Dana’s user experience blog

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.

I’ve been thinking about why airlines have been on this blog so often of late, and I have come to the conclusion that it must be because I travel more often than average, and small things that might not be annoying if they only affected me once a year have been affecting me roughly once a month for the past four months.

This time it is an airline booking website that has frustrated me, and (worse) wasted my time (which is, after all, the only thing in life that is completely irreplaceable, once spent).  I tried to book a domestic flight on Air New Zealand, and thus went to the local New Zealand website.  I searched for a flight, found an appropriate flight time and price, and tried to book the flight using Airpoints dollars.  After being redirected through a log-in page, I was shown the following error message:

When I clicked the continue button, it took me to the Australian site, but it had not passed on the search or selections I had made on the New Zealand site, so I had to perform that search over again (and then when I did, the prices presented were quoted in New Zealand dollars and the Australian price did not show until I had selected a flight).  There is no way I could have known this in advance, because there is no standard for which regional variant of an airline website users should use (Qantas insists you use the website of the country where your flight will originate, Air New Zealand likes you to use the site where you live, for example), and nowhere on the Air New Zealand website does it actually say which variant to use.

There are two problems with this scenario:

1. I am not Australian, and there is no reason for my Airpoints membership to think I am.  The membership was created in New Zealand, and it has me registered as a New Zealand passport holder.  Now, I am not patriotic, and I don’t particularly care about a website calling me Australian, but the text is misleading and could actively confuse some users (or seriously annoy users more patriotic than me). It should read “Airpoints members resident in Australia…” (because the sole reason it thinks I am an Australian is my address.
2. The website did not (though this is a technically easy feat) pass on what I was trying to do — I landed on a search screen on the Australian web-site and had to begin the booking process again from the start.  At best this is annoying and a waste of my time, at worst it could have meant I missed out on fast-selling sale fares.

Nowhere on any of the Air New Zealand websites does it tell you that you must book through your local version if you want to use your Airpoints membership to provide your information, accumulate points, or spend your accumulated points, nor does it use the IP address of your computer (the number your computer identifies by on the internet) to redirect you before you begin searching.  This is an easy error to make, and the time cost in recovering from it is relatively high (the two minutes it might take to make a booking basically doubles, given that the user has to start over).  Air New Zealand has ample opportunities to prevent this “error” (I find it hard to call reasonable user behaviour an error), and also to make it easier for users to recover from the error without costing them a lot of time.

Errors are something that should be considered in the design of any interactive system — both how to make it harder for user to make them, and how to make it easier for user to recover when they do make them — and Air New Zealand has failed in this.  Are there any systems you make mistakes in all the time?  It might not be your fault.

After the number of shows Mike and I saw last year (at last count, it was nine, ten if you count the second time we saw Priscilla), someone very thoughtfully gave us Ticketek vouchers of a significant denomination for Christmas. Sadly, this year there has been less we have wanted to see, and as a result we decided we wanted to spend the vouchers on going to see the closing night of Priscilla (that would be time number four). You see (and this is part of the user experience problems with the vouchers) we have to use the vouchers within six months, or they become worthless (never mind that rock tours last literally years, and shows run for months, nor that Ticketek has the money for the vouchers whether we use them or not, we have to find something we want to see within six months). This limitation means that we have not been able to save the vouchers for something we really wanted to see, and thus considerably reduced their value to us as a product.

The situation got worse, however, when we tried to spend the vouchers. I read the terms and conditions and discovered to my dismay that rather than book online (as we did for each and every one of the events we went to lsat year), we had to use the vouchers in a Ticketek agency (most of which are open during working hours). There should be no technological reason for this, as the vouchers appear to have unique numbers on them (and other vendors use online vouchers all the time), but nonetheless this is the way they must be used. Fortunately, there is an agency in a music store not far from where Mike works, so he went at lunch time to try and buy the VIP class tickets we wanted for the closing night of Priscilla. The agency worker told him that the VIP class tickets were sold out, so he phoned me asking what I wanted to do. Being somewhat sceptical, I looked up the VIP class tickets on the Ticketek website and found I could purchase them there. After a little to-ing and fro-ing where the Ticketek agent suggested I try and purchase the tickets online “because I wouldn’t be able to” and me saying I was only going to risk that if the agent would pay for the tickets if they went through, the agent phoned Ticketek and found out that in fact there were still VIP tickets available, and we might be able to use the vouchers to buy them through the agency at the theatre, but that he did not have access to them from his system. It turns out (after a significant amount of running around on Mike’s part) that you can use vouchers to purchase VIP tickets from the venue, but by the time Mike got this far there were only single seats left. Maybe we’ll see Priscilla again in New Zealand.

