Ground Zero: where customer experience and information management intersect
02 April 2008 I consult in several areas, including usability design and information management. Sometimes this seems a little schizophrenic, so it’s good to pull back and think ‘where are the commonalities in these subjects?’This little cautionary tale is intended to point out where some of these important commonalities lie.
Recently I had a nightmare of a time trying to claim on the extended warranty on an ipod I had purchased just a year ago. The screen cracked, by the way, which effectively means: new ipod time. But that’s not the story.
The real story is the customer (or ‘user’) experience I had while trying to make my claim. And that’s the link between information management and user experience. When the user is, quite simply the customer, and the experience is the provision by a corporate entity of adequate service across a range of communication media: then the connection between these two areas of professional endeavour is thrown into high relief.
My customer experience problem was getting any service at all, and the obstacle - which reduced me to incoherent rage over several weeks – was information management. Specifically, the fact that information was not being managed at all.
To start with, in January, I tried emailing the company with full details of my claim including my warranty reference number. An automated reply told me I had to ring them, during business hours. I’m in NZ, they’re in the UK, that’s an expensive option that happens in the middle of the night.
So I rang them and quoted my reference number. I explained the whole story. I had the wrong number: “You want Worldwide Cover, it’s another department”. But my agreement, which was a WWC one, gave me the number I had rung. So I rung the other number. Great! No problem, I just had to get a service technician to certify on letterhead paper that the ipod is jiggered, and fax them. I got the letter, I wrote a covering letter, with the reference number, I photocopied my receipt as well. I faxed it.
In the end I faxed it more than 40 times, thoughout February. In total I devoted most of a day to faxing it. I even got it to go through once – on try #18 – on the other 39 tries the fax number was busy.
When I rang to follow up on the successful faxing, I found no one had my fax: “It must be in another department” – apparently on Mars. I had this mad idea that faxes would be scanned and entered in the customer database, linked to my agreement by the reference number, so any call centre staff member could access it.
Fool!
I took the names of the helpful staff. Every time I rang back and asked for a name, no one knew the person I had spoken to: “He must work in another department”. Where were the other departments, were they really on Mars? Apparently there was no staff address book or contact database that covered all the departments.
One person, in late February, on learning of my fax debacle, gave me his email address. Apparently this was a big secret and I wasn’t to let on about it to anyone. He offered to receive an email with a scanned attachment containing my pathetic documentation, which he would print to hard copy and convey (actually walk down the hall, carrying, mind you!) to the ‘right Department’. I scanned and emailed.
I followed up by phone, but no one knew this guy either. What’s more, their database had no record of any communication from me after my first call in early January. I imagined, since I quoted the same reference number every time, that they were building up a charming picture of our history together.
How naïve – if they could do that, they’d eventually realise where the ‘black spots’ in their customer experience were, and f’ing well fix them. I was past angry by now, I was incandescent. Then I despaired. I gave up at this point. Just wrote the whole thing off as a lesson to never buy extended warranty again.
Then, two weeks later, I got the email, from Worldwide Cover, they had my letter (dated 16 January, I have no idea if it is the faxed copy or the scanned copy). They would pay out in not more than 28 days, a stirling cheque, to my address. I emailed back, even though they didn’t tell me to, just to make sure they knew I was still alive. And I waited.
Twenty days passed, and I got the letter, I ripped it open with trembling hands… no cheque. All the information in this letter was the same as in the email, except they stated the value they would reimburse (a generous sum, mind you). And they told me that I would receive the reimbursement in not more than 28 days. That’s another 28 days, by the way, and the letter was dated a week after the email, so ‘28 days’ is clearly code for ‘an amount of time we cannot or will not commit ourselves to specifying’… I assume they haven’t seen the zombie movie of the same name, or perhaps they have a better sense of humour than I imagine.
But the point of the story is… this worldwide ‘leading brand’ company have given me a ‘user experience’ that has killed their brand stone dead. It’s not even nailed to the perch, it’s on the bottom of the cage gathering dust.
And the reason for this sad demise is that they have a bunch of automated systems: customer records, staff records, call centre records, mail management - with absolutely no over-arching processes or systems to manage the totality of information received about my claim. Their staff were generally helpful, but with the tools they’ve been given, they can’t actually help anyone.
