Global corporate challenge not that global: Where on my dress do I put this pedometer?

Today is the first day of the global corporate challenge (or GCC), a challenge where you team up with six of your closest workmates and try to walk 10,000 steps (or more) per day each.  The theory is that by increasing workers’ average number of steps from 3,500 (the stated pre-challenge average on the GCC web site) to 10,000, those who participate in the challenge will see an increase in health and wellbeing from their increased activity levels.

Making people feel better is an admirable goal, and despite the wider issues with the GCC (for example prioritisation of walking over all other forms of activity, as evidenced by the ridiculously stingy cycle to walk conversion, the “speeding ticktets” issued for those who do too much exercise, and the relatively rigid defninition of an athlete) both testimonials and research show that it is helping at least some of its participants to feel better, and that’s a good thing.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that I am regular exerciser (on average 6 days per week) who does a variety of types of exercise (cycling, walking, aerobics, weight training, swimming, yoga…), who is female, and who is participating in the GCC.  As a participant, and as a usability consultant I have one major problem with how things work within the parameters of the GCC:  The pedometers we have been issued.

The rules of the GCC state that steps can only be entered from the official GCC pedometer (each participant gets two pedometers at the beginning of the challenge).  Given that one could reasonably expect that approximately 50% of participants are likely to be women (or maybe slightly more, if we take into account that cross culturally, women appear to walk more than men (PDF)) the choice of pedometer design for the challenge seems less than ideal.

The pedometer is the type designed to be worn on a waistband, completely upright, at one’s hip.  Moreover it does not have the type of clip that opens and closes, but rather it slides down over the top of a waistband.  This makes it considerably difficult to wear with a wide variety of women’s clothing:

• Women’s trouser styles are much more likely to have trousers stop at the waist (or above the hip) than men
• Skirts are often held up by women’s hips, meaning they too sit higher than the ideal for pedometer placement
• Dresses leave nowhere to clip the pedometer at all. Given that this is a coroporate challenge, and women  are in some corporations required to wear a skirt (and that even where it is not required, in some places it is recommended), the pedometer not really working with a dress seems a considerable oversight)
• Belts and sashes make the pedometer difficult to clip on because of the thickness of the material
• The style of clip means the pedometer is much more likely than an open-close clip to come off when trousers are pulled down–arguably something women are likely to do more often than men.

There are alternative styles of pedometer (including those that can be worn around the neck or placed in a bag, and watch-style pedometers), so I assume that the pedometer chosen by the GCC was based on some combination of accuracy and price. In my opinion, neither accuracy nor price can justify the difficulty presented to women by this model of pedometer (when alternatives are available.  Clip-style pedometers are only accurate when worn at all (impossible with some women’s clothing), and worn in the right place, so many women’s readings will not be accurate.  The entry fee for the GCC was nearly $100 AUD per person, and for this it would seem considerably more sensible to supply participants with pedometers that actually count all their steps accurately, rather than providing backpacks, hats, water bottles and extra pedometers.

Like the clip-style ipod shuffle, it feels like the organisers of the GCC just didn’t think about the whole population when they were making design decisions, and as a result of this women participants are disadvantaged (at least in terms of their step count, if not in terms of their actual gained benefit).  To let the organisers know for next year, I will be emailing a link to this blog post to their follow up email, included on the pedometer box, and I encourage all other participants to do the same.

Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to participating in the challenge, and perhaps learning something about my daily habits (I’m well over the 3,500 average workers make without having done any actual targeted steps, so it is nice to know that I am not as sedentary as the average worker, for example).  If only I could figure out where to clip the thing for those two weddings I have to go to…

The new Facebook: Not yet unfriended by users, but close

Facebook recently made a change to their interface that was the subject of outrage for many of their users, inspiring more than 1.7 million to sign a petition to reject it.  Facebook has made some changes to accomodate some of the things users said were problems, but many of the changes (including the slower-to-render rounded corners on pictures) appear to be here to stay.

