vanderwal.net

All aboard to Philly

I am utterly tired and a little crispy. I am heading to Philly for a very quick trip. I decided rather than drive I would take the train. I need to read and write and have a little down-time without an Internet connections. What a better way than the train. I went to the Amtrak site to check times and prices. It was a pretty good site, only it did not consistantly keep my previous selection when I would change one element to check price and arrival time combinations. The explainations were at the very bottom of the page (I was using a browser without alt tags turned on, which may have helped). It was a rather quick and easy to use site. The not keeping the previous selection did get me a wrong ticket time reserved, but when I called customer service it was easy (completely hassle free) and free to change my selection. I will see how the rest of the trip goes. (I have travelled by train a lot on the East Coast as it saves on driving and dealing with what to do with the car in NYC.)

Tablet Hotels gets Experience Design and IA right

The November 2002 edition of ID Magazine reviews Tablet Hotels. For those that are not familiar, Tablet Hotels is a Web site that focusses on well designed hotels that are not from the cookie cutter molds of the large chains. These boutique hotels presented are from around the world. The site allows users the ability to select by location, amenities, and the traveler's agenda.

The response to "What was the biggest design challenge in creating the site?" points to the success:

The booking path was the greatest design challenge. We built our own proprietary real-time reservation engine, and when we began, we really wanted to create something outstanding and above and beyond the sterile process that's out there now. However, as we got into it, we found ourselves handcuffed by the antiquated systems that the engine had to connect to (GDS and hotel inventory systems). Throw in the fact that our site caters to an international audience and that the language terms and general policies of hotels vary greatly throughout the world, and we had our work cut out for us in our information architecture.

The small site of Tablet Hotels had not only their own information architecture (micro IA) to work through be the semantic variations of an industry so to digitally interact with various players (macro IA). The pairing of these two extremes seems to be wonderfully executed. The visual design of the site attracts the international customers searching for design and customer focussed hotels. Each hotel has a well written snippet and are photographed from design friendly perspectives. The reviews also offer a "citysense", which is a, self described, sensory guide to region covering: look, listen, taste, touch, and smell. The interactive components are also executed very well with allowing the user a the ability to select the elements/facets that are important to them when making the selection for their hotel.

The Tablet Hotel site is very well thought through and has spent much time and consideration walking through the whole array of Experience Design/User-Centered Design roles, including information architecture, to make a site that raises the bar for other hotel sites.

User Centered Design and beyond

There are a handful of synonymous terms I have been running into and using in the past few months. Most of us understand User-Centered Design (UCD) as a concept and practice. UCD helps us build successful information applications, including Web sites, that are usable by those that want to use them, have to use them, or are seeking the information contained within them. UCD does not fully focus on the developers, the project owners (clients or mangers), but puts the focus on the end users of the information or digital services. This approach to development provides a wonderful return for those that engage in this practice as it is demoralizing for those that have spent time or paid money for development to have an information application that is not used (if it is not demoralizing it could be time to find a new profession).

Information wants to be found by those that seek it and Web sites, applications, and poor interfaces should not stand in the way of those wishing to consume the information. Information should be prepared and presented with consumption in mind. Many times digital information is a service that is used to assist the consumer of not only that information but other elements like a person buying a product. In a sense we not only create User-Centered sites and applications but Customer Service tools. This focus is very helpful when working on a site that will serve as communication between an organization or person and another organization or person. The experience between these two parties in this information transaction should be effortless. Just like a physical experience we don't like standing in a long line only to get to the front of the line to have the person tell you they can not help you and you have to go to another location or that there is no process to get your money back. As customers we want effortless experiences in the physical world as well as our digital environments. Customer service has been a focus of the physical business world for years and UCD is the digital equivalent. UCD has as its focus providing not only an enjoyable experience to perform the task, but also a more pain free method of correcting errors and problems (the folks at 37 Signals call this contingency plan design and are ready and will in to teach those that do not understand it).

While customer service is mantra in the private sector, Citizen Services or Citizen-Centric Services are becoming the focal point for the public sector. Governments have learned and have turned their digital focus on the citizens. Yes, governments are beginning to "get it". It is not about the technology, but about the consumer of the services. One of the central tenets of a governments is providing services. One of these services is gathering, aggregating, and providing information. Getting the information into the hands of those wishing to consume this information has been the struggle. Not many years ago we had learned to use a Post Office box in Colorado for a government clearing house for information, now we should only need a Web browser.

The government was one of the first entities to take advantage of the Internet to post information. Some U.S. federal government agencies created sites as early as 1993 and have been keeping them running ever since. More and more the government created sites and posted information. The down side was there was little of anything other than general Internet search engines to get the user to the information or service they desired. In the past year or two this focus has begun to move from just posting information where it was grown (in what appears to most citizens to be arcane bureaucratic and political organizations with undecipherable acronyms) to tying these information repositories to central jumping off points. FirstGov is the mother of the effort and has been guiding the Citizen-Centric focus. Many agencies have turned their eGovernment offices and staff toward the mindset of providing electronic Citizen-Centric services. Many agencies are working to provide jumping off points to information and services that are commonly sought and now available on the Internet. These portals remove the morass of acronyms and the need to understand organizational structures for the common citizens that have paid their taxes and are looking for a return on that investment in the form of electronic information or digital services.

