Customer Experience

Swivel chair integration?

  • Wednesday, 18 April, 2007
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Liverpool Victoria website - quotes only available at selected times

One of the great promises of the eCommerce was that goods and services are always available, 24/7.  Not apparently at Liverpool Victoria whose online quotations are only available at selected times:

Please note that our online car insurance quotes are only available at selected times: 8am to 11.45pm Mon-Fri, 8am to 3.45pm Sat.

One can only assume that this is an issue with their integration of their website with their backend quotation engine.  Was the quotation engine built in the days of 9-5 business and is unavailable outside business hours?  Maybe it depends upon overnight batch processes that render it inoperational between 11.45 to 08:00 and from 3.45 on Saturdays to Monday morning?  Or is this swivel chair integration, some poor soul manually taking requests from the web site and entering them into the legacy system?  Someone who doesn’t work nights, Sundays and whose weekend starts at 3.45 on Saturday?

Do you know who you are building for?

  • Monday, 12 March, 2007
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Senior management in both Tescos and Sainsburys have to spend some mandated time every year at the checkout in the stores. This keeps them in tune with what it is like to be at the front line. Taking them out of the realm of reports and documents and experiencing the reality of their strategy and decisions.

Becky Carroll recently posted a blog about looking through the eyes of others.

“We need to get to know our customers, their wants and needs, their frustrations with us, and their raves about us. You need to see your company through the eyes of your customers.”

It shouldn’t just be the senior managers of supermarkets that do this. There should be no reason why the whole project team should not gain some sort of exposure to the people whose lives will be touched by the product they are building.

Creating personas and scenarios that everybody is familiar with is a start, but it is no substitute to seeing what really happens. It may not be feasible to let everyone on the team get out onto the shop floor, but how about videoing the users at work; a five minute video of traders on the trading floor, customers at the checkout, call centre reps on the phone. When new team members join a project don’t just give them a verbal briefing or a bunch of documentation to read, let them see what’s going on.

Why is this important? Because we carry the baggage of our experience, and that is not necessarily the best or most appropriate way to approach things. We may think we are doing something cool with the technology, but is it appropriate to our users? As an ergonomist my first impression when seeing traders with four screens in front of them is one of shock. Its information overload and a poor way to work. But in the context of use, watching traders in their environment, you understand why so many screens are important. Through observation I was able to change my perceptions to reflect reality rather than my preconceived opinions.
If marketers need to “see your company through the eyes of your customers”, IT professionals need to “see your product through the eyes of your users”.

It gets worse…

  • Friday, 9 March, 2007
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The other day I wrote about how Surrey County Council had a “problem with their systems” and couldn’t tell us what school our daughter has a place in. We were supposed to be informed last Wednesday. They’d promised to “send the letters out” on Friday, today. Being impatient I rang them up; now the letters have been printed surely the relevent data would be available to give out on the phone to impatient parents.

Well yes and no.

Yes we should be able to give you the information I was told, but sorry we can’t. “Our database has crashed!”

I’m incredulous.

“It’s the EMS” I was told, “I can’t even log in to it. Today of all days”.

Is this Capita’s Extended Management System? Capita, the company whose chairman gave a £1m loan to the labour party? Suddenly, (much to my shock and surprise) the Tories are becoming ever more attractive. Partciularly with the Shadow Chancellor standing up and demanding a greater use of Open Source. As a tax payer this is great news! And as employee of a great company that champions Open Source even better!

I’m exercising my democratic rights next week and talking to my (Tory) MP about the farcical IT “solution” that is operating in his constituency, and will back up what his parties money man is saying.  And maybe my voting intentions may be swinging.

It’s not good enough to blame the computer. Blame the lack of tests

  • Friday, 2 March, 2007
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It’s education lottery time. Parents are receiving letters bearing good or bad news from schools telling them if their little lovelies have got places in their chosen schools or not. Choice being the big thing – although there isn’t really such a thing as choice, it’s more a preference. Parents have have three choices, ranked one two or three. Good schools have strict admission criteria, and will usually only accept “first choice” children. Don’t get your child into your first choice school and you are at the mercy of the local education authority – no good school will accept parents who rate their schools as second or third choices. It’s not an ideal system, but at least all the letters go out on the same day so you get to know where your child has been allocated a place.

Sadly we fall into the unfortunate category of parents whose first choice has not been honoured. Our first choice school has rejected us on the grounds of distance from the school. Their classroom quota has been reached and we didn’t fill it. That is not good for us! So will we be exceptionally lucky and our daughter get a place in our second or even third preferred schools? We don’t know. And Surrey Country Council can’t tell us.

We’ve got a week of anxious waiting before they send their letters out. They’ve got a problem with their “systems.” Well that is the message I get told when I rang them up. “We can’t tell you anything more because we don’t even know” I was told.
Frankly it is not good enough to blame the computer. If something so critical happens in the private sector, SLAs dictate a course of action; this is a severity one problem that will be fixed within hours. Not weeks. But this is good enough in the public sector where faceless bureaucrats can hide behind the computer, cosy outsourcing deals with little accountability mean that no-one really needs to take responsibility. Take responsibility for the pain and distress this is causing me and my family!
So I got their press office number from the website and rang the Head of Communications. She knew nothing of any problems with letters going out, but promised to have someone call me back to let me know what the problem was.