Initially I was mildly irritated by the new interface, but I put it down to my change aversion (users near-universally hate change, which is why if you’re making major changes, they better help users out substantially).  However, as time has gone on, I have become more irritated with the new interface, not less.  As I see it, there are a few problems with the new interface:

• The proliferation of nonsense in my news feed, without an option to show status updates only.  Yes, I can turn the rubbish from every application off, if I want to, but this requires effort on my part, and will happen every time a new crop of applications becomes popular.  It’s also fairly irritating that I had to go to a help guide to even find out how to do this much, because the mechanism for operating these options is hidden unless you happen to look in the right place at the right time.
• Another side of the same coin: having to edit applications not to publish my life story immediately upon adding them.  I don’t particularly want to bombard my friends with nonsense every time I play a turn in Lexulous.  This means I have to be particularly pro-active in editing the settings for my applications so that they don’t bombard people, and the function for editing this is reasonably difficult to find
• The lack of automatic updating.  I know the old interface didn’t have it, but the trade off for change was supposed to be that we got automatic updating. This change has had no benefit for me, so I resent the fact that the one useful thing that was supposed to happen didn’t.

Do I think no interface should ever change their look and feel?  Absolutely not.  Do I think that Facebook should have done some usability testing before lanching this design?  For sure.  Do I think they did?  Dubious at best.  The Facebook approach, which is one that will always generate negative publicity, is to test their designs on real live users.

According to this blog post, the best way to plan change requires four steps: knowing your customers, listening to them, communicating with them, and responding to them. I think that sounds pretty good–pretty much like doing good user experience, in fact.  And Facebook didn’t do too badly, on a points system–they did warn users (albeit not in a way that most users would notice), and they did respond to some of the complaints users had (albeit not in a way that is really that satisfying).  Unfortunately, you can’t pick and choose which things you want out of that list–good user experience requires all of them.

Nonetheless, I think many (if not most) Facebook users will suck up the changes, even though they don’t like them, because for now, Facebook offers them more than the changes have taken away.  Having said that, though, like I said in my earlier post about Facebook and MySpace, people have personal purposes for using social networking tools.  If Facebook continues to change in a way that breaks that purpose (as the first iteration of these changes did), they will find that users (and thus their advertising dollars) drift away.

What product or service have you used that has slowly worn away at your loyalty until you couldn’t stand it any more?

When things go wrong, communicate

In three separate instances recently, I have been frustrated by poor communication on the part of service industries I deal with.

In the first instance I was drastically affected by an airline schedule change, and it was not made at all clear to me what my options were–and when I worked it out and tried to to take advantage of the best option for me, the airline tried to charge me for it, claiming I had “already agreed to the schedule change”.  To be fair, I did eventually get what I needed with no additional fees to pay, and I was thrilled, but it seems a bit sad to be thrilled by an airline doing the right thing.

In the second, I found out that my favourite class was being cancelled at my local recreation centre from feedback they posted publically to another class, saying they would be moving that class into the room we had previously occupied.

In the third case, I was phoned the day before a booked appointment to say that I would not be able to keep my appointment (and offered two less convenient times as alternatives) because the professional I was to see was “not in”.  When I pressed to try and see the person with whom I had an existing relationship, I was told they had left the business.  This from a business that would charge me a 50% cancellation fee if I were to cancel within 24 hours of an appointment.

In all three of these cases, the disappointing thing that happened was inevitable, and I am not blaming the companies concerned for what happened.  What I am blaming them for, and what really made me angry, was their inability to communicate with me properly and in a timely fashion about the issues which affected me, and the paucity of alternatives I was offered (at least in the first and third cases).

Things go wrong in life, particularly in those industries where a product and a service are sold together.  In most cases users will be pretty forgiving if they understand what has gone wrong, and you communicate with them and explain what their options are from the outset.  In the instances where something goes wrong, communication is the key to keeping a user as happy as it is humanly possible to do, and keeping them using your service rather than anyone else’s.

Has anyone else had an experience where communication made the difference between grudging satisfaction and outright annoyance?