Yes, many of us are now fixing the mess of information digitally thrown onto the Internet by providing structure to this information and making it findable and usable by the people interested in consuming the information or the products the information provides a gateway to. We now have the User-Centered Design umbrella to tie the roles and processes together that we use to help the User, Customer, or Citizen. These handful of terms are used for the same focus that makes the digital world a less frustrating, more friendly, and usable environment.

Adaptive power

I really like the promise of Bluetooth (short range wireless connectivity that has the promise of eliminating wires between devices). Eliminating wires, or reducing the number of wires needed to function digitally would be a blessing.

But, having just moved I do not find the wires connecting the devices to be a huge problem it is the power cords. There are a myriad of power adapters that require somewhere to be plugged in. It also seems to be a requirement that the power cords are tangled with other power cords. Not only this, but power adapters are not interchangeable. Not only are they not interchangeable, but the do not come with any corresponding labelling that help identify power cord A should be used with device A. Power cord adapter manufacturers should be prohibitited from having their own branding on the adapter, as that branding inhibits pairing the device to the adapter. There are a couple companies that get this, Sony and Apple tend to brand their adapters so that it is easy to get their devices running. I guess the other device companies are not interested in us using their devices, but are only interested in us buying them.

What about daisy chaining power adapters? You know, like Christmas tree lights. Or universal adapters with voltage and wats settings that are selectable and an interchangeable plug end that quickly changes to been the devices connector slot, much like the British electrical outlet plugs are/used to be (have not been since the late 80s and it may have changed). In Britain when you bought an electrical device it came with a cord attached, but the cord did not have a plug to connect to the wall, as there were not standard wall outlets. The lack of plugs on the cord was annoying to those who were unaware of such practices, but it easy to understand why this practice was needed.

So to create a more workable environment have the ability to daisy chain power cords and have interchangeable plug ends. Manufacturers of devices must brand their power adapters accordingly. These steps would help eliminate the umpteen cords I have in bags that I do not know their mated device. I find 12V adapters do not work with all devices that state they need 12V power coming in. All I want to do is follow my digital passions and work. Is that too much to ask?

Mail that has problems other than errors

I am giving up on what seems like living in a block of ice, where I can see out and what what is happening but can not communicicate. I have been playing with Web mail that has taken sometime to set up to seemingly work, but I get a humorous error message at logout:

Important! This system is beta and not production-ready. You may experience errors and other problems!

It seems to remember that there are other problems than errors. (?)

Wahoo, Books

What a wonderful week in books. I just received Christina Wodtke's Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web today and it looks fantastic. I have only leafed through it briefly, but it seems to cover the basis wonderfully and provide excellent guidence on how to get through IA successfully.

Saturday I picked up Jesse James Garrett's The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and have read it in little snippets and have made it through a very good chunk in no time. Much of what I have learned over time, from experience, or from great thinkers like Jesse, which leads to successful Web sites or information applications is in this book. Knowing the steps and phases of approaching development will help you greatly. Jesse has it down for all to read and it is wonderfully written.

I am very glad to not only know these to folks, but that they are sharing what they have learn for others to gain from their experiences. This sharing is what the Web was build upon and will keep the Web improving into its next generations and incarnations. Congratulations guys!

Quest for Customer Service

It is all about customer service these days. I left my surly and poorly communicative cable company (Comcast) for DirectTV satellite, which so far has been exceptional. DirectTV was a breaze to set up service and has answered questions along the way with ease, honesty (they had to go check to verify the correct answet), and kindness.

We has a similar experience at IKEA at Potomac Mill last weekend as we were piecing together elements for our office. The woman who was helping us there took her time explaining things we may need and may save us money. She verified we had all the parts we needed and coordinated a pick-up for us that day as well as tied missing items together from other stores to be delived a little later. She also walked us over and introduced us to another employee who was equally helpful that tied kitchen cabinets into our office plan to neatly store items above the desk. I have had a string of horrible customer service of late that this really stood out. Some of the higher-end furniture stores have offered or provided similar service, but we did not expect it from IKEA. Actually the guy at Best Buy was equally as helpful and offered the best price options when I picked up the hardware for satellite TV.

On the Web there used to be great sites that were well thought though and had great customer service. Fat Brain books was fantastic, but hit the other end of the spectrum when Barnes and Noble took over (I have had horrible experiences with B&N on-line, but their physical stores are rather good). The Verizon site is utterly miserable with no contingency planning at all. The USA.net e-mail service is horrible with out American Express customer service behind it. It seems that many of the well thought through services sites that privide what you need we gobbled up by large entities that do not care about their sites or those that use them.

