Closer To The Ideal

Yet another story about a badly programmed website, with really bad error messages.

I went to pay my monthly cell phone bill. Just last month, SprintPCS instituted a new policy, requiring stricter passwords with more letters and numbers in them. So I was forced to change my password. Perhaps I was also in a hurry, as I did not write it down in the usual place.

Today, unable to remember the new password, I clicked the link they offer for “Forgot your password?” I came to the screen you see in the first image.

I typed in my “username”, which is simply my telephone number. When I hit the submit button, I got, in response, a blank white page with the text “Error: 500″. That’s it. Nothing else. Just that text on a blank white page. You can see it in this second image:

I offer this anecodote as one more small piece of evidence for the case that most web sites are horribly programmed and poorly tested. I don’t mean to pick on SprintPCS, since there are many sites that are just as bad, but this just happens to be the broken website that I interacted with today.

Mind you, the above incident happened this morning, around 11 AM, and now it is 11 PM. I just went back to get screenshots. Twelve hours later, the problem is still there.

I sent SprintPCS an email about this. I have not yet heard back from them. I’ll update this post if I do hear from them.

UPDATE: wonderful response time. I just got this, on the 17th. The irony:

Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:08:18 -0500 [02:08:18 PM CDT]

From: Sprint Customer Solutions <ecare@cc.sprintpcs.com>

To: LAWRENCE@KRUBNER.COM

Subject: Re: Subject: ID # 20070914212929 (KMM38317571I123L0KM)

Hello Lawrence Krubner,

Thank you for contacting Sprint.

A ticket has been submitted in reference to the difficulty you are experiencing logging into your account online at Sprint.com. The ticket number is 16880851.

A follow-up call will be made to you within 36 business hours.

Thank you again for contacting Sprint. We appreciate your business.

Mary O.
E-Care
Sprint
“Where our customers come first!”

Refer someone to Sprint and get $25.

So after 3 days, they send me an email in which they promise to contact me within 3 days. Then they close with “Where our customers come first!” Hate to think how we’d be treated if we came second.

A very nice point by Robert Hoekman:

We hold up usability as laudable because, sadly, most companies still have serious trouble putting their pants on correctly when it comes to usability. They need the gold stars.

Anyone in the interaction design or usability profession worth his salt knows that usability is a single piece of a very large “experience puzzle”. You need a strong value proposition to get users in the first place. You need a compelling product or service. You need good customer service when things go wrong. You need marketing prowess. You need something that makes you different, and better, than everyone else in your space.

For a product or service to be great, you need all these things. But you also need a usable touchpoint. A strong value proposition gets people interested in your product, but once you have their attention, a high level of usability helps motivate people to keep using it. A low level of usability deters people from using your product.

Robert Hoekman is the author of Designing the Obvious, which all web application designers should read.

In a recent post he talks about the right way to listen to feedback from one’s users:

I have also long maintained that once you have a product available, you should then plug in and start listening to your audience. In doing this, however, I’ve said you should pay attention to the overwhelming trends - the requests that bubble up to the top over and over again - and not the idiosynracies of individual or small niches of users.

He then quotes a statistic from the Opera web browser development team that shows that a feature that users had frequently requested, and which has been implemented, is never used.

He concludes:

Clearly, even paying attention to trends can be risky. I’ve seen this myself in a couple of situations. It seems that a large number of people can all have the same wrong idea….

Our job as designers is to interpret and define problems, and to create solutions. Very often this means ignoring everything you hear and paying attention only to what you see. When you pay attention to what people actually do instead of what they say they do, you can devise solutions that exceed their expectations.

Instead of building exactly what they ask for, figure out why they’re asking for it. Then find a solution that solves the real problem.

I have occassionally heard designers respond to criticism with the words “I did exactly what you asked me to do” This response, it seems to me, can arise for only two reasons:

1.) The organization for which the designer works has no real respect for design. The designer is not empowered to do actual design work. Instead, the designer is told to follow orders or be fired.

2.) The designer does not understand the actual work of design. The designer needs to spend more time listening to the client/boss so they can figure out the why of a request, rather than the what.

There is no easy fix for #1, which is an epidemic sapping potential economic value out of millions of businesses worldwide. However, for #2, all that is needed is greater design education.