One of these things is not like the others: Livingsocial’s recommender services

Last year I did an experiment: I logged every book I read, complete with tags about timing, subject matter, fiction or non-, andf themes, in Google books.  This was inherently satisfying to my curiosity (63 books last year, 24 of whiuch were non fiction), but was lacking something I’m interested in: a recommendation feature.

During the year, I discovered I could also log my books in Facebook, in a service that does have a recommender feature based on ratings (but no tags, sadly–I know, I should have just used librarything in the first damn place).  Thus I entered the exciting world of LivingSocial, which accepts ratings for books, albums, movies…and restaurants.

While I haven’t bothered too much with the music recommender service (though I should try, since my taste is all over the place), but I have found the book service and the movie service to be quite exciting–I’ve seen lots of books and movies I want to read/see.  So when I noticed last night that they also had a restaurant section, I was cautiously excited: I love food and I am always looking for places to try, but I suspected that it might be a US-only service.  It’s not, but I still wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, mostly because it doesn’t take into account the differences between books/movies/albums and restaurants:

• Availability of large, relatively comprehensive catalogues: There are a wide range of relatively-comprehensive online catalogues for books and movies–think Amazon or LibraryThing. The same is not true for restaurants: there may be listings in the local yellow pages for some towns, some of which may be available online, but these listings would be difficult to harvest and far from comprehensive.  As a response to this, Livcingsocial will actually allow you to add your own restaurant listings, but only after you have rated 20 restaurants.  If you don’t do a lot of travelling, and your city doesn’t have any restaurants listed, this could be a bit difficult.
• Location dependence: Subject to availability, playing equipment and local censorship laws, books/movies/albums may be enjoyed anywhere.  Restaurants, however, are only really available to those living or travelling (let’s be generous) within say 100 km (60 mi) of the restaurant’s physical location.
• Amount of information required to make a decision: Everyone has certain requirements of their entertainment, for example:  some people find swearing offensive, some people dislike science fiction intensely, some people cannot abide restaurants that won’t take bookings, some people are vegetarian.  Recommendations for books/movies/music are more likely to meet people’s requirements (going back to our example those who dislike science fiction will universally rate it lower, thus feeding each other’s recommendations) and even if they don’t, it is much easier to find out ahead of time that they are bad (in the example of swearing parental advisory stickers are a good clue). In the case of restaurants, however, there are more paramters in play (food, service, noise level, ambiance, wheelchair accessibility, child-frioendliness, diaetary requirements) and this type of thing is harder to tease out in a five point rating, and often harder to discover before making the time investment to actually go to the restaurant.

The restaurant recommender is based on the same principles as the other recommenders, the amazon style “people who liked x also liked y, and you like x so you will probably like y”.  My experience with it, however, was quite frustrating: I rated a significant number of restaurants (not without some difficulty, as there aren’t that may listed in Melbourne, so I had to go to other cities I had lived in), and then clicked on “recommendations”.  Most of the recommendations were for restaurants in the US, and there was no way to generate recommendations for a a specified geographic region.  If I were travelling to the US any time soon, this might be helpful if I were going to the specific cities where restaurants were recommended for me, but generally speaking, these recommendations are useless.

The problem here is that a model that works well for small physical items has been applied to experiences, and it simply doesn’t work–making the user experience clunky and ultimately frustrating, possibly more often than it is helpful.  LivignSocial would have been better to stick with wine!

Have you ever tried a product or service from a company that did other things well only to be disappointed?

‘Giving back something broken’ undoes all your good work and then some.

In Stephen Donaldson’s Second Chronicle of Thomas Covenant, the protagonist Covenant points out that ‘there’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything: Give him back something broken’.  While that is certainly melodramatic for the tone of this post, it is something than rings true in user experience.  If your system does something good for users and then takes that something good away without good reason it will make the user angry.

Let me give you an example:  Long time readers of this blog will remember how pleased I was with the pre-pay option available at my local supermarket.  Recently the chain involved in that post has brought out a loyalty card which allows you to collect those four cent petrol vouchers on the card, rather than stuffed into your wallet.  This works particularly well for my partner and I, since we don’t own a car and therefore only rarely purchase petrol; it means when we do purchase petrol we can just hand over the card rather than having to remember to save the dockets and present them at the right time.

