, new information screens at every station, clear timely relevant announcements, exceptional delay contingency plans, full online ticket facilities, universally clean and comfortable trains, ticket barriers at every station to eliminate free-loaders, pro-active customer service culture from Director-level down …)

And that’s it, from this moment on one are immune, on this blog at least, from criticism.

Don't Just Stand There, Do Something. Advice For Dealing With Delays

2006-09-22T11:23:00.000+01:00

Forty minutes late this morning. So glad I got up before 5am to catch a train … turns out a crew member was late into London from Clacton as his train had failed. The ticket inspector on the train appeared not to care and the announcements at Chelmsford station all took place on the wrong platform so I had to sit craning my ear for forty minutes to see if I could find out when I’d finally be heading North East. Still, I’ll still be here next week shovelling £52 golden pound coins into ‘one’s’ grasping little fingers to keep me ticking over until my season ticket comes up for renewal in August whereupon I’ll have to part with over £3000 for the privilege of such personal service for another year. But, in a change of heart I’ve decided that, with every moan about ‘one’ I should propose a solution, thereby giving them my Customer Experience expertise for nothing.

In The Event of A Crew Member Delay ‘one’ should:
1. Have a back-up crew member in position or on call from the starting station to prevent it occurring, failing that, invoke options 2, 3 and 4.
2. Have clear announcements at every station explaining why the delay was caused and what the most effective solution is i.e. wait for the train or catch train x and change at y etc. etc.
3. Distribute Delay Repay leaflets on the affected train at the same time as apologising personally to customers for the delay, without insipid grins.
4. Detail (on the train’s PA system) estimated new arrival times for each stop along the way.

There, I feel better now, much nicer than ranting at them all the time.

Wired Lifestyle Usability Issues

2006-09-21T12:52:00.000+01:00

I’ve just moved into a new place (see previous posts about Ikea) and bundled in one of the drawers in the kitchen was a telephone book sized folder containing all the manuals for the respective household appliances. I’ve not got round to reading many of them yet as, frankly, there are better things in life.

But this raised a interesting point, how much of the technology and engineering scattered about my place is intuitive and usable? There are certain things that, as a tech-savvy 20-something I should intuitively know how to use: microwave, washing machine, oven, electric shower. Additionally there are things that are new to me: dishwasher, integrated multi-room audio, under floor heating and I’ve enjoyed fiddling with this stuff to understand how it works to some extent. The hardest to ‘get’ was the audio system (an EGi Domos) though to be fair I’ve not even started to look at the heating yet.

To start with there are two main interfaces, a central control panel and individual room controls. The first is a complicated panel with multiple tiny buttons and LEDs, icons and descriptors are small and not always intuitive. The second is considerably smaller but, being concealed and discrete, was quite confusing in its own way. Within a few seconds of turning the control panel on I was able to start piping radio to at least one room, good stuff. It did seem quiet though… I went to the room control and pressed the two visible buttons, the station changed and it made beeping sounds. That’s all I could work out. It seemed to have two channels which presumably meant one room could be on one channel and another on a different one. Great, still quiet though….

By this point I was a little bit disappointed and complained to the missus that it must be a consequence of the location in a block of similar flats that the volume is restricted. She sighed and got on with her important stuff. About twenty seconds later I heard a loud laugh and a call to come and see what she’d done. She’d turned the volume up by simply opening the smart plastic flap covering the control and pressing the + button. She’s delighted of course, she’s worked out in about ten seconds (she claims it was obvious) and if it wasn’t for her I’d still be listening to it at library volume. Except I wouldn’t because I’d have read the manual eventually in a bid to understand what it ALL does (something girls seem to care little about, they only want to know the functionality that they’ll need). I wanted to write something insightful about how this demonstrates why users are stupid, why the obvious isn’t always so, why basic users (her) are more clever than potential experts (me) and so on but my own personal embarrassment wants to get me off the topic as soon as possible.

Not before I’ve mentioned the manual though. Which is dire. I’m so used to being fortunate to read manuals in my native language that when you find one in ‘foreign’ it can be either amusing (Asian hardware manuals in over-polite Victorian English) or baffling (in this case). The manual was originally in spanish but had had the English translation on the same page in italics making it really fiddly to keep finding the English bits and meant that the pages with diagrams were confused with twice as much text as they needed to have. Why not simply repeat the information in English as it’s done in 90% of guide manuals with the same layout? They’d decided to reduce costs by printing one manual for every product in the range too. So you have to thumb through and find the specific version of the control panels you’ve got installed and then read their pages complete with footnotes explaining that feature x might not be available depending on your installation. I’d really rather be given a piece of paper inviting me to their (ghastly) site to download the specific manual in English for my installation. It would cost less than sending one rubbish bi-lingual manual to every customer and be a hundred times more effective.

To that end I’ve not even bothered to set some of the more advanced functions, pre-set radio, wake alarms, door entry intercom etc. etc. Finally, the input interface for external audio equipment … a 7-pin DIN! I can’t remember the last time I saw one of these for audio, probably on my Dad’s 1970s B&O tape deck. It’s unbelievable that there wasn’t a dual phono or 3.5mm jack input. I spent ages in Maplin trying to find a cable to fit, it did but wasn’t in stereo (presumably down to the peculiar wiring in the DIN) so I had to order a specific part from the manufacturer. The customer experience of owning something like this shouldn’t be such hard work

Nano Technology, Not So Smart Now Are You?

2006-09-21T12:26:00.000+01:00

(This is my first post in the new Beta version of Blogger)

Sometimes the little things bug you. Despite being an astonishingly effective product and, more than that, a lifestyle accessory my Nano can still irritate. Why is it that Smart Playlists are not smart on my Nano? I have gone through and set a complicated series of playlists (based on nested IF statements) which meant that, in iTunes at least, I get to hear songs I’ve not heard for ages within a certain genre and given certain ratings criteria. If these core tunes are available in my Nano’s library, why can the software not cope with live updates of the playlist? Sadly it has to wait until the ‘pod is synchronised with iTunes before it updates the play dates etc. However, this information is clearly available on the pod which stores the play date and time and even creates a recently played history. Does anyone know if they fixed this in the new ones?

"Both James and I are looking forward to getting our hamster back."

2006-09-21T11:58:00.000+01:00

Just like the rest of us, Clarkson speaks for a legion of Top Gear fans after Richard Hammond's accident.

Tags: top gear + richard hammond + jeremy clarkson

one aware of blog

2006-09-19T13:13:00.000+01:00

UPDATE 20.SEP.06
This week I've seen a big increase in people searching for one related stuff and landing on the blog and the IP logs show plenty of hits from 62.172.97.11 which, if you do a simple WHOIS relates to LER, London Eastern Railway, one's official name.

Technorati Tags: one railway + customer service

You Pay For Swedes, You Get Turnips

2006-09-05T18:17:00.000+01:00

Regular readers will be aware of my evident joy at laying-in to ‘one’ for their dreadful customer service. I enjoy it because, to some extent, it’s easy to poke fun at their efforts. Today is a different story. For years I’ve told anyone who would listen (and several who weren’t interested) that everything Swedish is great: design, usability, lifestyle. Reading back over past blog entries you can even see me spouting off about Ikea.

Up until the weekend I’d only been a drop-in visitor to Ikea and my impressions were favourable. (I should, at this point, clarify that I’m referring to the Ikea store at Lakeside, Thurrock). I’d managed to wander through the showroom, pick-up minor items and – with my brother – select and buy a self-service chest of drawers which he assembled with no problems. This weekend my experiences were wholly different.

I’d had a fraught couple of visits in the proceeding weeks trying to determine what we needed for our new flat in Chelmsford. We made the mistake of going at the busy peak times at the weekend so, for that, I couldn’t blame the store. On Sunday we got there early, early enough to have half an hour of quiet browsing before the tills opened and the crowds began to build. This is where things started to go wrong. I’m going to break this post up into sections because there’s loads to talk about.

