27 emPowering the User

1e January 21st, 2005 by Jeffrey e Veen :: 7 9 37 10 Comments

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Don’t remodel your home. Or, at least, do what you can to make sure you know what you’re getting into when you start. When my wife and I remodeled our kitchen a year ago, the initial excitement of change and newness quickly turned into a 9-month ordeal of living in a construction zone, a refrigerator and microwave in the living room.

But let’s go back to that initial excitement: the kitchen of our dreams. Buying new stuff is exciting, especially when a dark old kitchen has become a blank slate.

Like most shoppers these days, I started by learning all I could about my purchases online. As I did my research for refrigerators, I noticed that virtually all manufacturers included information like cubic feet, features, and energy consumption. That last one was particularly important to me as I live in California, and have seen our utility rates almost triple recently due to various Enron scandals and the like.

So it was frustrating to arrive at the Maytag web site and find the refrigerator specifications lacking any reference to electrical usage. All of the competing vendors did, why didn’t they? As the illustration above points out, my interaction with Maytag was not exactly pleasing. Three emails, three customer service reps, no resolution to my desire for a simple piece of information. What a terrible design issue.

Design issue? Sure, I could explain this as a failing of whatever Customer Relationship Management process Maytag uses, but what does their inept correspondence with me have to do with that?

It’s an issue of anticipation. All of Maytag’s competitors were able to accurately foresee my need for energy ratings, but Maytag did not. This may have been an explicit choice by someone on the web team, or an implicit oversight. It doesn’t matter. The reps who wrote to me had the information (”Please include your model number…”) But I did not.

I was a potential customer, I based my entire perception of their brand on the interaction I had with their Web site. It was all part of the user experience — as much as browser compatibility, the use of Flash, or the effectiveness of the navigation for information discovery. In essence, Maytag designed their site with an incomplete understanding of their users. And they paid for it.

The problem could have been avoided through user research or — even easier — by a simple yet thorough competitive analysis. Designing on top of a foundation of research need not be expensive or complicated. It just needs to be part of your culture.

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1e Robotic Soliders : 39 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4199935.stm - 9 3d Comment »

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OK/Cancel Leaves London

January 25th, 2005 by Kevin Cheng :: 7 Comments

Well I’m back from Spain and Portugal but not for long. Soon, I will be moving all that I own back to North America … Vancouver, Canada to be exact from where I’ll try to figure what to do next.

Before I go however, I’d like to invite OK/Cancel UK readers to join me for a drink:

Where: Amber Bar downstairs bar in Soho
When: Thursday, January 27th, 2005, 20h00 (8pm)

I know the notice is kind of short but I hope some of you can make it out anyways. I’ll try to wear one of the OK/Cancel shirts so I’m easy to find. Come say hi before OK/Cancel loses its European representation! And if you plan to come, do drop a note here or by e-mail so I can look for you.

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OK/Cancel is a comic strip collaboration co-written and co-illustrated by Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi. Our subject matter focuses on interfaces, good and bad and the people behind the industry of building interfaces - usability specialists, interaction designers, human-computer interaction (HCI) experts, industrial designers, etc. (Who Links Here) ?