Human Factors

As a more or less loyal Lush customer I’ve recently joined their email  list to get informed about the latest products and occasional discounts. Today I got the first email from them, and it was a great fail in many ways. First of all, the sender of the email was “nzmailorder”, nothing that indicated it could be anything I had subscribed to voluntarily. Normally I would have marked this as spam just because of the unknown and slightly dodgy sounding sender. But for some reason the subject line caught my eye, which read: “Lush New Zealand – Thanks for taking the time to s”. What did they want to thank me for? Two fails before I had even opened the email made me curios, especially because I couldn’t remember any action they could want to thank me for.

After reading the email a couple of times, I can only assume that what they wanted to say was something along the lines of “Thanks for subscribing to our email list”, but I can’t be sure, since the word “thanks” doesn’t appear anywhere in the email. But it lists all the advantages of being a loyal customer, so I guess that’s what they wanted to say. Maybe they got victims of a length limit in the subject line? How did they not notice?

But it gets even better. As a reward for “becoming part of the wonderful world of Lush” they attached a discount voucher. To redeem I have to print it and take it into the store. Fair enough. But what if I want to redeem it in the online store? Well, although they provide a Promotion Code to be used on the website, they expect me to still print the voucher and mail it to them in Auckland, including my name and order reference number on the back. They must be kidding, right?

(difficulties reading the text? please click on the image for a lager view)

How can they make this process more inconvenient for the customer? And what’s a 10% discount if you have to pay for paper, envelope and postage (and time to get to the next letter box)? This clearly is a perfect example of someone not thinking through the customer experience, it seems almost kind of funny that they call themselves a “fabulous team” (at the very end of the text).

Like last year I was part of the organising committee for Wellington’s Flashcamp this Saturday. It’s a community event from and for developers and designers, organised by the Wellington Chapter of the Flash Platform User Group and the Wellington Creative Suite User Group.

Organising the event was great fun. Approaching sponsors, finding a venue, inviting amazing speaker, ensuring awesome coffee supply, choosing a great conference bag, finding the best caterer, tweeting from @fpcodecampnz and buying lots of little goodies to make people happy during the day – all these tasks were a great team effort. Big thanks to Kai and Ross for being awesome organisers, and to all the helpers who lend a hand on Saturday!

Now that the event is over, I can say that most things went exactly as planned. Feedback is coming in via the survey we sent out the day after the camp, and most people really enjoyed being at the Flashcamp.

Unfortunately I missed most of the sessions myself. I did manage to see the keynote – Jack Yan on “The Evolution of Display Type” – and enjoyed Brenda Leeuwenberg and David Buck from NZOnScreen talking about Flash vs. HTML 5.

My own presentation was about embedding video with Acrobat, and I talked the audience through the process of adding a video to a PDF (including some potential pitfalls and how to make it a less out-of-the-box experience for the user). I had all of the Adobe and ex-Adobe people who came to the Flashcamp sitting in my session, which was great towards the end when a question was asked that I couldn’t answer, but overall it made me quite nervous – I’m sure that this was not my best performance ever. But anyway, I enjoyed sharing my knowledge, no one has complained so far, and overall we had a very awesome day. Have a look at my presentation (PDF, 50 MB – sorry for the file size, but it contains embedded videos), although it might not make much sense without context. But it’s worth having a look at the embedded videos – the are made by Wellingtonian Simon Burgin from CubicStudio and are pretty awesome.

Overall, all I can say: I hope we’ll do it again next year!