:: The Experience vs. Aspiration
Take a look at the catalogue and you’ll see the items in store set up in show-home situations. Generally these seem to be large lofty apartments or grand drawing rooms with acres of space to fill with rack upon rack of storage solutions. Take a typical catalogue page and itemise everything on it, it would costs thousands to re-create those looks and most of the people that visit the Lakeside Ikea are lower middle-class Thames Estuary dwellers with little sense of design. Not a problem in itself of course but it starts to chip away at the aspirational image you hold in your head of your clean, simple, Scandinavian life-styled room. In all honesty it’s more likely that you’ll recreate a Basildon New Build. Secondly, but related to this point, the images and the showrooms in-store show a level of co-ordination and order impossible in the real world. Few people can present an open clothes rail in their bedroom kitted out with just shades of white and brown. This, of course, makes you buy into an idea but feel let down when you get it home and your room doesn’t look the same. It’s hard to take furniture apart, put it back in the package and bring it back (particularly if it only cost you £45 and you live an hour or more away), so people don’t and Ikea keep the money.

:: The Quality & Consistency
Say you wanted to create a co-ordinated look in a bedroom with matching furniture. Ikea would recommend you select a range (in our case Malm) select a colour and away you go. This doesn’t work. One look at the units side by side show that inconsistencies in the production of the product’s veneer mean that one mid brown is generally quite different from another mid brown. You have to select a shade where the colour variations are easier to disguise, in our case Oak veneer. Again, in terms of quality (and I know the place is supposed to be cheap) take a look at a sofa like the Klippan. It looks great in black in the catalogue and on the website. Go in-store and you’ll find the cover fits so loose it looks like a tatty student room day-bed. The furnishing equivalent of the Big Mac reality not matching the photo on the menu board.

:: The Shopping Experience
We wanted to buy a sofa and a bed (amongst other things). We picked up a product sheet for the bed, which ostensibly listed all items we’d need which – I assumed as it wasn’t clear – that we could pick up from the self-service warehouse. For the sofa I assumed this worked the same That is to say we’d locate it in the warehouse and check it through the till before going to the delivery point. Nowhere was I told that this was a ‘full service’ item and that we’d have to arrange the order in the showroom first. I found that out only by the time we’d got down into the warehouse via the showroom maze, requiring my fiancée to scramble back to the upper levels of the showroom to do so. In addition, when scooting around the warehouse on my own looking for the bed I’d discovered that the mattress wasn’t there, so we’d have a bed – which we’d have to pay to get delivered – with no mattress. We’d have to wait for the mattress, come to visit again and pay another £50 for delivery. Likewise, the bedside tables we were after weren’t in stock … and, by the way, it’s no good suggesting a stock-check before you go if you need to go to work out what it is you want! Finally we got everything on the list and checked out through the tills, over £700 lighter …

:: The Delivery/Fulfillment Experience
The delivery was on time, just after 8am today in fact. The deliverymen dropped the sofa but said nothing to my better half (she’d seen it from the window and hoped they’d mention it). They went through the items and we realised we’d bought the wrong colour bed, evidently picking up the wrong parts sheet from the display. Our fault entirely but the delivery guys wouldn’t take it back for us, neither could we arrange for it to be collected. We’d have to hire a van and take it back (another £50) and pay again to have the right one delivered (assuming it’s in stock when we get there) at another £50. To further compound the issue they told us we’d need fixing brackets – which weren’t on the parts list for the bed. Again, it’s down to us to return to the store to collect these (presumably at a cost).

:: The Customer Service Experience
Being new(ish) to the process I’d hoped that Ikea would show some compassion and support us in returning the items and resolving the orders especially given that we’d spent over £700 there (which must be higher than the average customer), but they couldn’t care less. To resolve the issues will require (assuming some stock unavailability) several trips, at least two hire/delivery charges, petrol and hours of travel time. Probably totalling a couple of hundred pounds. Why can’t Ikea assist in any way? Perhaps at least arranging a redundant delivery van (which, after all, must return from deliveries empty on most days) to at least return the stock or allow us to at least hold the correct colour bed to ensure we don’t waste a trip returning to get the item we have actually paid for. I appreciate it’s not their business model to hold items and so on for cost reasons but – on a case-by-case basis - there should be more after care.

:: We’re not in Sweden Anymore
The trouble is the business hasn’t translated like-for-like from Sweden. It’s staffed with bored Essex teenagers and poorly trained customer service staff. As you walk around you begin to think about how basic and cheap it feels not that it’s customer centric, design orientated, stylishly functional and simple. Ikea in the UK has not got the Swedish friendly air about it other than in the marketing copy and catalogue imagery. When the in-store experience fails it fails badly and the fulfilment has seriously dented the brand’s image. So much so that I’m writing this entry.

In Sweden they can process online orders. I bet they could bend over a bit to help me were I to make a couple of novice mistakes like I did here. Just imagine if, when we’d called them today, the Lakeside store had said “fine, sure mistakes happen and seeing as you’re obviously keen on our products [based on the order value] we’ll ask one of our returning delivery vans to collect your items and we’ll hold an Oak coloured Malm bed for you for 48 hours”. I’d have been delighted and I’d be blogging about that instead. It would have cost them probably £50 but increased the likelihood that I’ll spend several hundred pounds in there again by a factor of ten. As it stands I’m more likely to go round the corner from home to Habitat, spend 25% more and be sure to be taken care of.

There were just two good moments on Sunday. One young warehouse lad who dashed off to get a trolley to help the missus with a mattress and a short bearded chap in the sofa team who said he’d raise a query with head office about why the Ektorp sofa had feathers in the fabric version and foam in the leather.

I’m writing to Jens Johansson in his role as manager at Lakeside in the desperate hope that he can inject those Swedish social principles back into his workforce and acknowledge that cheap products really shouldn’t mean shoddy customer care.

Technorati: Ikea + customer service + customer care

:: Similar rants about Ikea's customer service

Dominic Booth Is Sorry, And He's Cross With Network Rail

2006-09-04T16:37:00.000+01:00

Dominic Booth is one railway's managing director and he is failing at his job. In my opinion. As his message today proves. In it he apologises for the debacles of last week and points the finger of blame squarely at Network Rail. However, he simply cannot grasp the scale of disorganisation at Stansted airport on Friday night. He should have been there, he should have experienced it himself and he should be man enough to speak directly to us passengers and determine what went wrong. His hollow statement where he indicated he'd 'review' proceedings is a groundless as the claim by his staff on Friday evening that 20 buses had been ordered to transport us and it is as flimsy as his staff's whimsical voices above the baying mob of disgruntled fare-paying passengers left stranded in a car park.

The experiences continue to prove that one don't think about their customer image - take a look at this screen grab of their site today for example. On the one hand there are no problems ("A Good Service Is Operating On All Routes"), on the other hand there are seven ("There are currently 7 line and service reports").

It's so bad it's almost laughable.

Technorati Tags: one railway + delay + train + customer service + Dominic Booth + Delay Repay

Web 2.0? That's SO Web 1.0 ... Tim Berners-Lee explains ...

2006-09-02T07:25:00.000+01:00

Amusing piece from the IBM podcast after it's passed through the web's summarisers ... connecting people with Web 2.0 is nothing new, it's what Web 1.0 (such as it is/was) has done all along. Read Alex Barnett's wonderfully entitled piece, "Sir Tim Calm Down 2.0"

'one' Unmitigated Disaster

2006-09-02T00:24:00.000+01:00

Finally got back to Ipswich around 22:35, via a two hour wait at Stansted airport amongst a poorly marshalled baying mob of commuters and weekend passengers. The police were there and one guy from one. None of them had megaphones, the crowd were jostling and three coaches came, filled up and went before I could board one. There was no order of priority, just a bun-fight. I filmed the chaos and have uploaded it (QuickTime 3GP and not great quality). A full four and a half hours after I set off, for the second time this week. I thought Wednesday's lack of information was bad but this complete and utter ineptitude and lack of on-the-ground presence from staff was inexcusable.

:: EveningStar have first online reports.

Technorati Tags: one railway + delay + train + customer service

Twice in one week, overhead lines causing chaos...

2006-09-01T18:46:00.000+01:00

Can't quite believe it but I'm sat here on a train at Liverpool Street (the 18:00 to Norwich) logged in via someone's open network as the trains are up the proverbial again, latest message from one:

Points Failure & Overhead wire damage.
Due to a points failure at Shenfield & also damage to overhead wires between Ingatestone &
Chelmsford, all services to/from London Liverpool Street to Norwich, Clacton,
Ipswich & Southend Victoria are being severely delayed. Trains are currently
unable to move forward from Shenfield at present. Passengers are advised not to
travel unless absolutely necessary.
Message received: 01/09/2006 at 18:09:15

Which is helpful if you're on the train. Just Skyped home to let m'lady know. We were supposed to be packing for our big move to Chelmsford tomorrow tonight.

