dancingmango

You went to the local branch of your bank and spoke to a really helpful person there.  In the few minutes you were with her you established a relationship with her.  You felt comfortable and confident that she would take ownership of your request.  But before she could deal with your query, disaster!  You left some critical information at home.

Can I email it to you later you asked her?

Silly question.

Have you ever tried emailing someone in the branch network?  Chances are the frontline staff don’t have external email.  What sort of business is it that doesn’t give its staff email and the ability to communicate on a personal level with its customers?  the same sort of business that has centralised all its customer contact and put it behind IVR.

So you give up on email.

Can I give you a ring with the details later you asked her?

She shakes her head.  She doesn’t have a number.  you see the branch doesn’t give out its number to the public. Go through the 0845 central switchboard, and let someone in the call centre pass a message to the person in the branch.  (With no formal process to get this to happen, good luck if your messages ever gets passed on).

In fact the only way you will probably get a message to the  person you talked to this morning is if you send a fax.  One step removed from the telex, two away from the telegram.

What is it with the banks that they don’t want their staff to have external email access?

This makes me mad.  I’ve got a HP all-in-one printer, scanner copier.  All I want it for is to print and scan.  On the Mac the printer is plug and play so no messing about with drivers for that.  I just need a driver for the scanner.  So I insert the disc and find myself having to download 18 applications weighing in at 55 meg.  No option to just install the scanning application - I’ve got to take the whole lot, picture editing, the works.  Now that is rude, it is impolite [pdf] and it is selfish.  If Mr Hewlett and Packard invited me to dinner I would come alone.  I wouldn’t bring my family, extended family and assorted hangers on.  So why do they think they can gate crash my computer like this.

In the recent copy of the Hong Kong British Chamber of Commerce magazine there is an interview with Fergal Murray, the Master Brewer for Guinness. He is asked “what do you think it is that makes Guinness so distinctive?” He replies,

I think there are a number of elements. From the brewers point of view, we want you to have a great all round experience. We don’t just want you to have a beer that’s refreshing, we want you to have an experience, to go through the ritual and theatre of emptying that glass. We want there to be a visual impact as well, it has to look fantastic. Finally, there’s a lot of flavour…

And you thought you were buying a pint of the Black Stuff because it was refreshing and tastes good. Yet for the Master Brewer these are bottom of the pile. Most important is the experience.

This is something that is missing in much software development. There are very few master brewers who go beyond just satisfying their customers with features and functionality, to focus upon delivering “a great all round experience”. To turn the mediocre and mundane into theatre. Like Apple have done with the iPhone. Like Guinness do with their stout. Yet something gets lost as you move away from the strategic owners of the Brand, to those responsible for tactical implementations. And this loss can obviously be costly. If the Guinness Master Brewer was only responsible for a drink that is an acquired taste, would it still be the sixth top ranked global Beer brand?

I’m a strong proponent of engaging the customer in all stages of the design process.  But sometimes you need to be careful with what they say and not always believe their first answer.

Ask the customer “what do you want” and the chances are you will get an answer that is rooted in their experiences and expectations.  Not what they really want.

“I want an intranet portal“.

No, you don’t.  You want a place where your employees can share files and documents.

“I want a google search appliance“.

No you don’t.  You want to be able to find documents quickly and efficiently.

Worse is when vendors try and force products onto the customer…

“You want an integrated BI toolset“.

No they don’t.  What they really want is to be able to pull some specific data from a legacy application into an excel spreadsheet and insert a graph into a word document.

OK, so it is easy to say that, but how to follow though?  How do you actually get the customer to create a vision of what they really want?  Well I’d start by not asking them that question.  Get them to articulate what their goals are.  Then try to understand in what context they will try to accomplish those goals?  Think in terms of customer journeys and value outcomes over features.  Think about the what, not the how. Start with the “to-be” vision rather than dwelling in the “as-is” quagmire, indeed use a system obituary to kill the as-is thinking.  Use visual tools to model your ideas.  And don’t get bogged down in detail.

I’ll write more about this in the future…

This is nothing new, but there are still people out there to whom Web 2.0 is a bit of a mystery. What exactly is it, and more to the point, should our business care about this stuff? Or, as I have heard senior executives argue, is it just another bubble, a distraction to let others waste their time, effort and money on. In an attempt to challenge this assumption, I’ve used a model with a few sceptical clients to hang some structure on. This is central to the below presentation that I’ve given to a few financial services organisations. It discusses what Web 2.0 is, and towards the end describes what it could mean for their on-line retail bank website. (Thanks to Duncan Cragg and Prashant Gandhi for some insights).

Someone from the Barclaycard research centre rang me today doing some customer research.  It is great to know they take the customer experience seriously - many of the questions were around my experience with the brand.  But then they dropped this corker, not once, but twice.

To what extent do your other credit card providers offer innovative products

How important is it to you that your credit card provider offers innovative products

How on earth did those questions get through and on to the list?  What is an “innovative product” when talking about credit cards or financial services?   What is an “innovative product” to Joe Public?  Maybe I can relate to an iPhone as such, but my credit card?  Product innovation is hardly something that you or I consider when we pull a credit card out of the wallet.

