Human Factors

I’m following quite a number of discussion groups on usability and today I read a couple of articles mentioning AttrakDiff. So far I hadn’t heard about it, so I did some investigations on what it is and what it can do.

AttrakDiff is a free tool by User Interface Design GmbH which allows you to have your products evaluated online by users. You may choose between three survey types, namely “Single Evaluation”, “Comparison before-after” and “Comparison between two products”. Simply log in, adjust welcome message and text modules, choose either pre-defined participants or decide to run it as a random survey on you website. Your participants will receive an email with a link to the survey and a passwort, so that each individual can only participate once. They than have to judge your product by choosing between word pairs, and in the end you’ll get a nice overview of the results. It tells you details about the Pragmatic Quality, the Hedonic Quality-Stimulation, the Hedonic Quality-Idendity and the Attractiveness of your product (and it even tell you what all this means ;-)). Additionally you’ll get some statistics on the up to 20 entrants you can have.

This tool definitely doesn’t replace proper testing, especially not as in the basic version you can’t define the word pairs to rate, but it could be a nice in-between-exercise to find out if you’re still on the right track while developing. It’s not much work to produce the survey and it’s free, so there are not many costs involved in using AttrakDiff.

In Zef Fugaz’ Blog I found a link to a brilliant personality test. Usually I don’t like these small tests, which you can put into your MySpace or Facebook profile, telling you if you are a “fairy” or a “hobbit” or if you should be a student in “griffindor” rather than in “slytherin” when you start attending Hogwarts. But Personal DNA is a bit different. It takes you through a huge number of questions about yourself and how you see the world, but as they use different methods (slide bars, buckets, multiple choice…), it doesn’t get too boring to give the answers. Sometimes it’s a bit tricky to stay honest, there are a few questions where you might have a good understanding of how you want to be, but you really need to fill in how you actually are. The outcome is an analysis which in my case was frightening accurate (I’m an Advocating Inventor, which means kind of very social problem-solver with great imagination and visions ;-)). Additionally you’ll get your personality visualised in a pretty colorful way – mine looks like this:

Wow, this is a great example of easy-to-use websites. Greenpeace New Zealand have updated their Clean Energy Guide and it’s pretty easy now to switch to an energy supplier that offers “green” electricity. “Green” in the case of New Zealand means energy generated only using renewable sources like hydro and wind, without the emission of carbon dioxide, which is generated by burning coal or gas.

First of all you’ll see a thermometer on the right hand side, that indicates where New Zealands electricity companies rank in regards to their cleanness. Maybe you’ll be shocked how bad your own supplier treats our valuable country and sure you want to switch to a better option. Simply follow the easy steps on the website and they will take you through to the cleanest energy supplier in your region in three easy steps:
1. Select your location
2. Choose the cleanest energy supplier available
3. Make the switch
These steps will guide you to an online form of the greenest supplier in your region and all you have to do is filling in your details. Make sure that you’ll have an invoice of your current supplier handy, because they will even cancel your old contract for you, too. So your contribution to slow down climate change is just a few clicks away – and Greenpeace and your new supplier are even doing the work for you. Amazing, isn’t it? For those who are still a bit unsure if they really want to switch, the info section on the website, which can be reached via the navigation tab on the left hand side, offers a great range of infromation and a FAQ section. It’s definitely worth reading. And if you want to, you can even send email massages to all energy suppliers in New Zealand, with different text depending on how bad they behave.

There are only two things that do need a tiny make over: The list of regions (to choose in the first step) are sorted North-to-South, while I personally would prefer an alphabetical listing. I’m so used to always find Wellington close to the end of such listings, that I get confused by meeting Christchurch and Dunedin down there ;-) The other thing is, that choosing the ooption “Select your location” instead of choosing a real region brings up an error page. It should bring you back to the start page again.

