disambiguity

Economist/Drupal – Sprint 2 Demo (CRUD-in-place)

Drupal/Economist Project – Sprint 2 Demo from Leisa on Vimeo.

Today is Demo Day at The Economist, where all the various SCRUM teams will show and tell what they’ve achieved in their latest iteration. I thought I might see if I can get into the habit of pre-recording my demo so I can share it with you here and ask for feedback & advice! So, here we go!

In the past two iterations (this project runs on 1 week iterations) we’ve done a combination of research, design and testing the publishing tools that the editorials staff will use to administer what is known as the ‘Channel Index Pages’ – these are pages that you’d land on if you clicked something in the navigation that said, say, Business & Finance, or Science & Technology, and their job is to pull the most interesting current content to the top so that readers can access it more easily.

These pages are made up of a range of elements, most importantly for this demo are News Packages (consisting of a lead story and related stories/media files) and what is known as the Bloggy Chunk (an editable text area that section editors can freely input their own content, it is still very much a work in progress and is variously used as an aggregator for recent interesting stories that The Economist isn’t covering in depth or to highlight interesting reader comments, it may in the future show content from an RSS feed).

Although working within the SCRUM methodology, I am trying to take a systemwide approach to the design as far as possible, so there has been a whole range of questions that I’ve had to consider that aren’t strictly in the ’stories’ for our sprint (logging on, activating editing, for example), and similarly, I’ve tried to devise interaction approaches that will be reusable across the other parts of the system that we have yet to design rather than just customising the design approach to this individual problem set.

The design approach shown in this demo is still quite lo-fidelity and ‘broad brushstroke’, it will become much more precise over time, at the moment my priority is to try to work through and communicate the ideas as quickly as possible – giving me more time to explore a range of approaches, and to iterate approaches which has been very valuable.

So, if you have a moment and are so inclined, I’d really love to get your thoughts on the approach we’re taking so far. We’re also about to embark on starting some development work on this – to make sure we can build it in Drupal without too much difficulty – so if anyone has any guidance on how best to approach this, modules we should take a look at, anything else you think we might need to know, I’d love if you could share it here!

Look forward to hearing from you and thanks in advance!

(apologies to anyone who saw the first version of this blogpost with the screwy audio synching)

More from Disambiguity

• Economist/Drupal – Design Principles for CRUD-In-Place
• Economist/Drupal – Complex Editing In Place
• Economist/Drupal Publishing Tools – Sprint One Update!
• Drupal.org – Initial thoughts on the Information Architecture
• Why is D7UX.org on WordPress (not Drupal?)

The Economist/Drupal Project – An introduction

Economist/Drupal – Intro to the Publishing Tools Project from Leisa on Vimeo.

Some of you may know that The Economist is in the process of moving their web content management over to Drupal and I am really excited to be joining the team working on the implementation of these publishing tools over the coming months – my mission is to wrangle the Drupal6 interface such that journalists will be able to spend more time doing what they love to do – chasing and writing stories – and less time doing what currently drives them mad – dealing with content publishing tools.

There are a few reasons that I’m excited about this project:

1. it’s The Economist! – it’s a company full of clever people writing thoughtful, well researched material
2. it’s Drupal! – also full of clever, thoughtful people
3. it’s a really logical progression from all the work that we’ve been doing on d7ux throughout the year which has really been focused on transforming the Drupal admin interface to be more friendly to content producers
4. it’s a big deal – getting this right is really important to The Economist being able to realise their potential and ambition in the online space
5. it’s Agile – we’re doing SCRUM in 1 week iterations with an experienced scrum master and even a scrum master master! I am a big fan of well run agile and always looking for opportunities to experience design working well in Agile projects
6. it’s end user focussed – each one week iteration includes user research/design evaluation (ah, the luxury of known and easily accessible end users)
7. we’re sharing the process – when The Economist signed on with Drupal the community and open source philosophy was a big part of this decision. We think this is a great opportunity to contribute a case study and some more exposed design methodology back to the community, along the lines of what we’ve done with the D7UX project, so I’m going to be sharing our work on the project here in the coming weeks and months (if you’re interested!)