Will update with 'one' service messages, last announcement was a full 30 mins ago...

A Smashing Swedish Design Blog

2006-09-01T16:50:00.000+01:00

Adam's swedesres blog has not only got a gorgeous header graphic, it's packed with Swedish design resources. In three minutes browsing I saw this great link to the Volvo S80 site which does a nice job of showing off broadband-optimised immersive brochureware.

It also pushed me towards Starring's website where I saw a portfolio link for the AMF Pension campaign, the 'ageing' technique used here is an uncanny echo the the Norwich Union 'Ready For Tomorrow' campain (43 going on 17 and The Future)....

This blog's feeds are now fixed

2006-09-01T15:38:00.000+01:00

Kept checking my Technorati listing to see that it was days out of date, the problem is that Technorati pulls the Atom feed from this site and not the RSS 2.0 one. The Atom one had problems with an incorrect character in the post about DENIM which I've now corrected so hopefully anyone using this feed via an Atom reader will be fine. Let me know if you use a feed reader to subscribe to this blog by the way...

:: RSS 2.0 Spec vs. Atom Spec

:: Technorati RSS + Atom + DENIM + Technorati

'one' fail to ease the pain of another major delay

2006-08-31T11:03:00.000+01:00

A few days ago I was checking my blog logs and realised that I was still getting a wealth of hits here for people searching for various gumpf about one railway and their preposterous customer care. I hadn’t written for a while and despite seeing incoming links from monerailway I couldn’t really think of much to say. The service has been below average but not disasterous and I’d changed direction (I’m heading to London from Ipswich these days). The trouble is things can be just ‘ok’ with one but when it does go wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong.

My previous delay record was 2 hours 20 minutes, back in November last year on my way back from London, I beat that tonight with a three and a half hour delay sat just east of Chelmsford when power lines came down (BBC News 31.AUG.06) (can anyone explain how this happens?). We were trapped behind two other trains and could only pass one at a time incredibly slowly. The conductor did his best and told us he couldn’t tell us anything, on one occasion going for 1.5hrs without speaking to us. The trolley passed through once and never re-appeared. We sat in silence, punctuated only by the sound of people speaking to friends and relatives to inform them that, yep, we were still waiting to move. I fortunately had my Nano and laptop with me so I could at least keep myself entertained as long as the li-ion batteries would last.

Eventually we did move of course and passed the stricken train which still had passengers on it. The conductor piped-up with news about our revised ETAs and some arrangements for onward connections which everyone must surely have missed. As people picked up their phones and called to let others know their plight I couldn’t help but feel thankful that I wasn’t on the stricken train. Clearly they were in for a long night. I’m not sure what the evacuation arrangements are but surely a train that’s been stationary for over five hours constitutes a total failure and passengers need to be escorted onto road trainsport?

I know these things happen to some extent but I cannot comprehend why one do not react with more care. Announcements should be made every fifteen minutes – even if it’s to say “we don’t know more” and efforts should be re-doubled for every 15 minutes delay to determine exactly what is going on. The only thing worse than the delay itself is not being kept informed. In addition, arrangements should be made in the event of an exceptional delay (anything over two hours) for staff to board the train at the next station and distribute free refreshments – a small biscuit and some water for example – to anyone who wants it. These supplies could be held at stops along the way for this purpose. Announcements should be made to encourage people to stand and walk about the carriage to reduce the risk of blood clotting.

As a customer all I felt on the train was that people in ‘control’ just think it’ll get fixed eventually, customers can sit tight until then. The only concession to passenger comfort was an unscheduled stop at Shenfield for a cigarette break.

Once again I’d invite anyone from one to comment in response to this post but I’m well aware that will never happen. All I can look forward to is a complete refund of my ticket.

UPDATE: When I got home (around 11pm) I saw the following message on the one website ... can anyone translate? "Cuatomers [sic] are advised to use alternative travel where possible. The LUL and First Capital Connect are passing customers reasonable routes on their Network for travel easements." [see pic included]

Technorati Tags: one railway + delay + train + customer service

When I grow up I want to be a user experience architect.

2006-08-29T17:12:00.000+01:00

I wonder if future spawn will utter these words? Does any child aspire to develop class-leading interfaces? Do kids play in the sand box at nursery attempting to create the next big thing in interaction? Possibly not yet, but there are plenty of 'adults' around who are looking to hone their skills in an emerging (though surprisingly resilient) job title in the dotcom industry and this week I've been trying to locate courses in the UK to formalise our training.

Before I get round to posting a summary of these courses (and thanks to everyone who's emailed me) I thought I'd post a link to a pertinent article by Dan Saffer (which is also a thinly veiled plug for his book ... which I'd like a copy of please Dan) and builds on an earlier article by Robert Reimann.

Longitudinal Experience With Sennheiser Results In Great Customer Service

2006-08-22T15:28:00.000+01:00

Last week I listened to Tim and Tom’s podcast and picked up on their reviews of the PX100, a pair of headphones I’ve supported on this blog in the past. Well, like Tim’s Shuffle (see also), my PX100s went belly-up a month ago when the jack-plug developed a loose connection. I also own a pair of HD465 which I love and sent them a letter asking for a repair under warranty despite not retaining the receipt. Well, they said ‘yes’ and gave me a repair reference to send them in under and I got a receipt with an ETA for their return.

Then, just as I was about to post this item I get home to discover a parcel waiting for me with a brand new pair of PX100s in it. They did not fix them; they gave me a completely new pair absolutely gratis. So I now have fresh clean ear pads, tight hinges and brand new drivers. Very cool and keeps me happy as a brand advocate.

I told Tim this, by email he speaks about it on this week's podcast and even gives this blog a kind review. Thanks :)

Technorati Tags: sennheiser + px100 + hd465 + design critique + customer experience

DENIM Uses A Pie Menu And Promotes Rapid Prototyping

2006-08-07T08:51:00.000+01:00

Just a quick post to reflect on something I mentioned in an earlier piece about Fitts Law. I downloaded DENIM recently to have a play (it’s free, go right ahead…) and discovered they use a pie menu. I loved it, even with a mouse it seemed really natural. Once I’d worked out that the middle circle was active too. There’s a picture of it in action in the tutorial.

A word about DENIM itself. Using a tablet PC or a pen-equipped device you can sketch out web architecture and basic design elements and watch the site build in front of you. I’m inclined to implore you to watch the demo video of this. It think it would be awesome for rapid prototyping in the ‘ideas’ section of a project, gives you the chance of making board-room ideas tangible to stakeholders etc. It’s not going to replace traditionally more labour intensive wireframing and prototype development but it might just be a good way to get your foot in the door.

PhotoSynth Shows Vast Potential to Fundamentally Change Information Navigation

2006-08-04T00:01:00.000+01:00

Following on from yesterday’s post about interactive television, I was delighted to see the BBC picked up on the PhotoSynth project. I first heard about this via Alex Barnnett’s blog and downloaded the Channel 9 video and the high-res Live Labs promo package. Clever stuff from the effervescent chaps in Seattle, must be all that caffeine. Once again, like the previous post, the technology is the first step; it is the sheer scale of the possibilities that this opens up that interest me.

The tool, such as it is, takes collections of photographs or images with a common reference point and links those points together taking into account angle, distance, scale, resolution, ambient light etc. etc. rather like a jigsaw to create a 3D virtual world. The environments they present so far are tourist spots navigated at high-speed (all due to progressive resolution encoding I think) and almost seamlessly. I am not explaining it brilliantly but the videos do a great job so take a look at them.

It does not take a genius to see the power that this technology has in terms of its application for information architecture on the web. The algorithm effectively links commonalities and provides a space into which communities can delve to enrich it even further. Imagine, if you will, that pictures are tagged (like in Flickr) or given hotspot areas such that if you submit your photos to the engine for recognition, suddenly the random picture of a statue you took in Florence comes alive in a 3D context with information about the sculptor, the location, the social context and so on…

Imagine too that a piecing together a crime scene from shots taken by members of the public at a given time or that a terrorist propaganda video can be interrogated for common visual landmarks to place it accurately. It’s a case of blending Flickr and Google Earth with Wikipedia and SETI and suddenly you're really unleashing distributed computing power and social networking to provide a virtual earth. At this point, I am sure people are considering the protection and privacy issues but, for the moment, I’m nothing but excited to see where and when I can get my hands on PhotoSynth and start adding every photo I’ve ever taken to the project.

