dancingmango

Storyboarding is a really powerful way of communicating how a tool will work. The Sun design team have put together some cartoons that can be used for presenting storyboards; for example taking a bunch of wireframes and using the cartoons to tell the story through them. The cartoons are in powerpoint here. I’m looking forward to using these, to ditching the dry persona description and annotations and replacing them with a more compelling cartoon journey…

Last year I wrote about Early Learning Centre and how impressed I was with their revamped web site. It was recently picked up by About Customer Relations: The New Competitive Edge. Whilst I stand by my comments about the site itself being well designed, the rest of the experience leaves a lot to be desired.

In the summer I bought a product on their website - the product that was delivered was not the same that was ordered. They succeeded in repeating the mistake twice, delivering two toy pushchairs before the pram finally arrived. With no present arriving on time we had to postpone our daughter’s birthday for a day whilst we waited for her birthday present to arrive.

I probably should have learnt from this experience. I didn’t and on 11th December I ordered toys on their website for my daughters and their cousins. The on-line shopping experience was faultless, I received a confirmatory email and the following day, on the 12th I received the following note:

We’re pleased to let you know that the following items from your order of 11 December 2006 have been despatched from the Early Learning Centre warehouse… You can expect your toys by Wednesday 20th December.

That was great, managing my expectations, keeping me informed. Only on Thursday 21st December no delivery arrived at my address. We rang their number and were informed that the delivery would be made, the order would be with us by Christmas. That was a promise.

Friday 22nd and still nothing. I was getting worried, I could postpone my daughter’s birthday, but postponing Christmas because of ELC’s incompetence was not on the cards. I got through to the call centre and was told that sorry, the delivery had not left the couriers warehouse, and would not go out before Christmas. The call centre representative said he’d phone local stores and see if the toys I’d ordered would be available for pick-up. I was put on hold as he rang a local store. All sold out. I suggested another store and was put on hold again. After fifteen minutes on hold I gave up and rang back. This time I was told that the courier firm would be making deliveries on the Saturday morning and I could expect my order to arrive first thing in time for Christmas.

Saturday morning and no delivery. I rang the call centre again. The representative I spoke to said that she couldn’t tell me whether the delivery would be made. I put the phone down. I rang back again and asked to speak to a manager. “Sorry, all our managers are in a meeting” came the response. This was not good enough. I asked for a manager to ring me back when they came out of the meeting. I’m still waiting for a call.

A little later on, the parcel arrived, in time for Christmas, but not in time for me to have anything good to say about ELC’s ability to execute on their web promise.

Central to my experience was a breakdown in communication. The call centre had access to the courier firm’s tracking website (that they wouldn’t share with me), but seemed to have no way to talk to someone on the ground to find out why my gifts were not put on a van before the date they’d promised in the email. I don’t care that the courier company let them down. For me, the courier is ELC. In the call centre it was clear that they’d brought in extra people to handle the Christmas rush. These people probably had a bare minimum of training and were not able to handle queries from disgruntled customers in a consistent way.

The lesson learned here is that having a good website is just part of the total customer experience. You may have the right products at the right price, easily found and simply paid for. My web experience may end with me parting with my credit card details and receiving a confirmation e-mail. But I’m not satisfied until the right goods arrive at my home and they meet my expectations based upon promises made on the website. At any stage of the whole process I expect a consistent and excellent experience. Anything less and I won’t return. Worse, I’ll tell others how bad my experience was.

The www prefix is redundant. Technically, and now, given the ubiquitous nature of the web, in marketing as well. So why do companies insist on retaining it. Worse, why do some companies have URLs that only work with the www.? This is sloppy, a couple of lines of code would direct either company.com or www.company.com to the correct IP address. There are some big names who suffer from this sloppiness. Will ‘07 be the year that WWW, an acronym that takes longer to say than to write, drifts into history?

So I may support Chelsea on the pitch, but on their website? Oh dear me. It’s as though they got someone who has just learnt flash to build it - to use as many flash animations as possible. And any website designer that incorporates a link on their splash page (why oh why a splash page) that says “check out the site demo” and a first message “learn how to navigate through ChelseaFC.com” needs to be questioned. Learn how to navigate a web site? Oh please!