To kick off the sharing process, I asked Kerrie Lapworth, Production Manager, and Barney Southin, Managing Editor of Economist.com to give you an introduction to the project in the video above, and I look forward to sharing more with you as we move forward!

More from Disambiguity

• Drupal.org – What we learned from the Community Wireframing Project
• Opening the floodgates! How to participate in the Drupal.org redesign project
• Drupal7 UX – Project Process
• Economist/Drupal Publishing Tools – Sprint One Update!
• Drupal.org redesign project – iteration 5 for your review!

10 Social Skills for Community Designers (things we learned from the drupal.org project)

It was pretty obvious from the outset that we’d need some design and UX skills to get us from one end of the Drupal.org redesign project to the other. It was less obvious how important our ’social’ skills would be – and unsurprisingly, we learned a lot about good and bad ways to share the design process with a community along the way.

Here’s a few ’social skills’ we learned:

1. you need to take responsibility for the way that your community behaves: it’s not in any way productive to associate the way that a community is responding to you by blaming the community or even the individuals in it. If you respond that way you’ll never be able to improve the situation. As with every relationship, the only person you can change is yourself. If you’re getting a bad vibe back, the first thing you should do is check your tone and content – what are you saying? how are you saying it? can YOU improve the way you’re communicating. The onus is on YOU to get it right.
2. tokenistic involvement is a waste of time: if you don’t really care what the community has to say on a subject, don’t ask them. If you do want their input, take the time to design a way for them to interact with you in a way that gets the best from them. Be creative, put a bit of thought into it. Avoid polls and and use surveys with care – you might feel as though you’re involving the community because you have ‘numbers’, but do you have real involvement. Ask yourself what the community knows that you can benefit from, then consider the best way to help them share that knowledge and experience with you.
3. ask for specific feedback: if you want to get good feedback from your community, tell them what you want feedback on. We *didn’t* do this much during the Drupal.org redesign – instead I was trying to keep it ‘neutral’ and not influence what and how people gave us feedback – we learned that by asking for specific direction we not only got excellent feedback on the issues we highlighted, but others as well. Without direction the discussion tended to be less helpful and was more likely to get personal (not in a good way!) This will also help you to get feedback on more than just the homepage.
4. give examples: if you want a particular kind of response from the community, it is important to provide an example for them to follow and really great instructions to participate. For example, when we were doing the ‘crowdsourced wireframing’ I included a picture of one of my not very elegant wireframes so that people had a sense that their submissions didn’t have to look ‘designed’. If there are instructions to participate, make sure these are as clear as possible. Then make them even clearer.
5. wait… wait… wait… engage! once you post something for feedback, go away and make a snack and do NOT get involved in the conversation immediately. This is probably the most difficult rule to follow and one that Mark and I had to coach each other on (and occasionally police! – step away from the computer!) throughout the project. If you dive in and start responding to the first few comments, what you unintentially do is skew and retard the conversation. Rather than exploring a broad range of issues and allowing key points to gradually evolve, the discussion focusses on whichever points you have responded to, everyone starts to focus on those few issues. The richness of the feedback is lost because you dive into detail too quickly. Rather, wait until at least a half dozen people have posted (or 12hrs has elapsed, whichever is soonest) and see what the trends are in the feedback, then start getting more involved in the conversation.
6. admit errors quickly: the only exception to the rule above is if you’ve stuffed up. In this circumstance you should admit the mistake quickly so that the conversation doesn’t focus on your error. In one iteration of our redesign we accidentally omitted a very important call to action (I know… how could we?!) As you can imagine, that oversight dominated the feedback we received and by the time we responded (way too late!) things were getting a little frenzied. We should have been keeping a closer eye on the situation and stepped in as soon as we realised our mistake.
7. don’t go dark, but don’t respond to everything: there is a balance in the correct volume of response that you need to aim for. It is really important that you don’t disappear (even if you get really busy) – the community needs to know that you are there and that you are listening. On the other hand, don’t feel as though you need to respond to every comment that is posted – unless you are only getting a handful of responses. As a rule, aim to respond to trends and issues not individual comments. Feel free to occasionally respond with a simple ‘I’m here and listening, I don’t have the answer yet’.
8. lead by example: it’s an oldy but a goody - interact with the community in the way that you would like them to interact with you. Be polite and respectful. Others rudeness or bad behaviour is no excuse for you to let loose. It’s up to you to set and maintain the standard of communication you want the community to engage in.
9. assume good faith: it’s a general rule of interacting with others online, but keep it at front of mind especially when you’re putting your own work out there for review and, therefore, more likely to feel a little defensive. Text is a tricky medium for communication – people might sound like they’re being mean or overly critical or agressive when they’re just not great at communicating (or you’re feeling defensive and read everything as an attack!), or being a little lazy with their words, or created unintentional meaning. Always assume that people are trying to be friendly and constructive and helpful if there is any room for doubt at all. In fact, even when it is evident that they *are* being a little mean, it is often useful to deploy this rule – play dumb and be extra nice. Don’t waste time fighting or being a smart ass, or just being mean, or engaging with others who are. Focus on the task at hand – doing good design.
10. be a human: I think this is the absolute most important thing – don’t assume a Voice of God, don’t pretend to be infallible or to know everything. Don’t feel as though you have to use very big words all the time. Swear occasionally (if your community is ok with that). Admit that you are nervous (or outright terrified, if that’s the case). All of this is allowed and encouraged. Communities are made up of people, of human beings and you are but one of them. Use your real voice and speak honestly. Be open.