Technorati Tags: PhotoSynth + Microsoft + Live Labs

Using Ambient Audio To Serve-Up Social and Interactive Television

2006-08-03T08:23:00.000+01:00

What I plan to do in the forthcoming days is post a regular sequence of smaller posts, all of which will hopefully cover a user-centred topic. In the past couple of weeks I’ve amassed a Targus case full of printed blog articles (I know, I know, think of the trees…), magazine columns and jotted notes about podcasts all of which I’ve intended to post about.

Regular readers and colleagues will know I’m not the greatest ‘completer finisher’ on the planet and am full of good intentions so here’s my chance to produce a consistent, topic-focussed output.

Using Ambient Audio To Serve-Up Social and Interactive Television
Xan passed me an article this month that (despite being a little too CompSci for my simple brain) introduced me to the work of Michael Fink (Univ. of Jerusalem), Michele Covell and Shumeet Baluja (Google Research). The premise, in a nutshell, is to use your laptop’s on board microphone to record the audio of the TV programme you’re watching and match that to a database of broadcasted material to serve up relevant media content from the web. This is quite clever stuff. In the same way that you can point your mobile to a speaker and send music audio to Shazam for identification, this system identifies broadcast content in real-time. There are a host of privacy issues and technical problems that the paper covers, and I’m not going to. I wanted to think more about the social element of this tool. There’s a host of personalisation, tagging and social networking stuff that can be thrown into the mix here. Imagine, for example, watching your favourite sitcom/drama/film and identifying that at that moment 20 other people were watching it too, you could chat about it via Skype or instant messaging or you could add tags to the content to identify places, objects, fashion etc. ABC drama ‘Lost’ is a great example, the online experience for the show is vast and tying this directly to the action feels neater in this model than it would via existing interactive TV channels (red-button etc.) Have a read of their paper and add your comments to this post by clicking ‘comments’ below.

Coping With Scale, Design Critique's Discussion of iTunes Identifies 'The Rub'

2006-07-27T11:40:00.000+01:00

Having gorged on podcasts recently (despite my better half's propensity to hijack the Nano for the gym) I have been a keen listener of the UPA and Design Critique (DC) output. Recently the guys at DC (Tim, Tom & Jack) have run a two part show dealing with iTunes. As a keen observer of Apple's development and having previously acknowledged the benefit of their integration of iPod and iTunes, this podcast hit upon the wider issues of coping with scale and diversity in music collections. A fascinating suggestion (and the first one which breaks Web 2.0-style social networking from the 'web' and puts it into an 'application' environment in my mind), was using folksonomy-style tagging to organise huge collections. I'd like to explore more of this - and as I've not got close to using del.icio.us properly, i think that's a good way to understand it. They've also introduced me to OK/Cancel too, which seems like yet another thing to add to my RSS feed reader in IE7 Beta 3 (which I love).

Technorati Tags : itunes + web2.0 + ipod + usability + folksonomy

The Noble Savage. Social Network Sites Display The True Goodness Of Web 2.0

2006-07-20T11:02:00.000+01:00

Today's article picks up on some of the noise being created about social networking (SN) sites. A quick scan of the Hitwise data indicates that MySpace, Bebo and FaceParty are clawing an incredible number of hits per day and NMA last week had an interesting piece by Heather Hopkins (typically aimed at advertisers) which detailed some of the differences between the sites in terms of their audience reach. MySpace is popular with the music-oriented and represents a wider age demographic, Bebo focuses on the school, college and undergraduate communities and FaceParty is a bit of a mix between the two. Towards the end of the article, Heather picks up on a particular characteristic of these sites' users, that they tend to be multi-channel and multi-media aware. Elsewhere I have read and heard about the tendency of SN users to be fantastic brand advocates, taking brand items and 'hacking' or customising them to fit within their creative space.

And so we reach my point. But before I get to that, a bit of historical parallelism. Let's consider a bit of 18th Century sentimentalism. Working from ideas first espoused in literature (eg. Dryden's "The Conquest of Granada" (1672) or Rousseau's Emile (1762) ) and developing out of circumstances and media hype surrounding the voyages of Cpt. James Cook, a culture of primitivism took hold. The essence of this was personified by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific and Americas who, in the minds of the Christianised world, represented an Edenic humankind, unencumbered by civilisation - the Noble Savage. Their simple behaviour, carefree manners and proximity to the fabric of nature - the very essence of life set them apart from their corrupted European colonisers.

To me, SN sites are populated by today's Noble Savages. Unencumbered by the 'rules' and self-regulation of web design and development, the teachings/preachings of Tognazzini, Nielsen and the corporate homepage, these SN pages are simplistic, innocent (c.f. below), disdainful of ostentatious luxury. They demonstrate a natural awareness of the technology of the web - apparently without much if any formal education and just because it's executed without much sense of order it is more often than not, perceived as inferior. It's not a parallelism without it's flaws, of course it would be wrong to say that every person with a MySpace page is an Omai, a Man Friday or Chingachgook. There is imorality to be seen, there is bullying and selfishness; even today as I flicked through someone else's ghastly Daily Mail I read a contrived piece about grooming on MySpace.

In addition, much of MySpace - perhaps in keeping with its recent purchase by Rupert Murdoch - is increasingly being hijacked by corporate brands, music publishers and so on with the express reason to sell. Just as in the 20th Century my perception of the exisitence of the true Noble (Web) Savage is becoming ever more flimsy and could be seen as bordering on the patronising. But dig deep enough and you'll find it. The intelligent blog-links, the vodcasts, the del.icio.us linkings, Folksonomies, Flickr postings etc. etc. They may not be the easiest sites to use (though I'd wager that a teen/tween would navigate them at a phenominal level of efficiency) but they're doing things and using things that those of us on cultured sites have some way to go before deploying.

The fact is that, in MySpace's defence, the design doesn't matter. People who know me will often here me refer to FriendsReunited as an ugly site that works. It, like MySpace, works in-spite of it's looks simply because it does the job it set out to do - connect people. If everyone in your class is on Bebo, you will be too. If you want to find an ex-school-friend you'll go to FriendsReunited, to hell with the interface. The kids that use SN sites have all the time in the world, they'll wade through the black text on grey backdrop because it might link somewhere, they'll put up with the blinking animated gif because their favourite song is playing on the page... Joshua Porter explains this well and his post attracted some intelligent comments too.

Of course, I'd love to explore some more by setting up my own MySpace/Bebo/FaceParty pages but frankly I know i'd get no social-linking and I'd fret about the interface. In the same way that Captain Cook probably knew when he was out of his depth I'm not prepared to go on there and get into any hot water...

Technorati Tags: myspace + bebo + faceparty + noble savage + homepage design + social networking

Famous at last? ... Simply blog about the Beeb.

2006-07-19T10:06:00.000+01:00

I read an interesting article recently (but I can't remember where) which highlighted key ways to get your blog noticed. I've tried a few, extensive contextual links, out-links to other blogs, recent topics, salacious content and inviting comment via mailing lists. In the past two days it seems to be paying off, first there's a link from Digital Media Minute to my pieces on SEO vs Usability which is extensively accessed and now the BBC have picked up on my review of the Governors meeting last week, there's quite a lot of traffic inbound from an intranet blog. I can't see it of course so no idea what it says so I'm hoping it's pleasant and isn't too critical of the grammar and typo problems which litter the article (re-reading posts is a sure-fire way to expose your own inadequacies...).

Anyway, coupled with a fleeting appearance on BBC Look East on the 18.30 bulletin the day after and suddenly I feel exposed. In a good way. Weirdly, and without wishing to blow smoke up Auntie's proverbial, it's made me even more aware of the Beeb's quality output. Last night I sat and watched a profound "Who Do You Think You Are?" with David Baddiel and (being a fan of his work since he slated Sittingbourne) I watched the interview he had with Mark Lawson on BBC4. A genuinely insightful and thoughtful piece, so diffrent to Parkinsons piece of brief, intense sycophancy. Made a change from my previous intention to watch "Love Island", "Big Brother" etc.

