Human Factors

This little application is probably most useful to people living in a high risk earth quake area, but it’s a good example on how user friendly a “What if…?”-scenario can be converted. The New Zealands Earth Quake Commision gives everyone the opportunity to check out the possible impact of an earth quake to the family home.

They show an average kiwi house and how to deal with the setting is pretty much self-explanatory: take the slide to the level of shaking you want to watch and chose if you want to see a quake safe or an unsecured house shaking. Then press the start button, watch the earth quake taking place on your screen and read some hints on how to improve the earth quake safeness afterwards. Straight and simple to the point, nothing that could be misunderstood or confusing. I like it!

I’ve added a few more blogs to my regular reads in Bloglines:
UXnet

Chopsticker

putting people first

Compete on Usability

UX-Strategie

and uiGarden.net

Additionally I’m following the news and meeting announcements of the New Zealand branch of the UPA, the Usability Professionals Association, which I’ve recently joined. Most bloggers I follow are doing a great job, posting quite regularly, some almost daily. So I spend a lot of time in the morning reading the latest blog entries of others, which is really good and brings me forward step by step.

… that’s the title of an article in The New York Times looking into the job describtion of usability experts. Although it just scratches at bit at the surface, it’s still worth reading.

Yesterday I lost my favourite earmuffs. Yes, I still had one of these old fashioned keep-my-ears-warm things with two round cosy fluffy ovals that cover your ears and are connected by a plastic strip. They are not meant to look good, their only reason to exist is keeping freezing ears nice and warm. I lost them at the bus stop, apparently IN the bus, but the girl who found them just asked the woman in front of her if they were hers and when she denied the bitch threw them out of the bus door again instead of handing them over to the bus driver. When I returned to the bus stop later on they were long gone. Today I spent two hours looking for new ones in all kinds of shops, but wasn’t particularly successful. There is no such thing as earmuffs available in New Zealand, at least not in Wellington. So I decided to get some new earmuffs online, and that’s where the odyssey begins:
Apparently you can’t get the original 80s-style earmuffs anymore, and honestly, I really wonder why, because they do an awesome job keeping someone’s ears warm in winter. The only product that I could find (except from heart shaped ones or little teddy bears!) was a medical ear protection for elderly people. No, that wasn’t what I was after. But I found something that I once read about in a German magazine before: Ear Bags. A swedish product, almost the same concept as my old ones, but without that plastic strap – you just pull the ear bags over your ears and they stay there without support and keep the cold wind away. I’m not sure if that will have the same effect as the old ones, but they are not very expensive, so I thought I’ll just give it a try. I checked a couple of online shops but couldn’t find one that delivers to New Zealand. Finally I ended up on the manufacturer’s homepage and was happy to see that they have an online shop, too, and they deliver worldwide. I strolled around a bit and decided to get a pair of ear bags they call “advanture” which have a security string you can clip to your clothing so they can’t get lost (seems to be the right product for me!). The shop itself is ok on the first sight: you always know where you are, the products are pictured, payment methods are visible on each page, information on shipping and delivery as well as all other terms and conditions are easy to find and you can chose from six different languages for your navigation. The only thing that annoyed me was the fact that you can’t get a close look at the different colours that are available for their standard product, but that’s just a small nuisance compared with what was waiting for me. The next step irritated me so much that I almost gave up on buying something. It was just a little oversight on my part and they probably never ever thought about having a careless user like myself, but it almost ended in me not buying anything. If it wasn’t so cold and uncomfortable in Wellington today, I swear I would have given up! What had happened?

I checked my shopping cart and there I had the chance to either log in as a registered customer, or to give them my name and billing address. I didn’t have the choice to “create an account” with them at that stage. So I gave them my contact details and an email address I usually use for online orders and newsletters and stuff like that. They sent me a friendly activation email: “click here to activate your account”. At the bottom of that email they gave me a user name and a password, but I didn’t read the complete email. I wanted to get the order finished quickly, my normal experience is that there are hardly ever any additional information in an activation email so I didn’t read a single word of that email but just clicked the button to activate my account. Back on their website I wanted to go on with my order but they wouldn’t let me unless I’m logged on with a proper user name and password. As I thought I didn’t have one, I tried to create one. But the system realised that I already gave it my contact details and told me that my email address is already in use – if I couldn’t remember my password I should press the “Lost Password” button. But to request a new password you must know your user name and as I was still convinced not to have one, I became slightly annoyed. It would have been a very easy thing to avoid this situation: they could have mentioned that the user name and password had been sent out with the activation email and everything would have been good. But they didn’t and so my only option to finalise my order was to create another account with a different email address. That finally worked and I hope to receive my ear bags soon. But I will always have the strange feeling that the shopping experience wasn’t a good one.