Heathrow Terminal 5 – Another rant about respecting conventions

This seems to be my theme at the moment. Respect conventions.

Respecting conventions doesn’t mean that you have to slavishly follow them, that would be boring and unnecessary, BUT if you *are* going to break with convention then make sure it is very well sign posted, otherwise people will make mistakes.

I give you terminal 5 at Heathrow. 

Firstly a quick question – how long before an international flight do you need to get to the airport? 

The vast majority of people would say that the conservative answer is 2 hours but they don’t usually give it quite that long. 

Another quick question – how long before a flight to a European destination do you need to get to Heathrow? 

Again, most people will give you an answer around the 1 hour mark.

Now… you may already know this, but if you want to fly from London Heathrow Terminal 5 to Istanbul in Turkey (as I did the other day – yes the weather is beautiful, thank you!) they want you to get there not one, not two, but THREE hours before your flight.

We arrived an hour before our flight the other day and were severely reprimanded and had to be given ‘permission’ to proceed from the check in desk to try to get our flight. Fortunately (for us) the entire security software system crashed and massive queues meant that most flights (including ours) were delayed and we made our flight with plenty of time to spare.

So, given that getting to the airport 3 hours before the flight is apparently a big deal for BA, and given that T5 is relatively new, and given that in all my years of international flights, I’ve never been expected to be anywhere any earlier than 2 hours before the flight, you might expect that BA would make a big song and dance about this 3 hour requirement.

You’d be wrong.

They *do* make a big song and dance about the fact that we were leaving from T5 and that T5 is a new terminal. I definitely knew that because they advised me at almost every interaction I had with them regarding this flight (and these days there are quite a few touchpoints between purchasing the ticket and boarding the flight). But what did they tell me about time?

This is an excerpt from the email they sent me one week before the flight, specifically to help me to prepare for my upcoming flight:

IMPORTANT: For flights departing from Terminal 5, you must pass through ticket presentation and security at least 35 minutes before the flight departs. For other important information about passport, visa and UK domestic flight security checks, please visit ba.com/t5information.

So, honestly. Do they *really* expect me to turn up 3 hours early when this is the information they give me.

Perhaps they do, but I can tell you that a good portion of the passengers for the Istanbul flight were stuck in the security queue with us, having arrived much later than 3 hours before. And I doubt that it was because they were being naughty travelers, or that they liked the adrenaline rush of almost missing a flight. They just assumed, as we did, that turning up an hour before a flight from London to somewhere in Europe was the right thing to do, because that’s what we’ve done many times before.

This is what we do as humans. We make assumptions based on past experience and if we think we *know* how something works we don’t bother investigating it in detail, because we could spend our time and energy investigating things we think are new and interesting.

