Closer To The Ideal

The often interesting robert hoekman, jr:

Our Stories should be an experience rich site. It should offer an engaging environment that compels users to explore and connect emotionally to the storytellers. But it doesn’t offer this at all. Instead, it offers what looks like any other Google design. It’s plain, minimalist, and it’s focused entirely around the information and not the experience.

Google apparently thinks it has hit upon the secret formula to all successful websites - simple, minimalist designs that offer information in a concentrated form. In reality, this formula only works for certain classes of sites, of which the original Google website was the par exemplar. Google fails when it attempts to build a site that needs a philosophically different approach. As Hoekman explains:

 If Google’s goal here was to create emotional connections, they should definitely have considered something other than the business-as-usual, sterile design work that has become Google’s signature. Granted, some of the site’s pages are geared towards showing people how to conduct interviews for the site, and those pages are probably best left alone, but the main attraction here is an environment of storytelling, not another Google search results system.

…Design is meant to communicate content. With the right design, you can always meet your goals much more effectively. If you want emotional connections, design something that encourages them. If you want people to take action, design to encourage action. Don’t let your usual design style get in the way of doing something great.

Yet another example of bad web programming. I was researching the subject of cancer and followed a link on a government site that gets me to this page:

I think its fine to print debugging information to the screen when a website is under development, but on a live site, I think the error messages should try to be more helpful. Perhaps the error message can suggest the average speed it takes the site’s sysadmins to fix problems of this time. Or the error message can suggest that the visitor go get the page out of the Google cache. Even the cutesy error message that Stikipad used was more reassuring than this.

Back on September 24th, I decided to put my Netflix account on hold. I knew I was facing a stretch of time when I was going to be too busy to watch movies. Apparently Netflix only allows you to put your account on hold for 90 days. Nevertheless, the form that I was presented with allowed me to choose any date in December, so I chose December 31st, as you can see here:

Upon submitting the form, I got the following error message:

This is, of course, an example of bad user interface design. They should not allow me to choose a date which they themselves forbid. It is confusing that their form should offer a date which is, in fact, not allowed.

The framework I wrote auto-generates forms based on the definition of a table in the database. These forms are usually quite ugly. The advantage of these auto-generated forms is that they speed the initial set up of a site - I simply define some database tables, based on what the client has told me they want, and the framework auto-generates the form.

On the TSR site, we are still cleaning up the rough edges. Laura Denyes, the lead designer on this site,  is transforming the rough and ugly forms. After enhancing the clarity and improving the use of space, we hope to leave the user with a better experience. You can see Laura’s work in this before and after image:

Well, maybe “broken” is too strong a word. The CSS failed to load. Which happens sometimes. Which is part of why semantic markup is important. How much does the user experience survive the lack of style sheets? This from the front page of Old Navy:

Just curious, but does anyone know some common reasons why the CSS files might fail to load?

Also curious about the marketing. The front page of the site is aimed entirely at women. Do women buy clothes online more than men?

I’ve written before about the error messages I’ve encountered on the Sprint PCS website. I’ve been unable to log into the Sprint PCS website this month - I get some bizzare error messages instead.

Today I figured I’d try to use my phone to pay the bill. I hit “*2″ which dialed customer service for me. I reached an automated voicemail system. It asked me to type in my phone number, so it could look up my account information. I did so. It then told me that I owed Sprint $513. I was stunned. By my calculations, I owe something like $200. I pay about $97 a month, and I owe last month and this month. I’m not sure how the amount doubled.

Eventually, the automated system gave me the option to talk to someone. I pressed the button.

A pleasant, helpful woman got on the line and asked for my telephone number, so she could look up my account information. I gave her the number and she said they had no account information for me. I explained that I’d had this account with Sprint since March of 2001. She explained that she worked for Nextel, she didn’t have account info for Sprint customers (the two companies are merging).

This is puzzling. If Nextel doesn’t have any of my account information, then why should my phone auto-dial Nextel when I press the buttons for customer service? Also, if Nextel has no information about me, how did the automated system tell me that I owed $513?

What happened next is also puzzling. I said, “Okay, can you transfer me to Sprint Customer Service?” She said she could not transfer me there. She could, however, give me the phone number. Why can’t the phone company transfer me to the number they want me to go to? I find that confusing.

I dialed the number she gave me.
Sprint PCS also had an automated system. It asked me to type in my telephone number, so it could look up my account information. I typed in my telephone number. It said there was no account with that number, and it suggested I type it again. I assumed I’d mis-typed it, so I tried it again, carefully. Again, the automated voice system told me that there was no account with that number. I didn’t know what else to do, so I typed in the number a 3rd time. Again it told me there was no such telephone number.

I couldn’t think of what to do then. The automated voice system did not give me any other option. It kept asking me to type in my telephone number. It asked me 4 more times, and then, when I did nothing, it hung up on me. It never offered to transfer me to a human operator, who might have been able to resolve the situation.

I’ve had this account for 6 and half years. Right now, I seem to be completely locked out of it. The computer at Sprint PCS claims my account doesn’t exist. At Nextel, the computer says I owe the incredible amount of $513, and then the operator says she has no access to my account information because it is over at Sprint.

I don’t need to know many of the details to tell that the merger of Sprint and Nextel databases is going badly. If I had stock, I’d sell it. This is the worst customer service experience I’ve had in many years.

I was helping a client move their site from GoDaddy to another web server. I logged into GoDaddy and found the MySql database and made a backup. Then I got sidetracked for 15 minutes. When I started working again, I got this error message (screenshot below). GoDaddy is right to log me out after 15 minutes of inactivity, that much is good security. But they tell me where I am suppose to go in the text, without providing a hyperlink. I can only get out of this page by hand editing the URL in the address bar. Badly done.