A Distinctly Average Day, And All The Better For It

2006-07-16T21:47:00.000+01:00

It’s days like today that you forget when it’s suddenly January 16^th and icy cold. It’s days like today that seem so distant when you’re walking toward the station at 19:30 and you’ve got to go to the supermarket when you get home. It’s days like today that at the age of 49 wincing as you climb the stairs at work to sit in the same desk you’ve sat in for 15 years are a world away.

Today wasn’t remarkable at all. A hot sunny day in Ipswich, a lazy morning in the park and an afternoon of geeky surfing on a shady balcony trying to avoid some left-over work for tomorrow. Top Gear on the TV, some pasta and a bottle of Grolsch as I listen to a bit of Madeline Peyroux and set about my blog. A day where everything thing in the world was just so. Where I was entirely myself and my fiancée and I were entirely content. A day when I didn’t feel unfit, old, aching, tired too hot or too cold, a day when nothing would trouble me. In a lifetime I wonder how many days like this we have.

Either way, today was one of them. So I thought I’d record it for permanent posterity.

BBC Governors Meeting, Norwich. What Happened?

2006-07-15T11:43:00.000+01:00

It’s taken longer than anticipated to get round to summarising the events of last night’s meeting in Norwich. Whilst I was there I was suddenly stuck by an overwhelming responsibility to do it right, based mainly on the fact that I was convinced (and will remain so until Technorati tells me otherwise) that I was the only blogger present. So, there I was stood in the mezzanine floor of the Forum watching a preview of the BBC’s HD output (via a Sky box and 50” plasma) when I thought I’d take a panoramic of the stage set-up [left]. This sparked off an intention to take loads of pictures and add them to Flickr, but I got side-tracked by the debate.

The Governors present were, obviously Michael Grade plus Ranjit Sondhi, Anthony Salz, Deborah Bull and Jeremy Peat. But the big surprise for me was to find (Director General) Mark Thompson sat in the front row along with a substantial number of the BBC Exec'. Previously in my mind the subject of Emily Bell’s ire on the Guardian Unlimited podcast, it was nice to finally put a real-life person to the distant victim. I had hoped, with Mark present, that the debate and discussion would centre around the BBC’s well-documented digital future but I hadn't counted on the people of East Anglia.

Silly me, the demographic was entirely skewed in the direction of the retired complainant. In the same way that I’d watched the outlying villages spill into Norwich to celebrate the Championship promotion in 2004 complete with wooden rattles and knitted scarves, so here tonight were the villages of the East. In place of the lithe and hungry farmhands cheering on the Canaries were the walking-stick wielding OAPs - all of whom seemed to have an unwavering belief that the BBC is “not what it used to be”.

Here we were, with News Presenter Jane Hill batting questions from the floor toward the panel ranging from the reception problems in Kings Lynn to the reception problems in Sheringham; and from the over-paid Jonathan Ross (roundly hated with some vitriol) to the under-payment of Test Match Cricket. I thought I was going to cry. Where was the praise for the World’s finest website? Where were the celebrations of exceptional programmes like Planet Earth, Extras, The Office, Bleak House. Where was the acknowledgement of the consistently high standards shown on Radio 4 and the ever-increasing efforts made to broaden digital coverage?

Instead we dwelt on the horrors of celebrity television (not so prevalent on the BBC) the nightmares of no isobars on the weather map (beautifully riposted by Michael Grade) and the apparent “racism” of using “95%” of the evening schedule to show “Americanised” TV. Now I should, at this point, acknowledge that some of these points were rather valid: Jonathan Ross, Moyles and Wogan are over-paid, cricket should be on the BBC (but that’s for Tessa Jowell to sort, not the license payer or the BBC Governors) and Only Fools On Horses was a mistake – regardless of the charity motive. It’s just that the views we heard were not truly representative. The sinlge element of conversation that really struck a chord with me (and not because it was delivered by the chap sitting beside me) was an attempt to raise the awareness that choice is not as universal as the BBC might have us think.

I have naively assumed that the breadth of choice the BBC promote is a positive thing for everyone. An ever-increasing number of channels are emerging both in linear television, analogue, digital and online. But this seems rather worthless when you think of invalid viewers, “trapped” in care homes with no choice but to watch what’s on, when it’s on. They may represent a minority in percentage terms of the viewing figures but given that they don’t have the same ability to choose, their voice needs to be heard incredibly loudly.

As we advance to a state where linear, analogue-broadcasting is marginalised we must ensure that provision is made to safeguard the rights of those without choice to receive quality news, information and entertainment. It’s keeping one eye on the rear view mirror as we hurtle into BBC 2.0.

I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Mark at the end of the session in between a glass of orange juice and a wild mushroom canapé, and I challenged him on the intentions to add advertsing to international versions of BBC sites. It was, I emplored, crucial that this was done as sensitively as possible and did not, under any circumstances, leak onto the British versions of the site. I stated I was proud of the BBC’s digital offerings, having downloaded clips of The Apprentice onto my phone and subscribed to BBC podcasts, RSS feeds and am a player of celebdaq. I have even linked to the BBC Accessibility site as part of my work. I stressed how important it is that the license payer funds this as efficiently as possible, if the BBC needs to justify it’s global face with some un-obtrusive ads, so be it, but it must not become MySpace and it must not become MSN.co.uk. (Ok, so I admit I didn’t have time to say it all like that but I think I got my point across).

Oh, and one final note, Emily I’m not sure he listens to Podcasts (there was no flicker when I asked him which he listens to) but he certainly reacted when I mentioned your name. I’m not sure I’d call it a smile, perhaps more of a wry grin.

UPDATED (21:15, 15th July) : Report on BBC News, "Grade Defends BBC's Independence"
UPDATED (18:42, 23rd July) : Finally corrected the typos in this post. Links here to my follow-up post and the news that this blog was featured on BBC News "The Editors". Finally, the comments on this article mention that the Webcast is now live (RealPlayer required).

Technorati: BBC, Web2.0, Norwich

BBC Governors Meeting, Norwich.

2006-07-13T17:09:00.000+01:00

Tonight I'm heading off to the BBC Governors meeting to find out what the mandarins at Auntie plan on doing online and how they anticipate funding their expansion in the light of all this Web 2.0 stuff that Mark Thompson keeps banging on about. It's being webcast live too.

Loads of BBC 2.0 Links (all 2006):

:: The Economist, 27th April, "Auntie on tap"

:: The Royal Television Society Lecture, 22nd March, "BBC 2.0 Why Demand Changes Everything"

:: The Guardian, 29th March "BBC Wants To Make Money From The Web"

:: Alex Barnett Blog, 1st July "Ads on BBC.com Good / Bad?"

A few thoughts tomorrow or tonight via the train journey home....

Technorati Tags: BBC .. web 2.0 .. online advertising

"Internet" As Viewed From a 1993 Perspective

2006-07-13T13:27:00.000+01:00

Every so often a link surfaces which makes you want to pass it on to everyone you know who's online. Today it's a CBC archived video report on "Internet" in 1993. I found it via Kottke.org but there's a mirror on You Tube if you're interested and the previous link is dead.

Wanted to know more about this Ajax stuff too so have taken the plunge and gone all GMail and Google Desktop. I'm Google-ising my life slowly. We'll see if the experiment comes off.

Sainsbury's Embrace 'Web 2.0' By Encouraging Customer Dialogue

2006-07-06T11:25:00.000+01:00

AKQA, Sainsbury's current digital agency, has created a market-leading dialogue area to the supermarket chain's online presence. Put simply, they've opened a 'Your Ideas' forum to "create a community around the brand" according to Andrew McCormick in this week's NMA (29.06.06).

Of course many of us are aware of the predicted explosion in user-generated content and social community sites (as demonstrated by MySpace, Bebo and Playahead) but this is one of the first occurences I've come accross where a major retailer is keen to get their customer base to contribute to content.

Thus far it's pretty basic stuff (and not exactly Web 2.0 since much of the technology has existed since the early days of the web) in that customers are posting recipes and discussing "food related topics". Presumably this means bored people ranting about the Cadbury scandal and showing off their homemade Spotted Dick. The key with this move is that it promotes the chain as being technology aware (especially given their late arrival on the home shopping scene) and a brand that's trusted and talked about by its consumers. The most revolutionary element is of course the opportunity for customers to discuss the relative (de)merits of Sainsbury's. Thier brand manager, Kirstey Elston is quoted as saying: "We're happy for customers to share openly what they think about Sainsbury's".