There are a number of usability problems with this scenario, affecting different people in the equation:

• The six month timeframe can significantly limit the use of the vouchers to recipients due to long touring seasons and short-ish pre-season availability of tickets
• Though it seems to me that there is no technological reason why the vouchers should not be used online, they can only be used in person, making it much more difficult in today’s “always on” world to actually purchase tickets with them.
• The agencies where the tickets are sold do not necessarily have access to all kinds of tickets, so the vouchers can not necessarily be used to purchase the tickets you would like.
• The information screen that the agencies have does not appear to indicate that they don’t have access to tickets (as opposed to tickets being unavailable) clearly enough — customers can be misled into believing that the show of their choice is sold out, where all they really needed to do was go to the venue (though that could be difficult if the venue is in another city).

So, while the Ticketek vouchers are a lovely gift, they have proven significantly difficult to actually use to buy tickets, which makes the process of using them less like fun and more like hard work. Ticketek could significantly improve the experience of using their vouchers by extending the period for which they are valid, and making them available to use online. In the meantime, does anyone have any suggestions for Ticketek-sold shows that are coming up? Mike and I have three months left to spend our vouchers.

Over the weekend, I went to a grocery store local to my home. Normally grocery shopping is not something I consider a good experience, user or otherwise. I walk faster than the average person, and I don’t like crowds. I’m irritated by not being able to find anything, and the minute I can find everything the store seems to get rearranged (apparently this is to entice me to buy more when I see new and interesting products in the space where the stuff I was looking for was last week, but it doesn’t work — it often means I leave the store without things I had intended to buy because I couldn’t find them).

Over the weekend, though, I left the store with a bounce in my step, because they had introduced something that made my life easier, and got me out of the store faster (and that small improvement was enough to change the whole tone of the visit — being a user experience geek, improved user experience — and therefore things I can blog about — really make me happy).

The usual scenario at checkout is one of three, at most stores:

1. Stand in a feeder line for one of several express checkouts, where people have usually jammed far more than 15 things into a basket (rather than getting a trolley) to delude themselves that they are entitled to use the express checkout. Then they pay with cash, only it never occurred to them to get their wallets out at any point prior to actually having to pay, so keep waiting while they find their wallet in a large purse or backpack, or in one of their 50 pockets. Not usually so express.
2. Stand in line for a self checkout machine, and pack your groceries yourself (I spent a summer as a packer, and I can pack into my own backpack, so I actually like packing my own groceries). If you’re lucky the machine behaves for those in front of you (and you) so that you don’t have to wait for a shop assistant to come and make it scan items correctly or deliver the right change (this is risky, so I don’t usually use this line).
3. Find a non-express line where the person in front of you is nearly done, and check out through there. Even if the person still has 30 or so items, there is only one transaction (and thus one chance for a lost wallet), and it is only the same number of items as two express checkout customers. This is my preferred option at larger supermarkets.

Clearly a large part of my irritation with supermarkets is the time I waste standing in line (I know, I could read the magazines, but I don’t like the ones they have on display, and besides…it feels a bit wrong to read a magazine someone else will take home). So recently at my local Safeway, having taken option 3 and being ready to pay for my groceries with my credit card I looked down at the credit card terminal while I was waiting and noticed something new: I could pre-swipe my card. The screen read “Paying by card? swipe now”, and so I did. I then selected my account, and had my transaction pre-approved — all this while the cashier was still scanning my groceries. This saves a significant amount of time once the groceries are packed (especially, if like me, you can never figure out which way to swipe your card) — all the check out operator had to do was ask me if I wanted cash out, and then, unusually in Australia, the machine accepted the PIN I have on my credit card (instead of forcing me to sign).

