dancingmango

We didn’t build it because the business didn’t prioritise it

Agile software development is inherently democratic.  Choice over Prescription could be included in the Agile manifesto.  We give the customer the choice, the choice to decide what is most important to them, what will deliver the greatest value and build that first.  We do not prescribe that they must build a complex framework first- the software will evolve, You ain’t gonna need it (Yagni) until you need it.

The problem with this democracy, with this unleashed choice is that, if you don’t have the right mix of stakeholders, the (agile project) customer doesn’t always know what is best.  They are not always the best people to choose.

There is a difference between domain knowledge and what I’ll call ‘experience’ knowledge.  A banker may know the banking domain inside and out, they can tell you the difference between all the different types of balance and how (and where) they are calculated; closing balance, running balance, etc.  But unless they have done any research with customers, unless they have ‘experience knowledge’, when it comes to  a question such as which balance to provide as an SMS alert, their ‘domain’ knowledge is as good as your common-sense.

Imagine software were a supermarket store.  IT are responsible for the construction of the store, the basic layout, the signage, the checkout, the peripherals.  The business are responsible for what goes into the store, the merchanising, the planogram.  The business imperative is to fill the shelves and shift the product.  They want to spend their money to this goal, anything that does not directly support this will be of lower priority.  That is their domain and they will prioritise that over anything else.  If they could fill the store with nothing but shelves they’d probably be happy.

Now imagine visiting the store.  There’s no carpark, there are no shopping trolleys, there’s no emergency exits.  There’s no ramp for disabled customers.  The shelves rise to eight foot high (with no steps to reach the heights), the aisles are difficult to negotiate because of promotional displays between the shelves.  The business is happy, but what about the customer?

In the agile world, nobody is going to pay attention to this stuff unless it is prioritised.  “Sorry, we didn’t build any shopping trolleys because you prioritised building more shelf space over them”.

This sort of thing happens all the time; functional domain requirements trump experience requirements. Why? Because no-one brings experience knowledge into prioritization and planning sessions.

When stating their choice, your stakeholder wears a commercial hat, they are thinking about their targets and those are based upon shifting product.  They are living in thier operational business domain.  But cold commercials are not what shifts product.  It is the experience that does.  Now go back to the democracy of choice on an agile project.  Who is the ‘business’ specifiying requirements? Is it a balanced team? Is their an experience champion with an equal voice?  Is the voice of the customer recgognised?  If not, isn’t about time you got an customer experience champion onto the team.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I just want to talk to someone

I’ve got a query about an Account I opened with Alliance and Leicester.  I’ve got a letter that provides me with an account number and a phone number, it reads  “…if you have any further question [sp] please contact a member of the team on 0844 5619737“. So I ring the number.

“Please enter your eight digit ID number.  This is on your welcome letter, monthly statements, or internet banking ID.  It is NOT your account number.”

Hmmm. I don’t have any of those things to hand, they are not on the letter.  I’ve got my debit card, but that’s obviously on a different system.  I put the phone down and return to the letter, near the bottom, in bold it gives another number “if you would like us to send you information in the future in larger print…” I ring this number.  It doesn’t work.

So I go to the website and look for a telephone number.  I’m an existing customer.  I select my product and ring the number on the page.

“Please enter your eight digit ID number.  This is on your welcome letter, monthly statements, or internet banking ID.  It is NOT your account number.”

I don’t have that information to hand.  I choose another product.  Same message.  I’m getting frustrated.  There’s a page titled “Other enquiries“.  Lots of words, but no number.  I navigate to the complaints page, it has a number.  Hey! Kill two birds with the same stone, speak to someone in their complaints department, make a complaint about how my time is being wasted trying to find a number and get transferred to the relevant department.

I dial the complaints number, more IVR and the prerecorded message.

“Please enter your eight digit ID number.  This is on your welcome letter, monthly statements, or internet banking ID.  It is NOT your account number.”

Frustration turns to anger.  I find a number for new customers.  I get through the IVR and finally talk to someone.  “I need to transfer you to the relevent department” she says.  OK.  The line goes silent.  And then goes dead.  Lovely.  Stress.  I give up and start the motions of closing the account.

There’s nothing unique about Alliance and Leicester.  I hate to pick on them.  But this seems like a case of a lack of joined up thinking.  When you are designing processes or procedures, don’t just think about them from the business perspective, take a persona and test them with real people in roll plays.  What if someone doesn’t have what you expect them to have?  Customers do not always behave according to the expected happy path.  What are you doing about that?

If you say Log out, log me out

You’ve logged into your on-line banking checked your balance, paid your bills.  What do you do now?  Click on the logout button?