So far it all sounds pretty good, right?  The problem is, this card breaks the pre-pay option on the supermarket tills.  You can put all the information in, but when you hand the cashier your loaylty card, it cancels the transaction you have begun and forces the cahsier to start all over.

This problem takes a system that works in favour of the customer, and turns it on its head: the customer does the work of entering their information, only to have that work completely wasted.  It would be less annoying not to have the option to pre-pay in the first place. The supermarket needs to fix this problem, or remove the pre-pay option before they get into more loyalty schemes (as is happening in the next couple of months).

What experiences do you have of systems that were working really well only to turn on you at the last minute?

On signs, and the need to carry my camera everywhere

Recently, as part of my work, I have commented on a signage policy for my workplace. Signs fascinate me.  It’s a basic usability premise that simple objects should not need signs, but so often I see a sign that either isn’t working, or which (with a little thought) doesn’t need to exist in the first place. I really do need to carry my camera with me more often so that when I see signs like this I can take a picture, but in the meantime I will describe a couple of examples to you:

There are two ways ofr a sign to fail: not provide the information that is needed, or provide information which may be actively misleading to some or all of the population.  A library I frequent has only a male cleaner; as such when he cleans the women’s toilets he must hang a sign to alert them to his presence in the toilets.  The sign he uses reads “not in use”, and I suspect that this is supposed to mean that it is not in “circulation” (to borrow a liubrary metaphor, but hung on a library toilet door, it reads more like “vacant”.

Signs that don’t work are interesting, but signs that shouldn’t need to exist raise my usability analyst ire something awful.  Recently in a public building I noticed a photocopier with not one, but two signs on it letting users of the space know that the copier wasn’t working.  Now, it’s excellent that the people responsible for the building let users know the copier isn’t working, but two signs seems like overkill, and given that the copier is on wheels, why didn’t they just move it out of the public space?

Are there signs in your work or recreation spaces that make no sense?  I’ll leave you with one I found on flickr, taken by brionv:

The bottom sign reads "door is alarmed"

Social usability, acquaintances, and spam

Despite my many years of internet use, I have only rarely had those moments where I stumbled across something I really wasn’t looking for and didn’t want (and usually because I typed something foolish into Google Images without the safe search turned on). Invariably, what I have seen has been thumbnails and relatively inoffensive–insofar as any adult content you weren’t looking for can be inoffensive (as for what people are looking for…that is neither for me to comment on, nor a topic for this blog).

Like Sara, though, my first experience of the true “Can. not. un. see” moment has come as a result of the 23 Things. I was checking my blog over the weekend, and saw I had a comment stuck in moderation. It was on a post I wrote early in the 23 Things, about anonymity online, and said merely “thanks”. Normally, I would delete such a post as spam outright, but given that I know many people are freshly beginning 23 Things, and I didn’t want to discourage a new user, I thought I better make sure that it wasn’t a 23 Things fellow traveller. I didn’t recognise the email address, but that isn’t anything new, and the link wasn’t obvoiusly spammy, so I clicked on it to see the person’s blog. Bad idea. What I saw was a large, outright obscene image and I couldn’t close the browser tab fast enough.

So here we have a very specific set of social circumstances that led me to an unlikely behaviour, and had decidedly unpleasant results–it is easy to see how spammers, scammers, and phishers do their nefarious work. Trust and identity are important features of online social media, but it they are a hard thing to negotiate, and breaking this trust (as my commenter did over the weekend) has severely negative consequences. These negative consequences include the personal negative responses like I had yesterday, the time many of us (including me) spend moderating their blogs so other people don’t have to be offended, and so that such material is not linked from a professional platform, and the bandwidth cost associated with viewing unwanted images or other media.