A little while later I got a call back and was told that there was indeed a problem with the computer, specifically in resolving offers, and in particular resolving offers where children have other siblings already in the school. I was also told that they’d earlier had problems in importing data into their systems.

Now the deadline for getting completed applications in is the end of October. That was four months ago. Four months to scan several thousand forms and process the data, and get it right. That is not such a hard task is it? OK, so the process changed for this round of admissions so changes would have been required to the systems, but even more reason to make sure you get it right. It begs the question, was there a test strategy in place? Did anybody do any testing? I believe that the system has been outsourced to Capita. Has anybody at Capita heard of test driven development? It strikes me that this sort of project is ripe for an agile approach to delivery; a business critical system that cannot fail, simple business rules… I wonder if my MP is going to listen to this story…

When do you need to design a UI?

  • Friday, 23 February, 2007
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Via Ian Cartwright  an interview with “Lean software gurus” Mary and Tom Poppendieck.  All is going well until  Mary says this:

When do you really need to design a user interface? Oftentimes it drives the whole design, but in fact you don’t really need it until you’re about to do your first alpha test. Before that you can be designing the business layer and you can actually put testing in below the user interface and you can be designing all of the other business logic; you can get that done with any kind of interface and in fact you ca drive testing with a automated interface, and then just before you go to alpha testing you decide what you want for your user interface. Then you take it off and at that point in time you figure it out. But up until that point in time you don’t need that.

This jars with my experience of building compelling customer experiences. There is a good reason why the user interface should drive the whole design because that is how the software is manifest.  To the people whose lives are to be touched by the software, the users, the consumers, the interface is the software.  To leave the UI till last presents a  huge risk of building software that is functionally rich but has a UI modelled around the features; the underlying data and logic rather than how the user wants to work.

Starting with the UI is an excellent way of capturing and communicating requirements.  And bakes in usability into the design.  You want this feature and that feature?  Great.  But will they be coherent and usable to the user?  Drawing out a UI  on paper – paper prototyping- is far more efficient that making assumptions about requirements on a list.  Afterall, isn’t this what the manufacturing industry that the Poppendiecks take thier inspiration from?  Don’t the car manufacturers start with CAD and move onto clay models?  Ergonomists have a hand in the design of car interiors, using anthropometrics to build in comfort and work out lines of sight.  The engineers don’t build the engine and the bodywork and then make decisions about how the car will look.  These things are designed from the start.  And so should it be with software.

When do you really need to design a user interface? It should be the first thing that you do.

Have you considered the consumer mind?

  • Thursday, 22 February, 2007
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Some things that the development community take for granted as “bleedin’ obvious” are often far from it for the end consumer.

Cue a story.

I’ll protect his identity and call him Jack. Jack is 60 and has been using the internet for a while; He’s got broadband; he banks on line, buys books on Amazon, books cheap flights with easyjet and sold his car on eBay. He considers himself internet savvy.

Not so long ago a friend castigated Jack for using Internet Explorer as his browser, and downloaded Firefox for him. Jack loved the tabbed browsing. Jack was a happy chappy.

When I was in Hong Kong, Jack thought it would be good opportunity to try out the web camera he had never used. He had Instant Messenger, and pinged me asking me if we could have a video chat. We tried to connect but couldn’t. Messenger told me he had an old version of IM and should upgrade. Jack said he thought he’d already done this – I sent him the URL and left him to it. Five minutes later he pinged me that he’d installed the new version of IM. Great I thought. I tried to connect and got the same error message – Jack was still using an old version of IM. Maybe he needed to shut down his machine… Jack disappeared for a couple of minutes and came back on line. Still the old version. Hmmm. I asked Jack to try installing it again. He came back proud of definitely having definitely installed it. We tried to start a video call:

The Video Call failed because jack is using a version of Messenger that does not support this feature.

Hmmmmm.

So we went through all the steps that Jack was going through. It transpired that Jack was saving the file, but there was no call to action to actually launch it.

Firefox save dialog box

And there on Jacks desktop were eight saved versions of msgr8.exe.

Jack often wondered what these files on his desktop were, but assumed they were important (he hadn’t put them there, the system had) and didn’t want to open them, let alone delete them.

Was Jack’s mistake such a big one; to assume that “saving” a downloaded application was the same as installing it? In developer mind, probably. But in consumer mind? Clearly not.

We talk a lot about beginner mind / expert mind, shu ha ri… But thinking about Jack, there is another mind that needs to be considered. Consumer mind. Expert in the things I do everyday, clueless in anything beyond my immediate sphere of need or want.

This impatient monkey

  • Wednesday, 21 February, 2007
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I’m impatient.  I also expect technology to work.  When it doesn’t appear to be working, when I’m getting no feedback as to what is happening, I get frustrated.  I click-click-click the mouse button.  I hammer the enter key.  I repeatedly thump the keyboard.  “Work damn you!” I curse.