What do you expect will happen now?  Well given that you have actively chosen to log-out (it’s not something you are likely to click on my mistake), you’d expect to do exactly that.  Logout.  The next screen you get will probably be something that thanks you for on-line banking, with a cross sell for a product or two.

That’s what I assume most customers would expect.  So what are Alliance and Leicester thinking about with this screen?

The customer has clicked log-out but they are still logged in?

Why?

“You are still logged in to Internet Banking – before you go have a look at Your offers.”

Excuse me, I logged out, I don’t need to be logged in for you to show me offers.

Worse: “Are you sure you want to log out?”

OF COURSE I WANT TO LOG OUT!!! Why else would I have clicked the link.

Alliance and Leicester fail here in a fundamental usability rule, that of managing the customer’s expectation. In an application where security isn’t paramount this would be an error, in an application where customers expect their action of leaving their secure accounts will do exactly that… but doesn’t, is inexcusable.

Where’s the call to action?

On logging in to your HSBC Hong Kong personal bank account the customer gets a brochureware spashpage promoting HSBC products (why no account summary?).  To access their accounts (the reason the customer has gone to the trouble of logging in) the primary call to action is in a box on the right hand side of the screen.  It’s the <Show> button next to gray-on-gray text “My Accounts”.   The strongest call to action is to the ‘new trading site’ Stock Xpress.  It’s a small point, but a call to action as important as account access should more prominent and be the focal point, not an easily missed button.

Are you experienced?

“For you who have had the experience, no explanation is necessary. For you who have not, none is possible.”

I’m going to attribute that saying to Ram Dass, a Harvard professor who via psychedelic experiences ended up a spiritual teacher in the Eastern Tradition.

The problem with too much software/web design is that it is produced by people who have just not had the experience, or do not see the experience as relevant to their organisation or domain. They just don’t “get it”.

(“For you who have an apple product, no explanation is necessary, for you who have not, none is possible?” Cue “it’s an enterprise application we’re buiding, not a ****ing iPhone”).

If we want to build memorable and compelling products, we need to focus upon the experience. To dwell on the feature list or functional requirements is to build mediocrity. Nothing wrong with mediocrity if you don’t want to delight your customers or increase the performance of your workforce. Without considering experience you will miss innovation and added value.

So how to focus upon experience? Get your team to undertake different tasks to get under the skin of what customers go through.

Telco product?
Spend time in a retail outlet and watch different customers buy phones
Go into all the phone shops on the high street and ask the rep “hello, I want a mobile phone”. Suspend all your knowledge about phones and tariffs. How do they sell?
Leave your blackberry at home for a day (how dies it feel? How does it change what you do?)
Download instruction manuals from different phones from manufacturers websites

Travel product?
Go into a travel agents and ask for a holiday “somewhere hot and cheap in February”

Credit card product?
Ask to borrow money from someone you don’t know (how does it feel?)
Apply for a credit card at another bank
Collect all the Credit Card / loan direct mail and emails that you and you get sent over a week, photo / scan all the credit card advertisements you see in a week
Go into a car sales room and look to buy a car on credit

Supermarket product?
Get behind the till for a day (In the UK, at least a few years ago, all senior executives in both Tesco and Sainsburys spent time in the stores over the Christmas period)
Ask a shop assistant to help you find an obscure product that is not in stock
Go into a store with a shopping list and a single bank note, (no credit cards)
Go to the pharmacy when it is busy and ask to buy the morning after pill

Extend your team
Bring in representatives from completely unrelated parts of the business to participate in brainstorming sessions. Building a “youth” social networking website? Get someone from legal or corporate finance to join in. (Get’s you thinking along the lines of extreme characters – here and here [pdf]). Working on a complex exotic financial instruments? Get a few PAs to join in. You may learn something (that your product is too complicated and even you can’t explain what it really is).

I’m sure you can come up with better exercises. The object is that with this collection of experiences and related emotions new ideas can be brought to the table. They can offer insights from another, different perspective, providing more chance of business innovation being realised. More importantly, if you have an emotional attachment to the product you are building through real experience, you are more likely to build a better product that will fullfil the needs of and goals of the target audience in the way they want. The day your enterprise application team all have iPhones will be the day you start building better enterprise applications. For them, no explanation will be necessary. They’ll just “get it”.

Resign or fix what you broke?

There once was a time where the honorable thing to do if you screwed up was to resign. No more it seems.  Times change and to resign is to walk away and admit defeat.  Defeat is something our culture doesn’t honor; no-one likes a loser.  So you ignore the critics and stay on; you know what went wrong, so you are the best person to fix what you broke.  The honorable thing is no longer honorable.  Failure is rewarded, and we just carry on as if nothing happened.

