Usability means sustainability: a note on world usability day

Today is world usability day, and the theme this year is sustainability.  I can undertsand if that might seem like a bizarre combination, or if it might appear that world usability day has jumped on some kind of bandwagon.  I don’t think the two are wildly unrelated, and I think it is timely that world usability day recognises the relationship.  The relationship comes into play in a number of ways, from better designed living spaces and cities down to feedback to technology users about their real impact, but today I want to focus on two issues: efficiency, and computer supported co-operative work.

Efficiency is, in my opinion, a really big way better usability can contribute to improved sustainability.  Consider that Ben Shneiderman found out 8 years ago that the average person spends 5.1 hours per week grappling with computer problems.  If even 25% of those people would otherwise spend those 5.1 hours doing something that didn’t require electricity, that is a huge environmental saving.  Consider also the case of Lufthansa flight 2904 where cockpit usability problems constributed the death of two people, and the scrapping of an aircraft or the Therac 25 usability problems which caused the death of two people and necessitated considerable medical treatment for two others; both of these cases highlight social, financial and environmental sustainability problems that might have been avoided with better usability.  More mundanely, consider workplace injuries caused by poor ergonomic design, or the tim you spend looking up help files: each of these is a loss in efficiency due to poor system design and lack of usability testing. Every loss in efficiency we suffer due to poor system design or technological troubles is a way that usability (measuring how real people interact wit that system)  might have produced a more sustainable product or system.

Computer Supported Co-operative Work is another area for significant growth in sustainability.  This research field has a rich hsitory of contributing to the ways in which we work, and promotes some real sustainability gains.  CSCW has been the genesis of ideas that allow us to travel less (because we can collaborate online–there are some things for which you have to be there in person, but meetins are no longer one of them), print less (because we can share and review documents online) and share ideas more readily (because electronic dissemination is so lightweight). In their own ways, each of these advantages of sharing an electronic workspace contributes to sustainability (particularly given that travel and paper are not incosiderable contributors to environmental problems) , and I have no doubt that CSCW will continue to provide stepping stones to sustanability gains in the future.

I could talk about any number of other ways that usability helps create a more sustainable world, but I need to get off this computer and go and do something requiring no electricity.  In the meantime, I thoroughly recommend this post on ways you can check the usability of behaving sustanably in your area.  What are the barriers you face in living sustainably that could be improved with better system design?

Connex: a great example of systemic failure to care

Tell me, if you wanted your automated train ticket machines cleared, would you choose 823 AM on Monday as a good time to do it?  Even if ticket clearing takes 13 minutes? Even if, during those 13 minutes, four trains stop that station according to your schedule, and in fact 6 actually stop because two are running late?  Even if it was a station where not many trains stop, because it is not a primary station? Even if there is no other way for your passengers to buy tickets, unless they have enough coins (tickets start at $3.70)? Even if you regularly ended up with 10+ people waiting behind you?

No, neither would I, and yet between them, this is what Connex and Armorguard think is a good idea.  There is actually plenty of scope to clear the ticket machines at that station where not one single train stops there, even during weekdays.  I’ve written about Connex before because of their poor approach to user experience, and while they have often given me cause to do it again, I didn’t want this to be the “I hate Connex” blog, so I’ve left it alone. This particular example, though, was a  perfect demonstration of how little Connex cares about its’ customers’ user experience, particularly when you factor in the Connex guards who were present to prevent the “fare evasion” not being physically able to buy a ticket during peak hour might normally cause.

It comes as no surprise that Connex have lost their contract for the Melbourne metro train system, and while it is likely true that the State government needs to come to the party if services are genuinely to be improved, I won’t miss the callous disregard Connex shows for its customers, nor their pre-recorded message apologising “for any inconvenience caused”. There are things the new operator can do, even without government support, that will show that they are interested in their users’ experience of their system, and this more than anything will make a difference to that experience.

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?

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?

Websites should not make users “error”-prone: Airlines are wasting my time

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.

User experience, business class, and want vs. need.

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.

The great leap backwards: Auckland airport

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…

Why the travel agent will survive — because airline websites are so painful

Recently I had the displeasure of doing something that should have been very pleasant — booking my flights back to New Zealand for my wedding. A friend of my gave me the heads up that there was an especially cheap flight with Emirates around the time I wanted to go, so I duly went ahead and attempted to book the flight.

The process of booking this flight — a simple flight, only a single leg — took over an hour and a half. Partly this was because the Emirates website was painfully slow, but partly it was user interface issues. When I made an error entering the dates I wanted to travel (and I discovered this near the end of the process) I had to go back and completely start the process over — there was no way to change the travel date. When I made an error with the seats I selected I was kicked back to the personal information screen, where some of the information had reverted to the default. And when I made an error entering my credit card details, the booking failed irrevocably (while saving the incorrect details to a customer profile that could not be accessed because the server was down). When I tried to start the booking afresh, I was trapped with the bad credit card details, and was offered the choice of collecting the tickets from an Emirates office, or having them mailed to me — no e-ticket for me. In the end, we logged in with my partner’s account and booked the tickets that way, but as I said, at this point it was 90 minutes later.

I tell you this story not to deride Emirates, who are, after all, flying me to NZ for an absolute pittance, but because whenever I book with an airline, the user experience is near-universally bad. I haven’t yet found an Australian website that searches as many airlines as House of Travel in New Zealand, but when I do, I won’t be booking directly with the airlines again — travel agents know their websites have to actually offer a service if they want people to come back, and so the user experience is much, much better.