Human Factors

One thing I didn’t consider when I started working in the field of user experience was the impact it would have on my private life. The more I learn, the more I notice when others do it wrong and I get annoyed when I’m affected. It started off with me moaning about unusable websites I had to deal with, and since I had a first look into Service Design, I have the feeling there’s room for improvement in almost everything I experience throughout the day. Doctor’s visit, physiotherapy, gyms to chose from – you name it and I have many ideas how to make it a better experience for the customer/client/member. But on the weekend I had a perfect experience while…. shoe shopping.

Unlike most women I’m not a big clothes or shoe shopper. I could even go as far as to say that I absolutely dislike it. My body has some common weaknesses, that the clothes industry doesn’t seem to be willing to cater for. One aspect of this is having calves that don’t seem to fit into any boots. I do have a pair of brown boots I got at least eight years ago, that I love with a passion, but I can’t get that particular brand in New Zealand. And I had a pair of black boots, which I have never really liked, that needed to be replaced.

When I went boots shopping on Saturday I didn’t really expect to be successful. I thought it would be another one of the tours around Wellington’s shoe shops, with intrusive sales girls, trying to talk me into buying something I would look ridiculous in. But this time it was very different… My first stop for the day was Kumfs on Willis Street. And it turned out to be the last one as well, since I got what I wanted, and left the store smiling happily.

The first thing I noticed when I entered the store, was that it was clean and tidy. The colour scheme is pretty neutral and there are inspiring words like “beautiful”, “charming”, “warm”, “exceptional” painted all over the wall. Despite not having much room in the small shop they had a reasonably good choice of shoes and boots available. Two salesladies were present; they noticed me when I entered, but left me alone browsing for the first little while. That’s one thing I really like – there’s nothing worse for me than having someone breathing down my neck before I was even have an overview of what’s on offer. It almost seemed like a miracle that the first pair I picked up had some kind of stretchy material at the back, so it would offer enough room for my calves.

As soon as I had this Hmmm-I-would-love-to-try-them-in-my-size-look on my face, one of the saleswomen approached me and offered help. She got me my size, and half a size smaller to find the best fit. The boots were awesome and I don’t think I’ve ever bought such expensive shoes within a few minutes of entering a shop before. At the check-out I was offered a free membership at the Kumfs Club, which allows me to return my boots within 30 days if they don’t work out for me as well as some other benefits, which are not quite so important for me. Although it took some time for me to fill out the form, they allowed me to join before the purchase, so I could take advantage of the benefits with this first buy. They gave me a huge fabric bag (“yay” for not using plastic bags) which has the same inspirational words on it as I saw on the wall before. A very happy me left the shop.

But the experience did not end there. When I unpacked my new boots at home I found a Thank You note for choosing Kumfs, some care tips for my boots and a feedback form in the box. I must say, I was deeply impressed. Since then I have had a brief look at their website, and even that seems to be ok. They are even on Facebook. In their About Us section they state: “Kumfs is a family owned business that operates with passion and dedication. Part of the our vision is to have pride in the quality of our work, provide the best customer service and to always delight our customers.”

All I can say is: yes, it works. At least for me.

Update:
Wow, less than 24 hours after publishing this blog post I got an email from Kumfs, telling me they love it and asking for permission to share it with their Facebook Fans. Not only do they know how to create a brilliant customer experience in their shops, they also “get” social media. Couldn’t more companies I engage with be like this?

Yesterday’s Dominion Post had an article about dangerous txt-driving. Both Vodaphone’s and Telecom’s spokepeople were interviewed and said there’s no such thing as an automatic reply to incoming text messages. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be surprised that they seem to have no clue what today’s mobile phones are capable of. There’s plenty of auto reply software available that everyone could easily install on a variety of availablemobiles. A quick search on Google revealed the following:

Auto SMS Reply (Windows Mobile)
Private Call & SMS Guard (Nokia/Symbian)
SMS Automated Responder (Nokia Communicator)
I’m busy (Blackberry)

I’m sure there must be heaps more out there! This is just another proof of what lack of competition in the telecommunications sector leads to: no innovation, no drive to be better than the competitor and absolutely no interest in providing customers a good service.

The Faculty of Psychology at University of Basel (Switzerland) is asking for help. They want to know more about expectations of people looking at websites. To get a better understanding of what users expect to find on a homepage and where they would look for it, they carry out a survey which enables you to outline your expectations on three different types of websites (corporate, online shop, online newspaper). It takes only 10-15 minutes, but it will help to improve usability of websites and user satisfaction. And if you are lucky enough, you might even get an iPod Shuffle for your effort. The survey is available in English, German, Spanish and French, so there are hardly any excuses not to participate… ;-)

All my life so far I created my mind maps by hand on butcher’s paper. A few hours ago I decided that today is the day to switch to electronic mind mapping. I remembered that Microsoft Visio comes with a mind mapping tool and I got the old PC laptop out of the closet to give it a try. But although I was able to create a primitive mind map, it didn’t look the way I wanted at all and at some stages it was quite difficult to use. Maybe I’m just too spoiled by using a Mac, but it was no pleasure to work with Visio at all.
Fortunately I remembered that James Breeze talked about an online mind mapping tool a couple of weeks ago and a bit of reasearch brought me finally to MindMeister.

The basic version is free, so I signed up and created my first master piece online. The benefits of online mind mapping are quite clear: access from every computer everywhere in the world, sharing maps with others and working on them as a group saves a lot of time and email conversations. The additional features of MindMeister are special notifications if one of those who are working with you on the same map makes some changes – you either get an email notification or a Twitter message. A proper history function brings you back to any stage in you map development you want and the automatic save keeps you from messing up by forgetting to save. Overall a really cool tool, only thing that makes it a bit difficult for me to use is my unreliable internet connection in a New Zealand suburb – but that’s not MindMaster’s fault…

Kai and I wanted to investigate a flight option to Australia. We need a multi-stop flight Wellington-Sydney-Brisbane-Wellington and requested options from Air New Zealand. It gave us a possible routing for $1,244.16, what we found a bit unreasonable.

Apparently Air New Zealand realized this as well, so it suggested a different, much cheaper routing. The only problem with this option – it doesn’t bring us to Sydney at all!!! I just imagine someone not checking the suggested alternative properly and ending up in Christchurch instead of Sydney…

After Adobe Max Kai and I wanted to upload an interview with Aral Balkan on SWX to Google Video. We had never done this before, we always used YouTube so far. But YouTube doesn’t accept videos longer than ten minutes, so we tried Google instead. As we had started the uploading process, this window appeared on our screen:

The time specification of “more than 3 remaining” is quite confusing – it will take 3 what? Days? Hours? Minutes? By leaving out one single word, Google caused a very confusing user experience. After one minute the number still hadn’t changed, so we decided to cut the interview down to ten minutes and now you can find it on YouTube.

(This video is really just about SWX, it hasn’t much to do with UX)