All this is very laudible but do Sainsbury's need to run these sites themselves? I am a great believer of leaving this type of content on independant sites, amongst the true user-community. then use technology to trawl the web looking for reviews, forums and blogs. That way people will comment in the positive, negative and laissez faire without the natural sense of moderation that using an 'official' forum would give. By using Web Data Mining all this information can be quantified and extracted by insight teams. Of course, doing it all in-house is faster and possibly cheaper but do the views expressed on such official user-communities really reflect the widest range of customer opinion? I'm not convinced.

I like Sainsbury's (although the Waitrose in Sudbury is great, 45 mins away though...) but their online shopping requires a minimum order of £25 and a delivery charge of £6. Often I just want a few bits, ordered mid-week and Tesco can do that. So we use them, until Sainsbury's sort out their pricing for this and until Ocado deliver to my area I'll continue touse Tesco. And that is in spite of the fact that Tesco have let me down with late deliveries and peculiar substitutions on several occassions. (A comparison review of the Customer Experience with online grocers is available here.)

Fitts' Law, Menu Bars & Web Usability

2006-07-05T20:35:00.000+01:00

Unearthed an interesting bit of information this week that the menu bar implementation on Mac operating systems is measurably more usable.

This comes about by applying Fitts' Law (1954), a model of psychomotor movement which predicts that the time required to move to a given object is a function of the target's distance and size. It is particularly useful in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) applications and in the case of the Mac menu bar it identifies that the positioning of the bar on the finite edge (top) of the screen means rapid movement 'North' with the mouse will always mean the user is successful in finding it. By contrast, the windows user bar is only useful in the active window which can be anywhere on the floating screen space, and by implication can be missed unless greater levels of motor accuracy are applied. (Aside: Have Apple forgotten this law in iTunes? a great article by Coda Hale investigates).

I've been trying to think of examples on the web where Fitts' Law could make life easier. It seems to me that applying Pie Menu systems (see also Pie Menu Central) or nodal navigation could be effective in the place of Linear Menus, however whether this would be offset by the effect of implementing an unfamiliar user interface and the difficulty in having multiple item menus remains to be seen. There is a rumour, by the way, that Windows Vienna will feature a Pie Menu. Evidently, the most obvious application for a web menu is the use of the screen limits - ie. navigation should be either at the extreme left (c.f. Kalbach & Bosenick, 2003) or top of a page to ensure it is more likely to be on a screen-edge limit. However, more subtle applications might be to keep contextual linking prevalent on the site (keep the links close to the content) and ensure target buttons are obvious and large. Common sense, basic stuff maybe but sometimes it's nice to see a bit of tangible scientific research backing it up.

:: Paul M. Fitts (1954). The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement. Journal of Experimental Psychology, volume 47, number 6, June 1954, pp. 381-391. (Reprinted in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 121(3):262--269, 1992).

Technorati Tag: Web usability and fitts law

It's over. England Exit FIFA World Cup 2006 on penalties

2006-07-03T11:29:00.000+01:00

Put simply it never really worked under Sven. He picked a team of Galacticos but never blended them well enough. We didn't win the early games by playing badly, we won them in the sparse moments of playing well. Let's not forget that although the momentum had built up before the Portugal game that ignores the fact that we were held by a poor Swedish side, that we nearly conceded against Trinidad & Tobago and Ecuador, (scoring in the Trinidad game only because Crouch got a handful) and that Paraguay was a forgettable match ... And, but for the game against Jamaica, we'd had some shocking non-competitive games too (Uruguay, Hungary, Belarus). In the last 5 years can anyone say exactly what Sven had made the England team into? How do they play, what's the most effective formation? what defines their style? For four years we've been drunk on the 5-1 in Munich and assumed that that indicated Sven's mastery, not so, one anomalous result in a managerial tenancy of mediocrity and but for the heroics of Hargreaves, Lennon and the back four you could almost say that, in terms of England's historic tenacity, the pilot light has all but gone out.

Using Feng Shui In Web Design

2006-06-29T07:19:00.000+01:00

Fortunately Metro treated it with a whimsical air but a piece on page three of today’s paper irked me nevertheless.

The main thrust of the article by Sarah Getty was that web developers are turning to the ‘ancient philosophies of vaastu shastra and feng shui’ to apply ‘balance’ to their sites. This practise it would have us believe is being utilised to harmonise the online experience with consideration to the elements of fire, water, earth, air, space (!), man and objects. So everything I suppose.

It goes on to quote Dr. Smita Narang who I’m sure believes wholeheartedly in this nonsense (despite sho-horning interior design principles into Human Computer Interaction), sincerely asserting that these elements relate to web properties (colour, HTML, graphical elements, typeface, domain etc.) and they need to be deployed with balance and harmony. “Fair enough” I thought, makes sense: Choose harmonised colours, think about a delicate layout balance, delineation, page ordering, simple clear domain etc., is this not user-centred design under a different name?

It’s not that simple though. Helpfully Metro boldy illustrated the piece with their own homepage, pointing out where they score on this Web Feng Shui. Luck (for example) is mentioned and apparently images of unicorns, fruit and dragons help here. And this is where the whole thing starts to unravel. On a more real-world note, they advise that header logos should be placed high and right or centrally, so definitely not in the established normal location of top-left then? Ignore the fact that that’s where people expect it to be and expect it to be a link back to the homepage…

Perhaps this mixed message of design clarity (particularly around the use of colour and simple shapes and nonsense about using coin cursors (wealth) and imaes of unicorns explains the mixed results seen by Brijesh Agarwal of Indiamart (itself hardly compliant with the philosophies) who concedes that whilst 3 of the sites he’s developed with this method have returned 60% increases in traffic, 2 haven’t.

By this point I was ready to give up and return to doing real customer-centric work when Rupert Goodwins of ZDNet (10m hits per month) cropped up in a well-sourced quote: “I’ve never heard of businesses using this and I think it’s complete nonsense”. I leave it there except to say that I hope Dr. Narang sells 0 books on this subject.

:: Additional informed cynicism about Web Vastu

Technorati Tag: Web Vastu

What is it that you do for a living again?

2006-06-28T13:37:00.000+01:00

Spent a large part of yesterday producing data for my colleagues in marketing regarding traffic, conversion and drop-off throughout specific areas of our site. This got me thinking about what service I, as a usability and analytics manager, provide to the rest of the company. I often use an illness analogy when describing this paradigm to people. By providing data I am presenting the symptoms of a problem, the current and historic state of health. With analysis on this data I begin to diagnose what the problem is and its etymology. However, and this is quite an important distinction, I am not in the position to provide the cure. The cure has to come from collaborative discussions between myself (with the knowledge of what customers do/want to do online), the marketing team (with the intention of what they want customers to do online) and the financiers and technical teams (to understand what we can afford and technically implement online).

When you put yourself (and are part of a team that puts itself out) within The Company as experts in Web Customer Experience it’s incredibly easy for people to turn to you with expectations that you’re the panacea for their perceived problems online … What’s even harder to demonstrate is quite what makes someone expert in this field. It’s a problem I had academically with Psychology. Often what psychology experiments prove is what people call ‘common sense’. I wish I had a pound for the number of times someone’s said to me “that’s obvious” in referring to the result of an experiment or some insight that’s been provided but then it was obvious centuries ago that the world was flat and the sun revolved around us. The best way to demonstrate expertise is by showing an ROI for the work you do. I’m building up, as usual, to another promise to write that piece: “how to convince your stakeholders that user-centred design is required from day 0 of the project“. It’s coming …

Flickor

2006-06-26T17:36:00.000+01:00

since going to Milan for my brothers' stag weekend a week or so ago I've been thinking about my own.

Given that I had been making attempts to learn the language (and I'm sure this would be helpful in certain situations) and given the shots of the crowd during their matches during the world cup, I'm even more inclined towards going to Sweden and specifically Stockholm.

If you're in any doubt as to why let me present:

Exhibit A: Sweden United
Exhibit B: Stureplan.se
Exhibit C: Flickor.se [caution]

I've discovered that HG2 also do a Stockholm guide ... time to pass all this material to the best man and get stuck into my Vera Croghan book ....

Wives and Girlfriends (WAGs) at FIFA World Cup 2006

2006-06-26T17:00:00.000+01:00

There's me posting a simple piece on Abigail Clancy and a quick Technorati search brings up this guy's blog with these posts (one, two and three) regarding footballers' wives. Interesting from a 'how to drive traffic to your site' point of view. But not very relevant to this blog's customer experience focus...