If people are making assumptions about your product, service or interface design and you’re *not* following the conventional approach, make sure whatever you’re doing differently is very clearly signposted. And then signposted again. Otherwise mistakes will happen.

And a customer who is making a mistake is very rarely a happy customer.

(disclaimer – yes, yes. I know that technical Istanbul is both European and Asian, doesn’t really make a difference to the discussion tho’)

More from Disambiguity

• Good experiences on a bus (another instructional analogy)
• ActNow Launches (2.0 for good not evil)
• GeeknRolla – You Can’t NOT Afford Good User Experience
• The general public myth (or, the whole world is not your user)
• What are you doing about diversity?

Thoughtless design is going to cost me money… (or, why you shouldn’t ignore conventions)

Here is a new phone we got the other day. It’s our landline phone. Pretty cute huh? It’s called the Aqua by BT. Don’t buy it. I paid about £100 for a set of these phones. They are going to cost me a lot more than that in no time.

Here’s the thing. How do you end a call on a slide phone (which is what these are)? Simple – you close the slide, right? Well – yes, on every other slide phone that I’ve ever encountered, but not on this phone. Closing the slide does nothing… except closing the slide. So, when I went to make a call last night I discovered that, in fact, a call was still in progress. A call to a mobile phone, that had been connected for 8 hours. Ouch. I am *dreading* seeing this months phone bill because this isn’t the first time we’ve made this mistake. Although, this is probably the worst example.

We keep making this mistake because the slide-to-end-call convention is such a strong part of our model of how a slide phone works. We will keep making this mistake – despite the fact that we will be punished, seriously, by our telco.

As cute as these phones are, they’re going to be returned very soon because the experience of using them is so broken.

Moral to the story – if you’re designing something that has existing conventions associated with it – ignore them at your peril. Otherwise you’ll end up designing something that sucks as badly as this phone. And we don’t want that, do we.

End of rant.

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• why bother calling if you call so late?
• you’ve gotta know when to hold ‘em…
• why is Google & Yahoo’s share price slide good for web 2.0?
• ‘But is expanded choice good or bad?’, from The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
• first? last? as you go? (when do you design the homepage?)

Tone of voice matters (show some respect)

I had to share with you this particularly appalling piece of email marketing that hit my inbox the other day. The back story is that somehow I had come across a £25 voucher to use at VirginWines – I went and had a look at the site to see if it was something I was interested in – after all, £25 worth of wine for free is usually something I was interested in. Before I realised that I would have to spend well in excess of my £25 voucher to be able to buy any wine on this site, I registered to ‘redeem my voucher’ and gave them my email address.

Several weeks later, this arrives:

Dear Leisa

I am not a sensitive person by nature, but I have to say that I am feeling a little hurt. We’ve invited you into our Club, but you’ve clearly decided not to.

So, as a one-off attempt at sheer bribery, I‘m offering you your first, trial Club case HALF PRICE at just £47.88 (that‘s a ridiculously low £3.99 a bottle!). Plus, two FREE gifts, worth £30. That‘s an overall saving of nearly £80.

Sound good? Then click here to claim your HALF PRICE case and FREE GIFTS.

But you‘re probably not ready to join yet. You‘re probably thinking…

I can buy the wines anywhere.

Well you can‘t actually. The boutique wines we reserve for our Club Members never appear in the supermarket. And they are always offered to members at a lower price than non-members get them for.

It‘s just like one of those ghastly book clubs.

Er…sorry, not correct on this one either. Quite simply, you have no obligation to take any wine you don‘t want. You don‘t even have to pay us for any wines that don‘t blow your socks right off.

I‘m not the joining type.

If we explained that the reason we have a Club in the first place is because 40,000 people can buy better than 1, perhaps you‘d change your mind? If you join us, 40,001 people will buy better than 40,000.

Or maybe you‘ve just not got around to it. Which is fine. People who buy wine by the case tend to be busy.

So what would be a good reason?