Every time I called it was like Groundhog Day, back to the first time. Not only do they not provide an adequate service, but the company don’t even know that they aren’t doing it! So from the company’s perspective the problem does not exist. When I email them the link to this blog post (after I bank the cheque, mind you!) – they won’t know what the heck I’m talking about.
But thanks to them, I now know exactly where user experience assessment and information management intersect. And I’m standing right there, at ground zero, glowing with impotent rage, brightly enough to be seen from the moon.
Labels: information design, information management, user experience
posted by Bruce on Wednesday, April 02, 2008,
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A web design company that talks about info design
12 March 2008 This must be one of the few web design companies I've seen in NZ that talks about information design: Click Suite based in Wellington (no surprise there - Wellington is where most of the best web work is happening in NZ, IMHO).Click Suite were also responsible for the UI of these two cool web sites by the National Library in Wellington:
- PastPapers - which "contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1840 to 1915 and includes publications from all regions of New Zealand." You can search for keywords across the scanned papers and the keywords are highlighted for you onscreen over the original scan. Nice work.
- Publications New Zealand - which gives public access to information in the huge National Bibliography of things published in New Zealand "from the earliest days of New Zealand publishing through to the present." This site is interesting in using an XML back-end and XSLT to deliver XHTML to the browser. Dat's some clever shit, and it's good to see more web people in NZ know about this stuff.
Labels: information design, web design
posted by Greg on Wednesday, March 12, 2008,
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Why we don’t hide the front door handle inside the Batcave.
25 January 2008 I’ve just completed another round of usability testing for some clients. At times like these I find myself reflecting (yet again) on how deceptively difficult usable web design really is.The key problem this time was that old favourite, hidden functionality.
I was testing a B2B online application, effectively a VERY large catalogue site with ordering and online invoice payment functions. The owners had found that uptake was below expectations, and anecdotal feedback was that the site was ‘slow and complex’.
When I did the test sessions I found that users did in fact say this. What they objected to was the ‘pick and add’ cart shopping model. This is all very well in a B2C situation, where retail shoppers might buy 2-3 items and the repetitive steps of finding items and adding them one by one to the cart aren’t too arduous. But when you’re ordering 25-50 items for a shop it’s a bit of a chore.
But in fact, I eventually realised (thanks to a really experienced user), the site had been built with a solution. Users could ‘pre-load’ a range of commonly-ordered items into any number of ‘ranges’, one for socks, one for undies… In effect, these were ‘pre-loaded template carts’. Users merely had to check items in the range to load them into an active ordering cart. No more searching across the whole site for correct styles and sizes - if users added the item to their ‘range’ whenever they first ordered it, the job was then done for next time as well.
Magic! The only fly in the ointment of cleverness was that the developers then made this crucial function effectively invisible.
The main navigation on the left side had a heading called ‘My ranges’ - which in almost all cases was below the page fold line, due to an excessive proliferation of much less important links higher up the navigation bar. As a result, few users ever saw it, and if they did, its lowly placement gave no clues that it was something everyone wanted.
Worse, the home page of the application, which appeared once users logged in, had a handy three-part flow diagram showing the main steps to making your order. The three main user steps (apparently) were:
Product search > add to cart > checkout.Doh! What’s missing here, people? No wonder no one knew about creating a range… it’s being kept secret!
It’s easy to lampoon this kind of thing, but the simple truth is, if designers don’t spend time with users finding out what their experience of a site really is, then they’ll never realise when their ever-so-clever functionality is actually completely inaccessible.
Batman has lots of cool stuff in the Batcave, which he uses to fight crime. How useful would all that cool stuff be if the only door handle was hidden on the inside of the front door?
Labels: IA, user experience, web design
posted by Bruce on Friday, January 25, 2008,
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Why can't the farmer and the cowman just be friends? or... Why every town needs its own Marshall
17 January 2008 Plenty of organisations are starting to realise they need to clean up their websites from time to time – so they hire in the usability posse. Like US Marshalls on the lawless Frontier, they call the Pinkerton Agency and hire some detectives from ‘out East’ who sweep in, clean up the outlaws who’ve been raiding the railroad, and then ride out again. Job done.Or is it…?