A couple of days ago Kai wrote about Air New Zealand’s fabulous new application “How far can I go”. I think it’s time to have a closer look at it – is it really as good as it appears to be?

Unfortunately this brilliant application is somehow hidden and not directly accessible from the start page – you have to find the “Offers”-tab first, from there it’s in the second chapter. But once you found it, you’re in traveller’s heaven. First of all you should check your bank account to figure out how much money you can/want to spend on your trip. Then you chose the airport you want to take off from (currently only available for flights departing from Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, Hamilton and Wellington). You start off with a map of New Zealand and use the sliding bar on the right hand side to adjust the amount of $$$ you want to hand over to the airline. Fine orange lines show you possible flight routes and the higher your amount of money the more places in the world are presented to you. The further you go, the smaller the NZ map gets and the more of the whole wide world is shown to you. Amazing, isn’t it? The magic border at the moment seems to be 3,100 Dollar, that takes you almost anywhere in the world. The flight details appear in a frame on the left hand side and are easy to select and you can book directly from there.

But Air New Zealand’s burst of innovation doesn’t end with this flash RIA; once you’ve made your booking it goes on and on. For example they are using google maps to visualise your planned journey for you. Unfortunately you can’t access it without have a booking reference, so here’s a pic of my upcoming trip:

Although I am not a big fan of Air New Zealand as an airline (they are permanently under-staffed, flights are too often delayed or completely cancelled etc), I really love the work they did on their website. Apparently they hired a few really talented and competent people…

New Zealand’s Yellow Pages have relaunched their website. The costs involved in the relaunch were a mere NZ$10 Million (approx. EUR5.8 Million orUS$ 7.7 Million!), so I expected something really big. I played around with it a bit and surprisingly the first real challange was finding the page. I expected it to be available under www.yellow-pages.co.nz, but this just referres to a british provider of personalised wines and champagnes (no, I haven’t checked the details on what a personalised wine might be). Maybe it was my mistake – how can I assume that they would write their domain name with a dash? Finally www.yellowpages.co.nz ended in the result I wanted, although the official URL they advertise is simply www.yellow.co.nz. I personally don’t think that this is the obvious domain the average user would try first, especially as the term “Yellow Pages” is a well established brand, but at least you can reach the web presence in two different ways. And if you get frustrated during your first try you could always order a bottle of personalised wine instead – that’s better than nothing ;-)

The website itself doesn’t look too different from the old one on the first sight, but there are a couple of cool new features that are really helpful. Let’s start with the first thing you would do on a Yellow Pages website: searching for something. Although the search box doesn’t deliver auto suggestions when you start typing, it offers a list of recent searches. So in case you want to look up the phone number of the fancy restaurant you’ve been to last week, you can do this pretty quickly without typing the whole name into the search box.

But there some really wicked features, too. They definitely deserve some brownie points for offering an overview of opening hours in addition to the usual data you can get about businesses (eg address, phone number, short summery of what the busines offers), and it is also possible to use the opening hours as a search feature to find out which busines is open now, open late, open 24 hours or open on Sundays. Additionally you can search by distance and exclude places that are too far away from your starting point. You can register with your home and work address to narrow down the radius search, but either that doesn’t work properly or they assume that I will always spend my daytime in the office – as soon as I search for Cafes within 1 km, they show me what’s around my office, not what’s around in my home suburb.

For each serch result they show a little map to visualise where you need to go to find the busines you are looking for. You can enlage the map and for Wellington this works pretty well, but I have no idea how it works for really small places in NZ. I tried to search for Cafes in Tuatakere and Roxburgh, the last-mentiones didn’t show a map. So I reckon that they have covered the bigger places in New Zealand pretty well but if you’re looking for something in a rural area you might be lost.

If you have problems to decide which of the available businesses to chose you can narrow down your choices by comparing all the features of a business in a list. That’s a nice feature, too.

Overall I like the new online-version of the Yellow Pages, but there is one big disadvange: it needs a lot of resources!!! I assume that there won’t be any difficulties on a high-tech machine, but my computer at work (union equipment, therefor not the latest fashion model but usually stable to run and probably comparable or even better than what most New Zealanders have at home) creates a couple of warning and starts shutting down programmes just because I’m running Outlook and Skype at the same time as an IE window with the Yellow Pages website. And although I think that the website is a quite useful one I doubt that the target group really enjoys the hassle that comes with it. And don’t forget about the 10 Million dollars price tag on it – it’s facinating that there are still companies out there who pay so much money for what is becoming web standard and definitely doesn’t cost that much in development. I feel really sorry for all those smaller companies who would have loved to build this page for 2 to 5 Million Dollars.

The iPhone is finally available on the market since last week and Jared Spool describes in the UIE Brain Sparks Blog what people do to get one or to catch at least a closer look at it. Definitely worth reading!