This pre-swipe thing saves time in three ways:

1. Encouraging shoppers to have their cards out ahead of time
2. The check out operator not having to ask how you want to pay for your groceries (if you have already swiped your card — if you haven’t, they will still have to ask)
3. The time taken to swipe the card and select the account (not insignificant if the card is being temperamental and/or like me you can’t figure out which way to swipe it.

There is also a fourth advantage, in that it gives shoppers something to do in that awkward time where talking to the checkout operator might annoy them or slow them down, but not talking to them feels rude. The time saving is, admittedly, in the process of grocery shopping relatively small, however, it probably represents a large saving in the time-per-transaction for the cashier (and therefore a labour cost savings for the store). In situations of long lines where people pre-swipe, though, or for those who loathe grocery shopping, this small time saving (and awkwardness aversion) can make a big difference to their experience. This is a win-win user experience improvement — it will save the grocery store money, and may have an impact on consumer impression of the store — I know it has improved my perception, and will make me more likely to use the Safeway that has implemented the system than others that have not.

Remember back in 2001, when in October, white headphones appeared everywhere seemingly overnight, and all of a sudden anything that wanted to be trendy and fresh was an i-Something? Since it was first unveiled, the iPod has captured the attention and devotion of users around the globe — initially just music lovers, but later users of all kinds of media.

So why is it that the iPod was as much a revolution (if not more) than the walkman? I would guess there were four major factors (and Leander Kahney and other commentators would agree with me):

• The iTunes music store tie-in. In the past few years the iTunes music store has been heavily criticised for selling “DRM infected” m4ps that only play on Apple players, and to my mind this is a valid criticism (though one that is being eroded as music retailers come on board DRM free and competition opens up). However, in 2001, the music store was a music revolution — you could buy a whole bunch of stuff (some that was difficult to get any other way) on a per-song basis, legally and for a reasonable price. And it was all integrated with a device that you could cart all of it around on and play it on.
• Meeting a need. The iPod was the first small device with long battery life and storage for a significant amount of music. And unlike travelling CD players, iPods almost never skipped. Way back when I bought my first iPod (I have a third generation 15 GB and a second generation 1GB Shuffle), in 2003, it weighed about as much as two CDs in their cases, took up much less space, and could hold about 3,500 songs. It still isn’t full, and my music goes with me when I travel.



• Design and the cool factor. Apparently they white headphones were a happy accident, but they became iconic, and the iPod became a must have. The advertising campaign helped with this — the primary colours with silhouettes rocking out to their music grabbed people’s attention so much that people started making their own takes on them (as above), and services to iPod your own photos professionally popped up on the web.
• Usability. Not only did the iPod do something that users wanted, it was easy to do it. The device, the music store, and the software are easy to install and use — and this didn’t happen by accident, it was a designed in feature. Some commentators go so far as to claim that the usability of iPods is the reason why people love them so much.

I don’t actually think usability alone can account for the emotion — I think it is the whole user experience of the right thing that is not only easy to use, but sexy as well.

So, imagine my disappointment to discover a fairly serious oversight in my shuffle. The second generation shuffle is designed in the shape of a clip (see below) . The clip is great, it clips onto clothing or backpacks readily and effectively. But it is designed for men, or more specifically, people who wear men’s shirts. This makes me feel just a little bit like my shuffle wasn’t designed for me, and if it weren’t for the shuffle being otherwise excellent, could affect how I feel about it.

For historical reasons, men’s and women’s shirts button in opposite directions — the buttons on men’s shirts are on the right, and women’s are on the left. Originally this was a usability consideration, men dressed themselves, and women were dressed by maids, so the buttons are closest to the right hand of the dresser — unfortunately, though, we have never moved past this even though women no longer have maids. The second generation iPod shuffle’s interface is up the right way (with the headphones going into the top) when it is clipped to a menswear shirt, but upside down (with all the functions going backwards and the headphone cord looping down and then pugging up into the iPod) when clipped to a womenswear shirt. This is particularly unfortunate, given that menswear is significantly more likely to have a pocket to clip the iPod to, and therefore an alternative where the interface is rotated 90 degrees rather than 180.

