Human Factors

Hurray, today bepacked.com was made public. The Flex and ColdFusion based application is the ultimate tool for people traveling through Australia. Ventego Creative is part of a large team of professionals (including the “inventors” of bepacked.com – Dirk Eisner and Leopold Humbel) who made this site one of the most essential websites for backpackers and other voyagers.

It’s a community-driven tool, featuring everything you need to plan, perform and evaluate your journey through Australia. Get all the information you need before you start, receive insider tips from fellow travelers, keep in touch with friends and family at home, share your happy moments or simply find someone to sell your equipment to before you return home – here you’ll find everything you need. In the first release the map, find interface, trip planner, contributor services and many more things are fully functional. Although there is currently still a lot of information missing, it’s stable and works very well, and the first load of content providers is getting on board. There will also be a list of new cool functionalities coming during the next few weeks and months (e.g. diary entries via txt, commenting etc.), so keep your eyes open for that. And the best thing is: everything is for free! So get out there, place your favourite destinations on the awesome map of Australia and be part of this from the very beginning!

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…

There’s no doubt that it would be pretty helpful for me to attend a conference and listen to various usability experts to become more experienced. So I had a brief look which events in the near future could be useful for me and so far I found a few really interesting ones:

1. The Usability Week organised by the Nielson Norman Group and held in Hong Kong, Washington D.C., London and San Francisco. Unfortunately this has just taken place in the last couple of months and I missed it :-(
2. UPA’s “Patterns: Blueprints for Usability” but this has taken place mid June as well, so I missed this one, too :-(
3. World Usability Day in Hamburg, Germany in November this year. But I can’t see myself spending this much money to attend a one-day-event. So most likely I will miss this one as well :-(

These were the most interesting conferences I could find by briefly scanning the internet. Does this mean that I can’t get face-to-face encounters with experienced experts?

Currently I’m inquesting websites on roses for an article in the German IT magazine iX. While some very few sites are somehow professional and easy to use, most of them are absolutely shocking when it comes to usability. Examples? You don’t even have to understand German to find out that this is highly frustrating for users:

1. On a links overview you can’t tell if a click on a link will open a new browser window or not, so most people who want it to open in a new window would use a right mouse click, right? If you try this on www.rosen-romantik.de the only result this will cause is the opening of a popup saying “Have much fun while surfing!” with the option to press an ok-button. After agreeing the small window vanishes and nothing else happens. If you want to click through a couple of these links and try the right mouse click out of habit for a few times, you’ll become really aggressive after a while, believe me!
2. A less frustrating but absolutely useless website is the one of the Europa Rosarium, which is the largest rose museum of the world in a small German village called Sangerhausen. Apparently they do have an existing Website but if you click on the link above you’ll simply get a note saying “Future home of www.europa-rosarium.de”. It can’t be that hard to forward the user to the existing website, can it?

I really appreciate that different people have different talents and while I have no idea about rose processing I don’t expect a rose lover to know how to build a website. But for user’s sake they should rather not having a website at all, then testing people’s patience by running poorly designed websites…

Why would a Social Worker who works with a small trade union in New Zealand have a blog about usibility? There is a simple answer to this question: I want to be an active part of our family business ;-) By the end of 2006 my husband Kai started his own company and I became co-partner. But being a Social Worker who did an apprenticeship in a German bank ten years ago, there is not much to contribute to a company offering consulting, training and development. So far I’m dealing with filing, accounting and taxes and send out invoices from time to time – but I want to deliver more.

I tried to learn programming. Using computer and internet for several years now, I have a rough understanding how things work. Someone recommended starting my “developer’s career” with html and php, so I bought a book called “PHP for kids” which picked me up on the right level. It’s a really good book, where a little rabbit explains how programming works. Whenever there is something really important, a carrot on the page alerts you for more attention. Unfortunately I could no longer stick with it when the coding became more complicated and every little distraction meant that I had to start from the beginning. I just can’t concentrate on numbers and letters for an extrem long period of time. That was the end of my developer’s career.

But what else could I do to make my contribution to our company and to support Kai with the incredible amount of work he’s doing at the moment? It must be something that has to do with people. With interaction, community, making things easier. And so the idea was born to take a deep dive into the secrets of usability! This blog is here to document my journey to explore the topic from the scratch. I have no idea where it will lead to – maybe I will give up on this like I gave up on programming, maybe I will become a world known expert on usability, or maybe just something in-between with the ability to use my knowledge for Ventego Creative. Who knows? We will see… Tips and hints to bring me closer to the mysteries of usability are always welcome!