Here‘s one good reason to test us out right now. We‘re keen to recruit new Members. So, for one last time I‘m offering you your first, trial Club case HALF PRICE at just £47.88

Take our HALF PRICE case NOW, and you‘ll receive a complimentary pair of beautiful Dartington Wine Glasses, completely FREE. Plus, a FREE professional lever corkscrew, worth £20.

Still not sure?

What is the worst thing that can happen? If you don‘t like the wines, I promise to refund you instantly, without any fuss whatsoever. If you agree that these wines are a big step better than you can get in the supermarket, you can look forward to a lifetime of feeling superior to non-members.

So why don‘t you join us now and find out what it‘s all about for yourself? Not next week, but right now.

Cheers

Rowan Gormley
Founder, Virgin Wines
www.virginwines.com/reasons3

0870 050 0305

The insight that the tone taken in this email gives me to this brand is profound, and frankly, I don’t want anything to do with a company who has this kind of attitude in their customer communications.

We’ve spoken before about positive ways to handle ‘abandonment’ – well, here is the flipside, a combination of guilt-tripping (‘I am not a sensitive person by nature, but I have to say that I am feeling a little hurt. We’ve invited you into our Club, but you’ve clearly decided not to’), cynicism (‘So, as a one-off attempt at sheer bribery…’) and smart talk (‘Er…sorry, not correct on this one either…’). Yes, consumers today are media literate and this level of ‘openness’ could potentially work well, but be nice about it. I’m supposed to enjoy buying wine, with this email VirginWine have put me right off my drink!

Take care with your tone – and of course, this applies to any kind of copy that you’re writing. And know that only *very* few brands can be anything but nice to their customer.

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• bitchin’ blog (beta isn’t a marketing phase)
• Four kinds of failure (for Richard Branson)
• The ingredients of Good Experience
• the art of travel, alain de botton

Yahoo! Go 2.0 shows how far mobile UI design has to go

Have you seen the Yahoo! Go 2.0 interface yet? I have, although only on my laptop as their mobile beta is currently full… I’m on the waiting list.

Yahoo! are very excited about this interface. Here’s how they describe it:

A revolutionary design. Yahoo Go! is the first application optimized for the “small screen” of a mobile phone that truly makes it easy and fun to access the Internet. Everything about the Yahoo! Go interface is designed to be both visually stunning and give you what you want with the fewest clicks possible.

At the core of the UI is the ‘carousel’ at the bottom of the screen that allows you to switch between the various widgets or applications (such as email, and the typical content streams – news, finance, sport etc.).

The carousel could hardly be described as revolutionary, as it is obviously inspired by the Mac OS UI.

More interesting, I think, is the design of the mobile search and the customisation of content sources.

The mobile search actually sounds pretty clever. Not only have the designed the search results in a way that is more useful for the mobile user:

oneSearch includes more actual content in your initial results than any other search—all grouped by subject matter and relevance, so there’s no sea of links to wade through like with a PC search.

The search engine also has location awareness – both awareness of where you are in the application AND physical location awareness. Now this is getting sexy.

oneSearch improves results based on both where you are in the application and where you are in the real world. For instance, launching a search for “eagles” in Sports will return results for the professional football team first. Similarly, searching for a movie will yield showtimes in your local area.

Ah, can it be – finally – location based services coming to a handset near you! I’ve waited a long time for this!

Content customisation looks as though it allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds to your phone using their interface. Very nice (although probably not so new). So you can choose who provides your news rather than live with whoever Yahoo! has their content deal with.

Another nice looking feature aims to remove the need to type URLs (hooray! this is no fun at all on a mobile).

Yahoo! Go also makes it easy to get to other websites. Simply type in the name of a website you want to visit (like eBay), and oneSearch returns the link to the website. Click the link and you’re there.

Having recently upgraded to a reasonably current handset (review coming soon!), I can confirm that the mobile user experience remains, as it has been for some time now, utterly rubbish. It’s as though all stakeholders are conspiring to make things as difficult as possible – from the product design of the hardware to the installed software to the internet content and design. There are frustrations and errors to be made at every turn.

So far, most compliments have to be paid to one or two browsers that are invaluable in making the internet a vaguely hospitable place for the mobile browser. Yahoo! Go 2.0 will hopefully also make the overall experience a little more palatable.