“Innovative products” are something that marketeers talk about,  they are not in the credit card users lexicon.

Marketing may be a touchy-feely occupation, but the language that marketeers use is far from it.  Campaigns, strategy, tactics, targets…  all out of the military handbook.  That might be OK within the organisation, but it shouldn’t be exposed to your customers.  An email sent by BA inviting customers to register to a special deal results in a page informing the customer; “Thank You, [name] Your pre-registration for this campaign has been successful”.  Now what is that all about?  They’ve spent so much time creating the campaign, how it fits into their overall strategy that they’ve overlooked the details around what really matters - fullfillment, wording and how the customer feels about BA at the end of the process.  I feel a little cooler than when I clicked on the promotion. 

Today is one of those days. A meeting in Zhuhai at 11am. Take the 08:40 ferry from Hong Kong, no problem. I’d researched the ferry times, got to the ferry port with loads of time to spare and went up to the ticket counter. “Ticket to Zhuhai please”. Suddenly there was an earlier 8am ferry leaving in five minutes, if I run I could catch it. “You’re sure this goes to Zhu…” I started to ask, but the man behind the counter cut me off. “Yes it goes to zhunzen, now hurry!” but I didn’t hear him correctly, I was focussed on a boat leaving earlier than expected, and that would definitely get me to my meeting on time. Communication Breakdown. It was only as the ferry left Hong Kong and turned right rather than left I realised my mistake. I was on the boat to Shenzen.

But that is not the purpose of this post. Arriving in China, when going through passport control, under the glass window there is a little box with three buttons on it, inviting you to rate your experience - green for perfect, yellow for satisfactory and red for unsatisfactory. Capturing customer feedback at the time of the experience. Howe much more valuable is that than asking customers to complete a lengthy questionnaire some time later, after the event. I think that websites could learn from this. Rather than a pop-up inviting customers to complete a questionnaire of a number of pages (often this appears just as you start your experience at the site), why not get customers to “rate this page” or “rate your experience” as a simple thumbs up or down (as you might Digg comments). This will provide instant feedback, maybe not qualitative, but quick and simple quantative data.

And if I had the ability to rate today? Right now, as I sit in a dingy cafe waiting the two hours for the next ferry back to Hong Kong, with a rapidly flattening laptop battery, I’d have to press the thumbs down, unsatisfactory red light on my current experience.

In the real world, when I get an application form I’ll flick through the pages and have a look at what is required. I can choose which fields I complete in whatever order I like. If I want to take a break half way through I can. I can complete it when I like and how I like.

So why aren’t web forms like that?

The usual format for a web form starts with some copy that describes the form (which people skim through at best). The user clicks to the next page and the form commences. There may be a step indicator showing progress through the form, but almost certainly progress through it will be linear. You have to complete each page before progressing to the next. If you are lucky you’ll be able to click to previous completed steps. But the experience is nothing like a real-world form. And when was the last time a real-world paper form “timed out” half way through, demanding the user to start over again if they left it idle for ten minutes?

The web forms we see today are a relic of their tecnological past. There is no reason why they must be linear, (and if there is logic in the form, there is no reason why the user can’t explore the different routes - you do that with a paper based form). There is no reason why the user can’t click to whatever page in the process they like (just like with the paper form). There is no reason why a page must be completed before progressing to the next. There is no reason why the form should time out and forget everything the user has entered. Fields can be saved as they are completed against an anonymous user, until the user wants to provide personal credentials.

Bottom line - the web has moved on. Instead of reflecting technical constraints of yesterday, it can adopt more real-world metaphors. But do we have the courage to start introducing new paradigms? Are users, information architects and usability experts so ingrained with broken web metaphors that they will shun a new model, (a real world model) of completing a form?

So here’s a rough example. It’s an application form for a savings account. Ignore the content, field labels etc, it is more the model that is illustrated.

1. The user can move between the sections (tabs) to see the fields that are required. There is clear feedback on each tab that it has not been completed. The “Direct Debit” section is optional hence no indicator. The ability to save the application is seperate.

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2. The user selects “Bank details”. They’ve not filled out all the fields on the first tab “Personal details”, but it doesn’t matter. There is clear feedback that this tab is yet to be completed.

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3. The user clicks right through to the confirmation tab. There is nothing to confirm so the page remains blank, with a prompt to fill out other sections.

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4. When sections are completed the indicator on the tab changes to show completion. Here the user has completed step two ahead of step one.

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5. Finally, when all sections are completed the user can review the entire form.

I’m not saying this is perfect, it’s a start. A start to re-thinking the way we design forms on the web and think about modelling them on real world behaviour instead of technical constraints of the past.

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) are the poor, ugly sisters to the functional requirements.  They are often left out, or worse written in wooly and non SMART terms; “the website shall be available 24/7″.  Is this what happened with HMRC?   The website that allows UK citizens to complete their tax returns on-line has gone down, just as the deadline looms.  I wonder if this is a case of the non-functional requirements around performance, scalability volumes etc being forgotten about or just not tested for.  Inexcusable really.