Apologising: Google is doing it right

As some of you will know, gmail went down for 100 minutes early thismorning.  I did notice it, but assumed it was my internet connection acting weird again–and I didn’t really need to read email at 7AM anyway.  For people elsewhere, however (for example in the US where this was anything from midday to close of business) and even people in New Zealand where the workday was just beginning this could have been a real problem, especially for those using gmail for business porposes.

Given how reliable Google usually is, this sudden and lengthy failure will understandably shake confidence in the service, and may even make people more righteously angry than service failures by unreliable companies (consider my eyerolling acceptance above, when I thought the problem was my ISP).

Generally speaking, users can think one of three ways when things go wrong (and lets face it, things do go wrong sometimes with any product or service):

• That the product or service is unreliable and therefore they have lost faith in the product or service and the parent company
• That something went wrong, but that the company did what they could about it and the solution was acceptable so they will continue to use the product or service
• That the resolution to the problem was not satisfactory, but that they have no option but to use the company next time anyway (for example when the company has a monopoly–if this is the case though, as soon as the company no longer has a monoply they can expect customers to jump ship).

Google probably has a lot of people in the second category after today, because they did two things right: They updated people, and they wrote a fabulous and public apology.  The apology was probably even more effective than one normally would be because a large company apologised for an outage in a free service, but there are a few other things Google did right:

• They apologised unreservedly, and with an understanding of their users.  There was no “we’re really sorry but it wasn’t our fault” or “we’re really sorry but you shouldn’t be so mad”–they understood why people might be annoyed, and they said sorry.
• They explained the cause of the problem.  Not everyone is going to care about this, but it is good practice to explain for those who do, when writing for a public audience
• They described what they are doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
• They subtly reminded users why they chose gmail in the first place, not by saying “we are the most reliable”, but “we’re trying to keep failures rare”.
• The apology was public (right up there on Google’s gmail blog), but not forced on those who didn’t notice the failure.

This is probably the work of Google’s PR people, but dealing with the failures that inevitably happen in life is a really important part of good user experience, and (I swear I don’t work for Google) this is one that Google have done really well.

Humour vs. computers, and the importance of usability

Computers, unlike any tool in history, seem to be the butt of a number of jokes. Sometimes it is about the stupidity of they way a computer talks to us:

Sometimes it is a common irritation with a feature designed to be helpful:

In a certain type of siege mentality, even the images of someone finally losing it with their computer are humourous:

Sadly, though, the frustrations our computers create for us are not always funny. Sometimes, as in this 2003 case, they are dangerous — a man shot his computer four times in a fit of rage that he could not do what he wanted to do. Anyone who has done a course on human computer interaction will almost certainly have seen the beer taps used to replace levers in a nuclear power plant to make it easier for workers to distinguish “the big red button” and not press it.

While the cost of bad user interfaces is not usually counted in danger, it is incredibly pervasive. A 2001 survey of 6000 computer users showed an average of 5.1 hours wasted per week grappling with computer problems, and frankly, I don’t think much has changed since then. Think of the last time you called a call centre, or asked a retailer if they could order something they didn’t have in store. How many times did they apologise for having difficulty with the computer, and taking so long? How much time did you spend standing there, or hanging on the line? Were you, as I was yesterday in a shoe store, sympathetic, and slightly embarrassed?

We create jokes like those above because computers make us feel bad — they make us angry, they make us feel stupid, they waste our time, and the things designed to help us (like Clippy) are often insulting. User interfaces designed with users in mind, like iPods and Nokia cellphones engender tremendous loyalty because they don’t create those negative feelings. While I am sure that their competitors may be technically just as brilliant, I have never used them because I like my iPod and my Nokia, and because user experience is at least as much who I am as what I do, I take poor user interfaces very personally.

There are two things everyone who uses computers can do to break out of the siege of wasted time, danger, and outright rage that computers impose:

• Buy the products that irritate you the least. Look for user reviews and see whether the company has a user focus (right now there is a radio ad for navman that mentions usability specifically). When a product frustrates you, if possible, complain to the company that made it. If there is a customer service line, call it — this costs the company money (as poor usability should).
• If you are designing a product or service, once you have made sure that that product or service is useful, make sure it is also usable. Being useful means you haven’t wasted money on a product no-one will use, but usability will save everyone time and blood pressure.

Computer humour is fun, but it’s black humour. I’d rather not need to resort to humour to cope with my daily interactions with, what are (when all is said and done) tools.