What is the solution to these antisocial behaviours leading to bad user experience? One possibility is to never click on or approve anything from anyone we don’t know for certain, but to me this denies one of the more interesting possibilities on the web: meeting new people and ideas. Alternatively we could decide not to moderate, and risk unsavoury links being added to our social spaces without our permission, however this gives the spammers even more advertising (and I’m glad I am the only person who had to see what I saw). Being careful seems a happy medium, with a low rate of failure, but it is not always effective, and it would be nice if some of it could be automated. Since it isn’t, though, I urge all my readers to be careful out there, because once something is seen, you can’t unsee it. Does anyone have any better suggestions for dealing with this problem?

Social engineering and usability: a post about toilets.

I’ve been away from this blog for far too long again, I know–sadly I have had things happening at work that have demanded my attention more urgently than this blog.  Now I’m back, and I am going to write a post about something I never thought I would see on this blog: toilets, specifically the dual flush ones.

The first dual flush system was designed in Australia in 1980, and modern ones are estimated to save households up to 67% of their annual water usage–a lot in a country that suffers chronic drought, but favoured by environmentalists everywhere.

Early dual flush system by necessity had to clearly mark which button gave a whole flush, and which a half flush, meaning buttons usually looked something like this:

The images on the buttons clearly dwmonstrate the concept of “full” versus “half”.  It might not be obvious to unfamiliar users exactly what this does, but once explained is likely to be relatively obvious (apparently, too, it is relatively easy to train new users–even children–to use “one button for pee-pee and one for poo-poo“).  The particular model displayed might have a minor design flaw, though.  The half flush button, the one an average user is likely to use most often is on the left as you face the toilet–further from the dominant hand of approixmately 90% of the population.  While this is a tiny inconvenience, it may affect behaviour in some cases, meaning the full flush may be used slightly more. Conversely in much design left is less and right is more–consider the volume knob on your car stereo, or the speedometer on your car, for example, so maybe this left-to-right design has consistency advantages that outweigh the convenience issue–experimentation would be the only way to know which side induced the “best” behaviour.

More recently, though, manufacturers have been moving toward circular designs, presumably in response to the fashion of the day.  Unfortunately, not all these circular designs are clear, as evidenced by the signage in this picture.  This design really does have a design failing; while the designers have kept to the left-half right-full convention, the half flush button (again, the one likely to be used most often) is a smaller target, on the left, and therefore harder to hit.  On the positive side, for at least some of these toilets, hitting both buttons (which is possible in this style of design) triggers the half flush, rather than the full flush (as scientifically tested by an army surgeon).  So again, this toilet may be discouraging “good” behaviour by its design, in the first instance because it is marginally confusing, and in the second because the correct usage of the toilet is discouraged by its design.

Recently, though, I was in a pub and I saw a dual flush toilet that is entirely based on the principle of encouraging “good” behaviour (in this case only using the double flush when you need to).  Because I have not been able to find a picture of this design (and strangely enough, I don’t routinely have a camera with me in the toilet), you can see an approximation of the design at left.  This design is quite clever, in that most of the time it does not require users to understand the concept of the half flush–provided they hit anywhere on the button but the small square, a half flush is what they are getting.  This may be particularly beneficial in a pub, where judgement may be impaired, and the amount of water per flush is probably the last thing on patrons’ minds.  Basically, this design is a clever little piece of social engineering, because unless you really want a full flush (enough to hit the relatively small, off-centre target that is the full flush button), all you get is a half flush.  There is a downside to this, though–it could make life harder for users with fine motor control impairments, for example tremors, Parkinsonism (or even drunkenness, ironically).  The fact that this design relies on the small square being pushed as well as the big circle (as opposed to instead of it) makes this somewhat less problematic, but users having to flush multiple times when they need a full flush (because they have poor aim) may cancel out the general benefit.

This flush design highlights the tension that can sometimes arise between what’s best for the group, and what’s best for the individual in interface design.  As to whether people do have trouble with the full flush, or whether this design really does save water, I don’t know, but it made for interesting thinking on a Friday night at the pub.  What do you think?  Would you put this flush in your house?  Is there anywhere it shouldn’t go?