The technology was probably just creaking along, it may have got there in the end, but my hammering is the last straw, it breaks the application. Frozen out, frustration turns to user anger.

The developer tuts, “it’s your own fault” he says, “you broke it with your impatience”.  And that is why Dan North’s recent blog about Monkey Testing fills me with happiness.  Testing software for my monkey behaviour, so that it doesn’t break when I do things that I’m not supposed to do – because I am human.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should

  • Tuesday, 20 February, 2007
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Following a recent Economist article, JP Rangaswami blogged about “can versus should“. His theme was around DRM and identity; just because the government can monitor your digital behaviour does not mean that they should. I like this, but think it can be extended to much of the IT domain.

Web 2.0 introduces many new styles of interaction, drag and drop, take over the right-hand mouse button… just because we can do these things doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. What will the impact be? Hide calls to action behind the mouse button on your site and your site alone, how does the user know to find them there? When building a “deluxe web” site at the forefront of mind should be how will people actually interact with the proposition. Just because we can do some technically cool stuff that would give us a buzz and gain nods of appreciation from our technical colleagues, doesn’t mean that we should. A customer who has come to the proposition probably requires clarity and an ability to accomplish their goals. They care very little for the stuff we can do.

Multiple select on a list - check boxes or web deluxe take over the mouse?
And then there is mobile. Just because we can deliver the ability to enable customers to watch TV on their phones, doesn’t mean that we should. Too often new propositions are driven by IT ability rather than consumer demand. WAP was a great example of this; IT consultants getting excited about delivering content on mobile phones using WAP, completely overlooking what a shocking experience it was and simultaneously missing what consumers actually wanted to do – text message.

The Total Experience

  • Thursday, 15 February, 2007
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The customer experience doesn’t start on the home page and finish on the payment confirmation page. A compelling customer experience comprises of a number of factors with the different factors residing in, and owned by different parts of the business. This can result in parts of the experience being excellent, others being shocking, such as at the Early Learning Centre. Projects that are driven forward by “IT” rarely see the bigger picture; the project manager’s primary concern is with delivery. And this means producing a product that covers all the use cases or stories that were specified in the plan. Agile development practices often reinforce this; an agile team is (rightly) focussed upon delivering technical excellence according to the “customer’s” requirements. The trouble with this is that project success in the on-line world goes beyond just delivering working software. Success is all about the total experience.

I’m sure there are a hundred and one different frameworks for “e” success. The following works pretty well for me.

The Total Experience Model. Copyright Marc McNeill!

Compelling proposition
Any on-line offering starts with its proposition; what it is offering to the market place. Do we know who the consumers are (segment), how many of them are (market size) and their propensity to buy? What is going to attract them to the site, and what is the glue that will draw them back.

Findability
Well if no one can find your compelling proposition it’s never going to make you money. Do you have a strategy in place for ensuring consumers can find your proposition? This starts with search engine optimisation, but will extend to affiliate programs and making a noise about you (Product team blogging?). And then when they are at your site is navigation intuitive? Is relevant and wanted content findable?
Personality
What is the product aesthetic, what does it look like? Is it branded? Does it exhibit production values that reinforce the brand? How does the overall experience make me feel – how does it emotionally engage me?

Content
Content is king. But all too often it is a bit of an afterthought. It’s not just syndicated content, or articles that subject matter experts might write, it is all the copy, the words that appear on the site. Do they support the proposition, or are they just placeholders that the developers wrote and never got updated? Related to content, and maybe it should have a bubble unto itself is community. I think that increasingly, successful eCommerce offerings will include an element of community. Fulfilling the promise of the ClueTrain manifesto from several years back?

Technical Excellence
Working for a company that undoubtedly employs some of the finest developers in the market place, this is something I see a lot of. But it means nothing if the other elements are not realised. Technical excellence includes those “non functional requirements” that development projects talk about; reliability, performance, scalability etc etc.

Usability
Learnable, speaks the user language, memorable, all those old chestnuts. Probably the maxim is “don’t make me think”. Aligned to usability is accessibility; we don’t want to exclude potential consumers through sloppy implementation.

Operational excellence
So the on-line experience may be compelling, but what happens then. Is the fulfilment channel fulfilling? Is there a promise to deliver goods and is the promised delivered upon? What about support channels? Do they support or do they just pay lip service to the concept? Does the web experience go beyond the web and cross other channels? Can consumers start a journey on the website and seamlessly conclude the experience in store? My blogs on Early Learning Centre, Norwich Union and a seamless experience all touch on operational excellence.

Test – measure – refine
Underpinning these factors is the need to constantly test what we do. We can all learn from Test Driven Development (TDD); write the test first and only have the confidence to proceed when it passes. How do we know it has passed? Well we need to measure it; we can only know success if we can quantify it. Based upon the feedback we refine; test – measure – refine, a concept core to agile software development practices.

A lot of words and a picture that belie a simple concept. When working in the web world, always think about the total experience. Break out of your silo (be it technical development or marketing strategy) and think holistically. What will the end to end experience be for your consumers? A technically excellent website is not success. A polished, well branded look and feel is not success. Success is compelling total experience.

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