Over the last three weeks I had the most unpleasant experience ordering firewood. When we first moved to New Zealand we had no idea of the concept of a woodburner. In Germany woodburners are completely unknown, the only thing you’ll find if you’re lucky is an open fire place for pleasure (not for heating), or a coal oven in very old houses. So we moved into our house in Karori, the woodburner was already there and luckily the previous owners left some pieces of wood. But after a while we had to reorder and being the internet freaks that we are, we simply googled for a wood supplier. Out came “Action Firewood” also called “Action Recyclers”, in Lower Hutt (Wellington region), who even offered ordering via online form. We found that very handy, because it gave us the opportunity to order after hours and didn’t have to deal with phone calls during the day. So we placed our order and for the next couple of days nothing happened. After a while we called them, apparently they hadn’t checked emails and didn’t know about our order. So we confirmed our wants on the phone, agreed on a delivery date, I took a day off work to receive the delivery and nothing else happened. They simply didn’t show up on the agreed delivery date. So I wrote a complaint, got a relatively friendly response, they delivered a couple of days later and in the end they even wrote an email to check if we were satisfied with the wood. Ok, you might think, at least they had learned from it and did their best to be kind in the end.
Yeah, so we thought as well and that’s the reason why we ordered with them this year again. Big, big mistake! We placed our order on 7th July and again we didn’t hear anything from them. So after a couple of days Kai gave them a call and again they were a bit surprised, that we expected them to deliver wood to our house. They gave us the rough indication that they would deliver by the end of last week and I gave them another call to ask if they could do in on Thursday. They agreed and so Kai and I spent last Thursday at home to await our wood delivery. Not quite surprisingly it never arrived. Not on Thursday, not on Friday, not even on Saturday. So I wrote an email again (there’s simply no point in calling them on a Sunday) and attached the email conversation from last year. What happend today really earns an award for “Most-Unfriendly-and-Unqualified-Retailer” of the year. The phone at home rang around 4.45 pm. Usually no one is at home during this hours, because (like most people in New Zealand!) we work. But today I was back home early and just came through the door when the phone rang. At the other end of the line was a grumpy guy asking for Kai. I told him that Kai’s not at home and if I could help. He then started laughing and said “You are writing this email each year.” Excuse me, please??? Yeah, sure I’m writing this email each year, because each year I stay off work for a day and wait for wood on an agreed delivery date and nothing happens! I then told him that we placed the order three weeks ago, which he denied (ok, it was just 17 days ago, but that doesn’t make much difference when you ran out of wood in the middle of winter) and then he came with the lame excuse that they had a hard drive crash. Yeah, right. And our two phone calls, and the agreed delivery for Thursday? The guy on the phone told me that no one said to him that there was a date agreed, so that didn’t count for him. He then offered generously to cancel the order and I am happy that I don’t have to see any of them again and that they don’t get my money.

What can other small retailers learn from this?
1. If you offer online orders, make sure you check your inbox regularly! In the unlikely event of a hard drive crash, inform potential customers on your website that you currently cannot access orders!
2. Make sure that each employee knows how to forward information. It must either be impossible that someone agrees on a delivery date that someone else is not able to match, or people must know who is to be informed about commitments that are agreed on with the customer.
3. Train your Telephonists on how to deal with a customer in a friendly manner. It is important to calm the client down and to make him/her feel valued – in most cases they are about to spend a lot of money at your company (and worst case they usually deal with User/Customer Experience and you might end up being mentioned in their blog in a negative way). To laugh at someone who is about to spend 400 Dollars at your place is not acceptable!
4. Never offer cancellation as a first solution. This means for your customer that he/she has to find another supplier and gets even more angry. An angry customer is never helpful – in best case you’ll only lose one client, but it’s highly likely that they’ll tell all their friends and family about it, which means that you lose either other existing clients or potential future clients. However, there is more impact than just one lost delivery.

At least the Action Recyclers gave me a long story to blog about and a really remarkable User/Customer Experience. Although this is not much fun sitting in a cold house…

Since BarbieGirls.com is now online for about 2 months, I decided to have a closer look at it. Michael Jung reports in his e-commerce-blog that a mere 3 million girls are already registered users and as a former Barbie fan I wanted to know what had changed in the last 25 years. I knew that there would be a huge difference between the Barbie Club that I belonged to in the 1980s (where you had to send a 10 Deutsche Mark-note to some dubious mailbox to receive a double-A4-Barbie-letter four times a year) and what the girls get today if they belong to the secret circle of insiders.

I expected it to be a nice online community and although I am aware that I am three times the age of the average target group individual, I thought that I would at least understand what this is all about. But I was mistaken. I spent roughly 20 minutes on the website, was able to get a character, get it dressed, changed my “apartment” and that was it. For a couple of things you need to be some kind of a mega-member, but whenever I requested more information about it, they showed me a Barbie mp3-player. There was a little chat window, which gave me the opportunity to type something in, but I couldn’t find out who I would end up talking to, maybe Barbie herself??? Ok, maybe I was not motivated enough to get the real meaning behind this, but I guess that my lack of ability to cope with a before-teenager-girl’s-club really lies in my age. I suppose that a huge company like Mattel did a lost of testing on there website and although it’s still a beta it should be well tested with target group candidates. I am just wondering where that leads us to, once those girls grow out of their teenager status and become the consumers of tomorrow. Will we still be able to feed their needs in approaching the web as well as those of the generations before and after?

Last week e-consultancy published the Top 10 of UE heroes:

1) Jakob Nielsen
2) Steve Krug
3) Jared Spool
4) Donald Norman
5) Jeffrey Veen
6) Jesse James Garrett
7) Louis Rosenfeld
8) Jenifer Tidwell
9) Seth Godin
10) Eisenberg brothers

Most of the names already sound quite familiar, so apparantly I’m doing quite well in researching and I’m reading the right blogs. Another little boost of confidence… :-)

As far as I know there’s no eyetracking machine in New Zealand – so I haven’t seen one live and in action yet. Hence I was quite happy when I found the video below on youtube, although it is in Dutch it gives a nice insight into how eyetracking machines operate.