For more considered readers, there are Telegraph articles about the WAGs or for up-to-date snaps of the WAGS in the stadiums, try a GettyImages search...

Technorati Tag: Abigail Clancy

Abigail Clancy

2006-06-26T14:18:00.000+01:00

"So, Abi, what attracted you to millionaire footballer Peter Crouch?" *

I don't think I'm alone in feeling a little cynical about this relationship ... what's odd too (and thanks to the Baddiel & Skinner Podcast for this) is that in Brazil the players are such superstars thay don't have to worry about their appearance and therefore despite being truly minted, Ronaldinho and Ronaldo have some of the worst dental frontages seen in modern times...

* - with acknowledgment to Caroline Aherne.

Stag Weekend in Milan

2006-06-22T13:48:00.000+01:00

It seems like ages since I wrote a blog entry. I went away for another recharging week to the Isles of Scilly (intended to write a new piece about that), then had a hectic week in the office, then had a less hectic week followed by a stag weekend in Milan.

Milan was cool. I’d taken the advice of a friend and, as best man, spent a great deal of time pre-planning bars, clubs and arrangements for the weekend. Unfortunately, none of the major stag companies cover Milan due to an apparent lack of daytime activities so I had to work out flights, accommodation and excursions for ten people. In the end we were booked up under the assumption of being a conference party at the Hotel Mediolanum, a contemporary styled budget hotel in the Piazza Della Repubblica area. The receptionists there could not have been more helpful, they were very good indeed and our conference ‘deception’ meant we were treated with suitably business-like respect. The hotel bar was decorated with buffet food every evening which provided a welcome bit of free sustenance.

On Friday night we took in a few bars along a pretty, totty-adornded street call Via Brera. None of these were exceptional but those of us who were more adventurous found some better places later that night. We elected not to do much at all during the day itself on Saturday to keep the budget manageable and hangovers in check so ended up visiting the Duomo for a cultural fix and a wander round the stunning shopping districts gawping at the designer displays (both on the mannequins and the streetwalking models). In the Piazza around the Duomo they had set up a giant screen to show the football on. On Saturday night we headed out to Corso Como and Corso Garibaldi where a few of us had been the night before. We started at a bar called dotcom I think before heading to Pixel where we were well looked after by the hostess and then (for a few of the group) to Loolapaloosa. The rest of us took in a few other drinking spots before moving on when 3am singled an unexpected closing time. Earlier we’d started off watching the football (Italy-USA) in a restaurant called dot com (I think) which was wholly intentional to soak up the enthusiastic local atmosphere.

On Sunday we took a wander up to the park and then into the Duomo area again for a last dose of totty-spotting.

I used my HG2 guide to pick out the hotel and despite finding some awesome restaurants in there we decided that it wouldn’t be possible to be a complete ‘Hedonist’ on the budget we were on so ate elsewhere. Despite this book being an excellent indicator of the types of things possible we didn’t end up taking in any of the more classy joints – even 10 Corso Como got ‘forgotten’ in the descending alcoholic mist of Saturday night. I would thoroughly recommend this book and have already got it in mind to pick up the other guides in this series for future events.

If you’re planning a stag weekend in Milan, drop me a line and I’ll point out the places we should have gone to. Although, to be fair, the ones we did attend were well worth it.

A few pointers though: Take insect repellent as the city is full of mosquitoes. Take decent clothes and shoes as everyone is impeccably dressed – or at least makes a very Italian attempt to be so – and you will stand out like a sore thumb if you’re pale, overweight and clothed for an afternoon in Norwich (which I’m not and I wasn’t). As a rough guide, rounds for 10 of cocktails cost €100 (£69) and, like the rest of Italy, you can eat very well if you chose a good restaurant, for under €40 (£28). We flew into Linate on easyjet which was delayed both at Gatwick and on the return leg. The total cost of flights and accommodation for one person was £236.61. Finally, take a positive attitude, everyone in Milan was up for a good time and stunningly beautiful women are willing to talk to you, despite your evident lack of Italian, simply because you’re likely to have a wallet full of notes and an intention to spend them.

Fare Evasion on One Railway. Conductors Apparently Don't Care

2006-05-25T09:43:00.000+01:00

Regular readers will know of my on-going correspondence with One. Archives of which are available. The latest installment...

To: customer.services@onerailway.com
Subject: Revenue Protection

Sirs, It has been a long time since I have felt compelled to write. There used to be a time when I was quite a regular depositor of (justifiable) rants in your postbag and you will be delighted to know I have shared your insipid responses with friends, colleagues and strangers via the medium of the internet.

My written absence from your desk these past few months has not, I’m afraid to say, indicated that the service from one has improved, rather that I have become more busy and at the same time apathetic to the complete ineptitude and disregard for fare-paying passengers which you clearly display. I write to you today to express concerns about your ability to implement your own policy as I have been prompted into action by a couple of recent encounters on my infuriating (c.f. relaxing) morning commute.

A short while ago you (as one) began to post notices around the stations informing passengers of the imminent roll-out of penalty fare charges for anyone found travelling without a ticket. Previously your correspondence to me had detailed that you only charged this penalty on given routes but you did (eventually) acknowledge that there were a number of people travelling ticketless between rural stations. I believed that these notices indicated you were finally about to get serious about protecting your revenue and ensuring full-fare paying passengers like myself were not subsidising fare evaders.

It appears this revenue protection message has not got through. On repeated occasions I have seen your on-train staff ask for tickets only to be offered money for the fare by travellers without them. A standard fare is purchased and the conductor moves on. Why are people not being charged the penalty?

If no-one is ever charged this penalty then there is no deterrent and people will continue to take the risk to avoid paying. The only occasion I can see this charge being applied is when there is an ad-hoc check on the platform and the revenue-protection staff are backed-up by British Transport Police. Is it the case then that your on-train staff are trained (in your posh new customer service academy) to avoid conflict with passengers and so do not challenge fare evaders?

Do you have any statistics as to how often the penalty fare is being charged by staff on trains?

If you do not charge this penalty fare in all circumstances, remove the notices from stations as these are misleading.

In addition (sorry to go on, but it has been a while and you know how these things build up) the punctuality once again has failed to improve. The last four days this week (22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th May) the 08.09 from Ipswich has been delayed. Not by enough to make a Delay Repay claim but by enough to inconvenience me, can you explain these delays to me and what it is you’re doing about it as on your website1 it looks like everything is rosey in Dominic’s garden.

I had hoped that when Tim Clarke resigned and Dominic Booth took over you’d all start thinking things really had to improve. They haven’t and you haven’t, it simply isn’t good enough. Why not get your senior customer experience managers to travel the routes and talk to commuters, the people that do this every day. Don’t rely on those daft NX surveys that get handed out at stations every quarter, most commuters I know bin them, talk to us directly.

Alternatively, have a look around on the web in forums, blogs and review sites, see what people are saying about your service, it’s atrocious and it’s not getting better. Everywhere I look there’s incompetence in one railway. Look, for example, at the handling of the Norwich Station improvements. It has taken over six months to simply repaint and re-board the platform roofs and lay tarmac and that’s not even complete yet. It took well over a year to replace the digital departure board at Ipswich … last night (24th May) the 18.30 from Norwich was not cleaned at all before departure and I sat amongst newspapers, cups and filth for my journey home…

Maybe I’m labouring the point but I think you get the picture. At the very least, please respond to my points regarding the penalty fares and, if you feel so-inclined, I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts about the other disappointments I’ve outlined above.

Many thanks for wading through that, I’m genuinely looking forward to your reply. Alternatively why not get someone to actually call and speak to me [number].

smorgasbord-design : usability: TSA Agree, Peter Stephenson is being exploited.

2006-05-24T12:22:00.000+01:00

smorgasbord-design : usability: TSA Agree, Peter Stephenson is being exploited. More on this story at MarmiteBoy

TSA Agree, Peter Stephenson is being exploited.

2006-05-23T13:52:00.000+01:00

Following my post earlier this week in relation to Peter Stephenson, a Tourette Syndrome sufferer, being exploited in BB7, the BBC report that the Tourette Syndrome Associate (TSA) have concerns over his inclusion.