I recently went back and read over a website evaluation I wrote a year ago, and then had a look at the website itself. I was flattered, they’d implemented almost all my recommendations. Clearly my massive invoice had had an effect on them! But after a couple of minutes poking about I was forced to ask myself, is this a fully user-centred website?
Well… not really.
The problem, kids, is this. UCD is an iterative process. You do it, you wait for the dust to settle, you do it again. As many times as it takes: “How many times?”
The answer to that question is: “Well, partner, how much string have you got?”
So anyway, this site was much better. It now has one set of navigation, which shows the second level pages in each section. The page headings generally match the menu headings. The home page content focuses on user needs, rather than corporate self-inflation.
But the execution of the recommendations wasn’t done by people who know what user experience really means. The information architecture is still confusing, with 13 top level headings instead of the eight I recommended. The top level pages in each section don’t point clearly to the pages on the next level down – instead they’re as splattered with links as the survivors of a paint factory explosion.
But worst of all, apart from the homepage, the writing has not improved one jot. No topic sentences, no judicious placement of key words for SEO purposes, and more random bullets than a drive-by shooting.
Reading this kind of stuff is tiring, because your brain is doing two things at once, reading the words, and trying to remember them long enough to make sense of entire paragraphs at a time. Good online writing flows like Guinness, you don’t notice it happening at the time, but by the end of the glass, you know what you’ve been drinking.
I’m going to have to reform the posse and ride back into town to clean up the cattle rustlers we missed last time - while we were tidying up the railroad.
Maybe this time the clients will decide they need to hire their own lawman to keep the peace in Silver City when the Pinkerton Men have all gone home. There’s really no replacement for having a web content manager who can actually manage the content in a consistent and user-advocating way.
Contract resources can ‘make it nice’ for a brief period, but if the website is genuinely alive, it won’t stay ‘nice’ for long. The clients need to realise they are committed to an ongoing process, which they either manage properly in-house, or keep tap-tapping regularly on that telegraph to call the hired guns back again from St Louis.
Labels: IA, information design, usability, web design
posted by Bruce on Thursday, January 17, 2008,
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Defining information architecture
20 December 2007 Patrick Kennedy of StepTwo has published an excellent summary of the many faces of information architecture.Bruce and I have talked a bit recently about how IA seems to mean different things in different countries and in different industries. We've noticed that what people mean and expect when they use the term 'IA' can be highly variable, and this is one of the few useful explanations we've seen of how all these practices can be seen to fit and work together.
I'm not so sure the split between the skills and outcomes and the faces of IA are as clear-cut in this country, or other countries, as Patrick states, but it is certainly a useful tool to help people determine what skills they made need when putting together a project team, for instance.
In New Zealand the term IA seems to be connected strongly with the IT industry and systems design, which is unfortunate because it cuts off a whole raft of what I'd call 'information design" skills that organisations can benefit from in an IA person.
It would be good if Patrick's article helped change some thinking around IA in New Zealand.
Labels: IA, information design
posted by Greg on Thursday, December 20, 2007,
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Defining information design
04 December 2007 TCANZ have provided some useful definitions of information design, in the Issue 11, April 2007 edition of their Southern Communicator journal.I was re-reading some old articles and found this good definition of information design by Greg Pendlebury and Janice Leong. The journal is for members only, so have reproduced it here.
Information design = Users + Content + DesignThey also provide a good definition of an information designer:
Information design is a discipline that focuses on communication design where the information is needed to support a user in some action, decisionmaking or process. It is a collaborative process of research, writing, design and testing.
Information designers are content developers that may have a background in writing or in graphic design or in user research. They work across all of these areas in solving communication problems. Information designers work to understand the users, the context and the information required. Information designers strive to be advocates for the users.They certainly do.
Labels: information design
posted by Greg on Tuesday, December 04, 2007,
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Web design is like what?
21 November 2007 Mr Zeldman has done it again. Several years ago he completely changed the way I build web sites when I read his web standards approach, and now after starting to despair that so many in the traditional business environment, tv media in particular, just do not understand the web, he has inspired me again.This article Understanding Web Design is well worth reading, because it is so right on the button.
Labels: web design
posted by Greg on Wednesday, November 21, 2007,
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