Now, this may seem like nitpicking, and it probably is — but for a company and a product that has such an excellent user experience track record, small disappointments like this (particularly when they affect 50% of the potential user population, though maybe slightly less of the actual user population) are surprising. What should Apple have done about it? Well, ideally clothing would all be changed so it was more usable in modern times, but given that this is wildly unlikely (because this is a standard, and they are notoriously hard to change), I would have suggested one of things:

• An “equal-opportunities” user interface where the clip was vertical instead of horizontal
• Selling left and right clipping iPod shuffles
• Having a reversible clip.

Apple have a lot of it right, and I am not about to throw my shuffle out just because I have to work a little bit harder to find somewhere to clip it, but I do think this is an excellent example of how small things matter to a user experience, and that standardization isn’t always a great idea. Still, though…I’ve seen the iPod touch. And I want one.

Again I have left this blog too long without a post, and again it is because I have been travelling. As much as I used to love to travel, I am now throughly sick of it — sick of waiting in airport lounges and lines, sick of the poor design of systems that require me to fill out a card when there could be a machine that scanned my passport and boarding card (if you really need my signature, how about I just sign my boarding card?), sick of trying to decide if kohl pencil counts as a liquid (it doesn’t) and sick of answering the question “have you got any liquids aerosols or gels in your carry on?” with the cumbersome “yes, and it is packed in a clear 1l plastic bag”. Many of these irritations could be dramatically reduced by better systems, and in many cases, I could fly business class to reduce my aggravation.

Business class/first class on airlines really are the ultimate sale of a user experience, as opposed to a user necessity, for the vast majority of passengers; the extra movies, better food, and real cutlery are all nice, but they don’t help you to do business any better at the other end. I can’t find any statistics on how many passengers who are flying business class are actually on business, but my guess would be less than half. And lets face it, with business class travellers making up only 10% of travellers, but 35% of revenue (at least in the US), it makes sense to keep the business class passengers happy.

One of the privileges business class passengers get is the exclusive use of a set of toilets for their class. Generally speaking, given that they pay twice what a economy class passenger has paid, this is only appropriate. However, I recently flew back to Australia from New Zealand on the Air New Zealand Airbus A320,and the layout of the plane meant that not only did some economy passengers use the business class toilets, those who didn’t were involved in serious interruptions to service, and a general health hazard.

The A320 has 8 business class seats, and 144 economy class seats. There is one business class toilet right at the front of the plane, and two economy class toilets, both in the tail section (yes, this means that there is one toilet per 72 economy class passengers — this is less than is recommended for restaurants in the American Restroom Code (PDF), though more than is recommended for passenger terminals). There is a single centre aisle, with three seats on either side in economy class, and it’s pretty narrow. You can see a diagram of the plane layout here. Now, the flight I was on was completely full, and as always, the flight attendants began the economy class food and beverage services from the front of the plane — same with tray collection. You can see where this is all going to go wrong: given that the cart was blocking the aisle, and passengers were not allowed to go forward (though some of them did anyway, including one elderly and disabled lady), access to the toilets was severely limited for the majority of passengers for the majority of the flight. Passengers who did need to go could access the back of the plane by having the flight attendants wheel the cart back to the galley, squeezing past it, and going thus seriously interrupting service and coming very close to the food that was being served to other passengers. Once the aisle was finally cleared, there was a significant line of people waiting, all out of their seats and definitely not wearing seatbelts, which puts those passengers (and the people seated around them) at greater risk of injury (and it was nearly made illegal in the wake of 9/11). What’s more, with the prevalence of moderate urinary incontinence at a minimum of 3% among men and women, this had a high probability of causing someone discomfort and/or embarrassment.

It’s all very well to sell an excellent user experience to your business class passengers, who pay more. It’s not appropriate, however, to create barriers to accessing necessary facilities to uphold the exclusivity of this experience. Air New Zealand, and indeed any airline using this aircraft in this configuration needs to consider either offering economy class passengers access to the business class toilets or designing the cabin space so there is alternative access to the back of the cabin or a toilet at the front. Selling a great user experience at a premium is a good idea, but not if it compromises the health, safety, and basic comfort of your other users.