Roy Hillard (TSA spokesman) seemingly supports my argument adding that the length of exposure and apparent lack of medication will exacerbate the disorder.

Predictably Channel 4 maintain he was picked on his other merits and that his positive approach to his condition made his inclusion even more worthwhile, i'd like to think this was the case but I simply don't buy it and neither, it seems, do the TSA. Channel 4 have, in a vain attempt to deflect some criticism, added a link to the TSA via Peter's profile page.

Demonstrating a Return on Investment (ROI) for Usability

2006-05-22T07:49:00.000+01:00

One of the hardest things we usability practioners have to do (besides getting customers/users into a sinister looking testing lab...) is demonstrate to senior managers that usability has a solid cost-benefit case. Since the dot-com bubble burst in 2001 those holding the purse strings have had little time for the sort of gay abandon with which money was thrown at web-related development in the past.

Today almost everything I do has to stack up with figures. Aside from becoming proficient in producing highly-understandable Excel sheets I have had to improve my ability to demonstrate a confident link between changes, improvements and development we make and the bottom-line.

It's all too easy for usability to turn into a subjective argument. My perceptions of a site or application journey are skewed by my experiences and my specialism within the industry. My Mum's perceptions of a site would be similarly skewed by her experiences on Amazon, Friends Reunited and her online banking etc. etc. Both of us have valid comments about the user-experience but making these objective require a specific approach.

The key is to divide the experience into discrete, mutually-dependent fundamentals: the brand, the content, the usability and the intended function. Under each fundamental element we can score the experience on a polarised scale (1-5). We then have a total user-experience score out 20. Each element needs some parameters of course and that's where I'm going to be discrete, I have my opinions but ultimately my job depends (for these are the tools of the trade to some extent) on keeping this kind of information back.

Of course, once you have a set of quantifiable user metrics you can add your business-related metrics to them: click-through, conversion, keyword density, unique views, session time etc. etc. Plotting the user data against the bottom-line data will indicate if your development is effective.

Of course, this only works if you've got a site/application to work on and if your user-centric design is about evolution rather than creation. If you want to know how to convince your stakeholders that user-centred design is required from day 0 of the project, you'll have to wait for another blog entry later ...

Technorati Tags : web usability and ROI OR cost-benefit analysis

Endemol & Channel 4 Unacceptably Sensationalise Tourette Syndrome

2006-05-19T09:53:00.000+01:00

Last year I made a decision not to watch Big Brother. I made that decision because I wanted to enjoy my summer without feeling I had to know every evening what had happened in a house-come-studio in Elstree. I felt good at the end of it all that I’d managed to pick up enough through the press to be able to discuss it at work but I hadn’t wasted my evenings with the modern-day equivalent of the 19^th Century circus freak-show.

Last night the 2006 housemates entered the fray and frankly I was appalled. Channel 4 have felt it acceptable to put a tourette-suffering young lad, Peter Stephenson, in there apparently (due to Davina’s evident guffawing) to make him a national point of mirth: effectively, ‘look at the funny man with the tic who swears’. Ultimately Tourette Syndrome is a psychiatric disorder and I really thought we’d gone past the days of finding these inherently funny.

Last year the Tourette Syndrome Association (TSA) in the US released a press announcement “It Ain’t Funny & It Ain’t True; Exploiting Tourette Syndrome for Laughs”. There is no doubt in my mind that Big Brother is attempting to sensationalise this condition and is being aided and abetted by The Sun. They also quote a spokeswoman from the TSA in the UK: “Sufferers should be laughed with, not at. We hope Big Brother will help viewers understand TS and be supportive.” Detailing some of Peter’s other behaviours (his apparent lack of sexual inhibition and cross-dressing) the Sun builds a picture of someone with co-occurring conditions. Often Tourette Syndrome sufferers exhibit Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) which in adults manifests itself in excessive talking, interrupting others, blurting out answers before questions are finished and saying what's on your mind without regard to the ramifications. I’m not an expert but a degree in Psychology does at least qualify me to say these do correlate with the behaviours Pete apparently displays.

Pete’s presence at the house in Elstree is designed solely to grab audience attention – it’s certainly not for any other reason – and whether he’s fully aware of what this means in a social context for his disorder, it remains that this encourages a climate of discrimination. A counter argument may run that this is actually better than hiding Pete away as a form of social censorship but that is not what I am advocating either, merely that this programme demonstrates an artificially skewed sense of social order and what suffers like Pete need is inclusion and acceptance. BB7 is not educating the Great British Public about psychiatric disorders, it is (in my opinion) unacceptably sensationalising it.

Also: Brand Republic: "Channel Four reveals Big Brother's freaky 14"

Technorati Tags : Peter Stephenson , Big Brother and Tourette syndrome

Viral Marketing Measures of Success: Reach vs. Conversion

2006-05-18T14:10:00.000+01:00

I was sent the viral Fan Van game this afternoon which (as chaps might be able to see) is quite an entertaining and visually appealing distraction. It has been sent on already and has therefore fulfilled the viral element of the strategy. What I'm not so clear on is how effective it will be at getting people to generate revenue for the company involved. That company is P&O and the strategy for this viral must be for (men) to enter the competition to win a van and therefore supply them with significant volumes of client data or book their trip (and I guess the supposition is that this will be a trip to Germany 2006 via the P&O ferry route) through them. I'm not convinced a high percentage of viewers of this viral will actually do that.

By chance today Justin Kirby of Digital Media Communications writes in NMA (New Media Age) about how "Marketers must get creative for viral campaigns to succeed". He asserts a similar position: "...sadly success still seems to be judged simply in terms of reach rather than tangible business benefits, such as shifting product or increasing brand advocacy." I'd like to see the figures from this P&O viral, what was their reach, what was the uptake in sales and what was the increase in brand awareness. There's no question that the P&O viral is creative, but does it have longevity? I might forward this on but I'll have forgotten about it tomorrow and it'll have been deleted from my mail box. It's not something I'm going to revisit and, if it wasn't for the fact I'm writing this, I'm pretty sure I'd have forgotten who it was for. In fact, I'd heard about it from a friend before I got the email ... he described it as "the fan in a van thing" ... I searched in Google for "fan in a van" and it didn't appear. I typed "faninavan".com and .co.uk, it didn't appear. If I had wanted to look for this after i'd deleted the email I wouldn't have found it again.

In addition, is this sort of viral just a little too indiscriminate. Some will inevitably fall on stoney ground. Ok, so it will reach a core target audience of 17-35 year old men but will all of these have the sort of disposable income where they will be booking P&O trips? Will they be the sort of chaps that will want a van? This seems a bit of a broad-brush approach. But then, does this wastage matter on the web. At the end of the day, you don't HAVE to click and a video of nubile girls is unlikely to annoy many unwitting recipients in this demographic. I'd have much more confidence in the product/service shifting results of this viral if it had been effectively targetted and profiled.

Some additional Blog comment via Gordon's Republic.

Technorati Tags: viral marketing and FanVan2006

Prioritizing Dancing Mangos

2006-05-18T08:24:00.001+01:00

It's been some time since I've posted about the dreadful service I have experienced on one railway. That's not to say it's improved, well not much, it's just that I seem to have bigger fish to fry.

However, I was delighted today to be pointed in the direction of Dancing Mango. I'm particularly interested in the Customer Experience section, I love reading about companies that are getting it right and those that are getting it wrong, it brings clarity to much of the internal hypothesising I find myself doing as part of my job. To that end it's been a real eye opener to pick up Jakob's new book, "Prioritizing Web Usability". Unlike some of his previous books this one (and it might be Hoa Loranger's input) contains a fair swathe of analytical, thought-provoking copy. But, and this is what give it credibility in my eyes, is that it's not afraid to say "we were wrong" or at least "we're no longer right" about certain topics. For example link colours. Previously Jakob said, blue is essential, now it's ok to use other colours for links as long as they're consistent and contrasting. Common sense prevails. It simply has less of a prescriptive tone and more of a common sense advice, and in that sense it picks up on the great successes of Steve Krug's work.

Technorati Tag : web usability

Darling Buds of May (13th)

2006-05-13T20:38:00.000+01:00

As mentioned previously I'm growing chilli plants this year. I thought I'd post a picture of my homegrown cayennes as they're pretty close to opening their first flowers. The macro shot to the left shows the buds are pretty abundant. My Habaneros on the other hand are a bit lacking ... more important chilli news later ...