I still love Amazon as they still have a rather well thought trough service and their customer service is nearly always very good to excellent. I have had excellent service and support from nearly every Apple site or related site I have run across. The Apple store are great, but so are the Apple local stores. The understanding of the product and the people is lost at PC based stores, there is no passion or caring in the PC community, or maybe it is just burried somewhere.

Part of the poor customer service could be attributed to lack of paying for good customer service or not training for customer service properly. Over extended support teams and people can quickly lead to poor or lacking customer service. These elements can quickly lead to a miserable experience, but having people in a service world that are not truely passionate about product and the customer seems to be a common trait everywhere. Where I find great customer service, there is support from top to bottom in the organization for training and caring for the employees, but the biggest factor is passion. Passionate service folks will knock your socks off everytime, given they are not over stretched or worn down.

Follow the passion

Do not strand them

Stranding users is not a good thing to do, I think we can all agree with that premise. Not remembering that a user of your site can drop in to the site from anywhere to anywhere can be fatal. Take the U.S. Treasury Department, which recently did an expansive redesign of their site. They did a good job at bringing together much of their domain under one consistent branding roof. They have a few large navigation problems, they tend to pop-up a new window at the drop of a hat. Worse is that many of their press releases are built to pop-up, but have absolutely no navigation, not even to the Treasury homepage. I was suckered by this in July while searching for information from Google I was dropped in to a press release with nearly the exact information I was seeking. Big problem, all the Treasury Press Releases (sample of poor Treasury Web design) have no related links and no navigation to get you to the sourse of the page. When the Treasury gets around to fixing the stranded user problems they created they should fix the giant top banner/navigation bar that keeps the information their users are coming to the site for pushed down the page.

I will give the Treasury large kudos for grasping control of the splintered branding that is rampant in the large organizations. This consistantcy provides a couple of advantages by providing ease common design that give welcome consistancy and it makes it easier to go back and correct the navigation and usability errors that were left behind.

Chad's reading lists

Chad Thornton has a great list of others reading lists. Such reading lists are great ways to find new resources. Chad adds Stanford's Joint Program in Design to his list.

Interface and the customer

Adam Greenfield wrote a great article in Losing (inter)face: Customer experience and its discontents. This is a wonderful correlation and has sparked quite a great perspective on interface.

Communication relies on a transfer of information. I have been going through battles with the UPS driver lately and it is all based on that UPS sticky note that is your communication with your driver and the package you hope will arrive. This week a driver left a blank sticky, which UPS customer service stated was not possible, funny because I have it. The driver did not return the following day. The UPS site fails when the driver does not do their part and customer service can not perform properly when the commication fails. Information needs a transaction vehicle, breaking this transaction can lead to a breakdown in trust.

Gold Box provides

The Amazon Gold Box provides a goodie to get. After watching the Gold Box for weeks, and wondering where it went for a week or so, the Gold Box had a solid offering. I found Memento on DVD popped up. I did not see the movie in the theater, but have had an interest. The 10 dollar plus price made it less than a movie out for two and the fancy tiles are not available at the rental joints. One thing I did not realize about the Gold Box is that if you select an item to buy before the final item you do not get the opportunity to see the remaining items.

Paris France design in CommArts

I enjoyed the CommArts Design Interact article on Paris France. One of the pull quotes is very close to one that I continually use around meeting tables at the organizations I work for, "The Internet site or Intranet site is not about or for anybody around this table, it is not for anybody we can reach out and touch, it is for those folks we can not touch and walk through the site or application. This is why we build this site and or application, it is to be used by those we can see or touch. Knowing this we must focus building things in a manner that the user will understand, because we can not explain how we think to guide them so we must understand how they think." This article also provides some great visuals along with the wonderful read.

Recentralization information extension

In response to Peter's recentralization essay, part 2 and part 1, Nick Ragouzis discusses what he believes is important in recentralization. Nick points out that consistency of principles is very important and that may be more important than consistency of presentation. This is juicy and dead on.

Finally a move to centralize organization's Websites is the norm

Peter Merholz wrote The Pendulum Returns: Unifying the Online Presence of Decentralized Organizations for Adaptive Path. Peter points out the needs for organizations to centralize their Web content and visual interface. Consistency helps the users greatly, I have been finding this for years. The "let every flower bloom" is has always been horrible means for organizations Internet and Intranet sites. This is does not provide for central branding and ruins a user's experience when dealing with a the organization. Research, for years, has shown a homogenized brand and information structure will greatly benefit the organization and the users. There are great cost efficiencies to be had as well. For now go read Peter's work.

Adaptive Path talks with Marc Rettig

Adaptive Path interview with Marc Rettig. Marc is one of my favorite people, who continually blows my mind with his approach to problem solving (Peter and Lane are no slouches either). [hat tip Brad]