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.

In a cash-based economy in a hot country, this is something of a design failure:

Seen in Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn, Melbourne, Australia on Friday 11 Jan 2008. (Thanks to Thomas Rutter for taking the photo).

My apologies that this blog has lain fallow for so long; life gets in the way of good writing far more than the truth gets in the way of a good story I am afraid. Part of the reason why I have been conspicuously absent, however, has been a trip home to New Zealand, both to spend Christmas with my family, and to get on top of a number of things that needed to be taken care of for my wedding.

Of course, because user experience is “what I do” I reflected on the poor user experience that the modern traveller has come to accept as the norm on a number of occasions (warning: don’t do this, being angry at how simple it would be to make things better will only make the way you feel now worse). Much of that poor experience has to do with standing in line — to check in, to clear customs, to clear security, to get on the plane, to get off the plane, to clear customs, to collect your bags, to clear biosecurity (New Zealand and Australia, at least)… It’s fairly endless, and in combination with security restrictions (and the people who don’t follow them) is the main reason why the minimum check-in time for New Zealand to Australia is now exceeding the flight time in some cases (having said that, it seems in most cases that if you show up late they come looking for you anyway — “anyone for the flight to Nadi?”).

Of course, some of these lines can be reduced or eliminated by self-service (and this is happening in some cases, notably with self-check-in), but I’m not going to talk about that. What I am going to talk about is the Auckland airport departure fee.

When you leave New Zealand via Auckland Airport, there is a $25 NZ departure fee that is payable at the airport. I’m not complaining about the fee itself, which is relatively low (departure fees from most Australian airports are around the $200 mark, but since they are collected by the airlines they are hidden in the cost of your ticket). However, paying the fee is an annoying step in the process of exiting Auckland Airport, which is the major airport in New Zealand. The real problem, though, is that the Auckland Airport management team have just made the decision to allow Travelex to collect the fee, when it used to be collected by the Bank of New Zealand. This means that travellers can no longer pay their departure fee at an ATM, the way they used to, but must now line up for yet another thing leaving the airport — it might mean the airport gets a few cents more of the fee, but it is significantly inconvenient for every single passenger (in a way that raising the fee might not have been).

Sadly, much like Microsoft and personal computing, Auckland Airport has a near-monopoly on the New Zealand international travel market, and so the market has little choice but to bear this great leap backwards in user experience. Still, though, I am seriously thinking about selling my shares in Auckland Airport, if only I can figure out how to do it…

I was tipped off to the angry librarian when it went around the office; if you haven’t seen it please watch it below and then read the rest of this post.

I hope that was an especially painful 5 minutes and 10 seconds — I know I found it painful, and not, as many of the commenters on YouTube did, because “that spacey girl is so dumb”. This is an excellent (if spoofed) example of a bad user experience in an unusable system that involves a human being. The girl’s task is relatively straightforward, she wants to print a picture in colour for a university assignment. When she tries (and fails) to complete the task on her own, she asks the librarian on duty for assistance.

From this point, the librarian completely fails to offer a good user experience; he doesn’t provide enough information at any stage in the proceedings for the girl to know that what she wants to do is impossible, and during their conversation, the girl (a library user, the person on the customer end of the equation) makes the only attempts that are made toward solving the problem — only to have each one rebuffed in a ruder and ruder manner.

Rebuffing the girl’s attempts to print a document in colour takes five minutes, time that is wasted for the librarian and wasted and frustrating for her. There are ways to deal with this that would have taken much less time, and would have been a much better experience for both parties:

• The obvious: Make colour printing available to students.
• If colour printing is not available for students, then make this fact obvious, and provide an alternative, for example “I’m sorry, we can’t do colour printing for students, but the copy shop next door can and is open 9am to 9pm 7 days a week”.

The bad user experience in this case was caused by an interaction between an obstinate person (the librarian) and a set of rules that would be incomprehensible to the average user (and aren’t readily available for users to read). While I am sure that this scenario is not in the least bit library-specific, this video is an excellent incentive to assess how our rules and our customer service may make our users’ lives difficult.