One good thing in travel: Online check in

I’ve been travelling again (hence my sustained absence from this blog), and of course, as always happens when one travels in the cooler seasons, I picked up someone’s cold. This time, I want to talk about a good experience I had with my travels: Air New Zealand domestic services online check in.

As regular readers will know, I hate standing in line at airports with a vengeance, probably because I have (from my perspective) wasted an inordinate amount of time standing in them. I know some readers will see online check in as a reduction in the level of service that airlines offer, but given that I can still check in in person if I want to (actually highly unlikely in my case), I don’t see it this way. The online check in is great just by being available, but it is also (apart from a couple of little niggles) very usable.

My big niggle with the online check in for Air New Zealand is that to do it you need the arbitrary booking reference they assign you. Given that I have an Air New Zealand airpoints login, it would be much better if I could log in with my (equally arbitrary but at least constant) airpoints number, it would be nice if I could just log in, select the flight from a list of my bookings, and check in.

Apart from that, though, once you’re logged in it is very easy to manage — you select your seat from a visual map, and you click ‘check in’, and you’re done. Air New Zealand emails you a PDF of your boarding card, which you print out, and take with you to the airport. You drop your bags in a baggage drop line (which moves much faster than a proper check in line), and go to your gate.

There are two aspects of this system that make it better for some users: Time and control. The time thing means that the user gets to choose when the time taken to check in is spent — whether they want to wait at the airport for 45 minutes prior to their flight, or whether they want to check in at home and arrive later. The control issue is the important one, though; this system puts seat selection into the hands of the user. You can’t select an exit row seat ahead of time (there are certain restrictions on who can sit in these), but any other preference on the plane is available to you. This is a vast improvement over standing in front of a check in agent begging for the aisle seat you know they’re saving for a frequent flyer with a higher tier than you.

Air New Zealand isn’t the only airline doing this; I know that Qantas and Emirates both do it as well (and Emirates has it for international flights if their appalling website doesn’t time out), but Air New Zealand is the only one I have experienced recently. What are your experiences with online check in?

A good (and surprising) user experience: Laundering the shuffle

Yesterday morning (a Monday no less) I had one of those “oh, $%#@*” moments while packing my work bag.  I was ready to pack my iPod shuffle (a second generation, for anyone considering trying this at home), when I realised it was not with my phone and my wallet, and I knew exactly where it was: In the pocket of a polar fleece jacket that had been laundered the night before.  Having heard a few stories of miraculous technology survival, and knowing that the shuffle is essentially just flash memory, I thought I would see whether it was still working.  I pressed the play button, and though no sound came from the headphones, the light came on.  It turned out that both the iPod and the headphones survived, but that the headphones took a day longer to dry out and begin working again. I’m not sure if this is a designed part of the iPod shuffle second generation user experience or not, but I sure am glad of it.

While I wouldn’t recommend laundering your shuffle deliberately, I have seen more than one example of people with a similar story to tell.  Given that (as one of the posters here says) ’shuffles are designed for pockets’, designing them to be as laundry-resistant as possible (and not advertising the fact that they are) is an excellent user experience strategy:

• It takes into account the likelihood of error — it is probably not unlikely that these devices that fit easily in a pocket and are light enough to go unnoticed will get laundered (or dropped into a lake, or exposed to the rain or–in one case–run over).  Not only is this error taken into account, users do not (always) suffer catastrophically for it.
• The user’s expectation (that water will bust their iPod) is surpassed, rather than not met.  If Apple had labelled their devices water resistant, in cases where this failed (and after all, who knows if I would be enjoying music right now if it had been a hot water cycle) people would be disappointed.  Instead, people get something they don’t expect and are delighted (this is not to say that it is necessarily a good idea to set expectations lower than what will always be delivered–an unusual pleasant surprise will be remembered, a common pleasant surprise will eventually become an expected experience).

Like I say, I don’t know if this is a design feature or a happy accident, but either way, right now I am seriously impressed with my iPod, and that is always a user experience win.