Front of wallet

Credit card companies talk about “front of wallet”. With customers having a number of cards at their disposal, how does a credit card issuer ensure that their card is the customer’s card of choice; the card they will pull out first because it is at the front of the customer’s wallet?

How do you make sure that your website is “front of wallet”? One solution is to become the wallet. In Web 1.0 many organisations tried this, branding themselves as “portals” trying to be a one stop shop to do everything. The reality was that people liked to “jam jar” their experiences. They didn’t trust one one provider who did one thing well to sell them unrelated products; that just didn’t fit in their mental jam jar. They buy insurance from an insurance site, cars from a car site. So if they wanted to buy a car they would go to Autotrader. It was not a banks place to offer car sales in their portal offering. (The value proposition to the bank of course looked good on PowerPoint, sell people cars on the banks portal web and there was a ripe market for cross selling finance and insurance at the same time).

Web 2.0 brings a new “portal” to the playground. A concept rather than a product. Thus we have iGoogle and netvibes and mash-ups. No company can become the wallet, they must resign themselves to being the cards inside. They can do this by offering rss feeds and widgets. Making their content and functionality promiscuous, divorcing it from their site and allowing the customer to consume it how and when they want it. Sadly the banks have yet to grasp this concept. Their technically savvy customers would love to have their balances and recent transactions displayed on a widget or as a feed. Sadly they listen to the masses and their inherent conservatism prevents them from such offerings, killing it with what-ifs and unfounded security concerns (“what if a husband and wife shared the home computer and the wife saw suspicious transactions…” yawn).

Anyway, so there’s Twitter. I’ve signed up to it and for a long time it just sat there I had a subscription, but out of sight and out of mind. It wasn’t at the front of my wallet. It wasn’t even in my wallet. Until I got round to putting it on iGoogle. Suddenly it is visible to me. I see it every time I log in. I get bothered by the inane, uninteresting tweets that most of the people I follow burble, but I also update my status on it (and it updates my facebook status as well). Twitter is now part of my on-line experience. It is now front of my wallet.

Unlike the banks who I visit periodically to check my balance and pay bills (in-out, no lingering). Now if my bank balance was a feed on iGoogle I’d have more of an interest to drill down into more detail. I could manage my money better. I could establish a better on-line relationship with my bank. If they gave a little away, I’d give them so much more. But for now, they are back of my wallet.

Do you know what you are doing?

Recently I was told of a Blue Chip company whose IT organisation, in the guise of cost cutting, has recently disbanded its QA function. From now on, testing will be conducted by the developers themselves. Since when have developers relished the role of testing? It is inevitable that this cost cutting solution will end up costing the organisation more than it saves.

At the end of last summer I was working with a bank on their on-line retail banking strategy. During a workshop with representatives from their mortgage business they made it clear that they saw the biggest sector for growth in 2008 was the buy-to-let market. I left the workshop shaking my head, were they not reading the same newspapers I was? Even then I didn’t need a crystal ball to tell them that they were putting their eggs into the wrong basket.

Clearing out old paperwork, I came across a document describing the technology strategy for a blue chip organisation that I’d worked with in the past.

There is a guiding principle that is being applied to product technology selection that says we do not follow a ‘best-of-breed’ approach, but rather select a major technology leader (IBM) and ride their product development cycle. This means we explicitly seek and accept the “80% solution” rather than trying to optimise for each and every possible requirement. [We are] emphatic on this point. What this means in practice is that, following the selection of IBM WebSphere Application Server… add-on functionality should be sought from the IBM WebSphere family of products first. Shortcomings will be made explicit in order that we can escalate with IBM, and influence their product strategy.

No rationale was given for their preference for going with a single vendor rather than a best of breed solution, but talk to developers who have used best of breed products and the above mentioned vendor product and they will almost certainly come down on the side of the “best of breed” (that is why they are best).

During the dot-com boom I worked with bank who were developing a WAP mobile banking platform. Trouble was it could only be accessed via a Nokia 7110 (the first mobile phone with a WAP browser), the experience sucked – “Worthless Application Protocol” and the market penetration was never going to reach beyond the most hard-core (and GUI-patient) of early adopters.

At the time the same bank was intent on closing as many branches as possible – branch banking was considered unprofitable; on-line was the way forward… yet several years later I was back in the same bank helping them with their in-branch customer experience.

We all must have examples of times when we have shaken our heads and asked of others do they really know what do are doing? Whose interests are their decisions in aid of? You may not be able to do anything proactive about it at the time, but the question is, what can you learn from these encounters and how can you use them to teach others in the future.

Banks don’t want you emailing their staff

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?

Web 2.0, retail banks and a Slide Share presentation

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).