The nature of football fans is their brand loyalty, but to give them something that visibly takes time to load (page loading status bar), requires instructions to learn how to use, and doesn’t make things easy - support me achieve my goals - is frankly insulting.

Oh, and they’ve got a text only version (the CFC Flash website isn’t going to win awards for accesibility so one can only presume this is the only reason it is provided) but the splashpage requires JavaScript to load up, so no JS and no website, regardless of any text-only goodness that may be there. So not an accesible website then.
Meanwhile the community stuff that supporters care about (beyond the news and match reports, it’s probably going to be the most sticky content) is a seperate site that looks like it was built in the early days of the web. I mean, who uses frames anymore.

Sorry Chels, poor show. Your league status doesn’t extend to your on-line prescence.

User name and password. Ever since setting up my first hotmail account, since buying my first book on amazon these are the two unique peices of information that securely identify me. It’s a pattern I’m used to. Sometimes the username I want will be taken, but I’ll find another one. I remember my user names. Passwords are a little harder, I seem to be forever changing them, but at least with a user name I can usually click on a link to get a password reset emailed to me.

So why do the banks do the whole identifcation thing differently? The majority of banks don’t allow you to have a user name that you define. They allocate you a “customer number” or a “membership ID” or some other randomly generated number that you are almost certainly not going to remember. You are going to write it down. So this number can’t be more secure than a user name. And it is not as if you don’t already have a plethora of numbers with the banks; card number, account number, sort code. Couldn’t they use these numbers as identifiers? With HSBC you can generate your “IB” number from these information, but it is a more lengthy procedure. First Direct have an on-line support ID and an on-line access ID (whatever they are!?)

Security is paramount with on-line banking; as banks renew their security infrastructure they should review the customer experience; how security manifests itself to the end user and how easy it is to use, as well as ensuring it offers the highest level of protection to themselves and their customers.

All too often there is an assumption that we can deliver a bunch of features and they will provide a benefit to the customer. A simple model and it underlies much of what agile is perceived to be about. Deliver those features that provide greatest (business) benefit at the earliest opportunity.

It is worth looking at the updated DeLone and McLean model for Information Systems (IS) success [pdf]. This is a causal model; if you want to accrue benefits with a system it is not sufficient just to deliver “features”. There are qualities that must be realised; these will drive an intention to use and actually use the application. This is tightly correlated with satisfaction, use will precede satisfaction, but if the outcome is satisfaction then use will increase and this is the ultimate test of how beneficial a system is.

So taking the “qualities” one by one:

System quality: e.g. reliability, usability, performance, availability, accessibility
Information quality: e.g. usefulness, personalisation, speaking the user’s language, keywords, search terms
Service quality: the overall experience, interface design, emotional impact, trust, security, support

Typically development teams may consider some system quality attributes as “non-functional requirements” but these are generally from a technical perspective (e.g. availability) rather than a human perspective (e.g. usability). Probably this is because this is the language that development teams understand.

Information quality is usually left to someone else, someone from the business, from marketing, to write the copy for example. On the web, where most customer experiences start with search so getting copy right is essential to ensure search engine optimisation. On pages that are not content managed, pages that the developers are coding have meta-tags been identified? Has copy been written with targeted keywords in mind, keywords at the beginning of the page, with repeated use of the keywords etc?

Service quality is something that everybody assumes will be manifest but is rarely explicitly stated as a measurable component. I recently worked with a client that wanted to offer “world class” services. What did this mean? Asking them resulted in different things to different parties. The DeLone and McLean is a little light on “service quality”. Depending upon the application, it is something that looks and feels good, and makes me feel good using it. It is something that delivers a complete and holistic experience from the first point of contact (e.g. hitting the home page) through to realising my goal (e.g. correct products ordered arrive at promised time).

These qualities have a causal impact on use and user satisfaction. These can be measured (e.g. usage patterns/ repeat usage/ surveys) and should be incorporated into the non-functional requirements at the outset of the development.

Get all this right and you will realise net benefits from the project.