At the end of the day though, it should be a massive wake up call to us all that Yahoo! borrowing an element from the OS user interface and transplanting it into the mobile environment could be considered revolutionary.

It seems ridiculous to me that it has taken this long for any kind of innovation to areas like search interface for mobile and eliminating URL entry to occur. Sure, I know it’s a technical nightmare to develop for mobile… but it’s outrageous that little seems to be happening to increase consistency across handsets and browsers and operating systems.

*deep breaths*
With any luck I’ll get a Beta invite sometime soon… stay tuned for reports on what it’s like to actually use this interface.

Have you used the Go 2.0 interface yet? How’d you find it?

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• ActNow Launches (2.0 for good not evil)
• mobile: user interface design – the great frontier
• women of 2.0 (get up and go to a conference?!)
• Ms Dewey – Lessons in how NOT to design a search engine, brought to you by Microsoft
• why is Google & Yahoo’s share price slide good for web 2.0?

Wii have a problem (but it’s your fault)

Who knew a games controller could wreak such havok. Head over to WiiHaveAProblem and be astounded by the number of TV sets that people have taken out when they’ve been playing with their new Wii and the controller has been thrown out of their hands with such force as to break the strap. Carnage ensues.
What does Nintendo have to say about this situation?

Vispi Bhopti, of Nintendo Australia, said the problem was less to do with quality issues and more related to the way the console was being used.

“Nintendo has done various tests before we launched, but it turns out people are playing with a lot more gusto than we would’ve anticipated,” he said

“At this point, I do want to clarify that Nintendo is introducing a brand new form of entertainment and a brand new form of interacting … it’s not like conventional video games, and … we need to let people be aware of how they should approach it. This will take a little time for some people.”

Bhopti added that over-the-top movements and letting go of the controller places unnecessary strain on the wrist strap, causing it to snap.

via Sydney Morning Herald

Oh. So it’s not Nintendo’s fault, it’s your fault. You’re not playing the right way. You’re playing too hard.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a tremendous cop out and would much rather lay the blame at the feet of whoever designed the testing for this ‘brand new’ product? Isn’t one of the most exciting things about a product like this the fact that people will use it in new and unexpected ways?

I would love to know more about these ‘various tests’ that Nintendo carried out and the context in which they took place.

You see, if they did all their testing in a lab, then there is no way that they would have seen this coming, because users, generally, behave themselves pretty well in a lab. Particularly if you’re videoing them.

Users in their own environments are different animals, so imagine if Nintendo did some contextual research… well, it just seems so obvious in retrospect, doesn’t it.

A Wii, a couple of boisterous guys on a Friday night, and a weak wrist strap.

It was never going to end well, was it?

Contextual research. It’s fun to do, and sometimes there’s a really good reason to get out of the lab.

Image credit: WiiHaveAProblem

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• good lord, it’s a school yard out here (and I’m a nerd again!)
• if it was *my* conference… (or, what makes a good presentation)
• bitchin’ blog (beta isn’t a marketing phase)
• Good experiences on a bus (another instructional analogy)
• The general public myth (or, the whole world is not your user)

Smart email: If I stop buying, ask me why!

Two clever companies noticed I was doing something that was not making them money recently and emailed me to let me know they’d noticed. And then they tried selling me more stuff. As though I must have just got bored or forgot what I was doing when I was supposed to be spending money. As though it couldn’t have been a problem with their product or their processes.

Neither of them ever asked me why I stopped buying. Although I was eager to tell them both.

The first example was Three which I discussed in an earlier post and just this morning Ocardo emailed me saying they’d noticed I’ve not been buying their organic boxes lately. You can tell from their email (above) that they assume that I’ve just forgotten about this great service they’re offering and that a reminder and maybe a special offer will trigger my buying behaviour again.

They’re totally wrong of course. I stopped buying their product deliberately because I think it’s a rip off. They send me boring fruit and vegetables, ones that I don’t really use, and they charge a whole lot of money for it. I don’t buy their product because I can get better organic boxes elsewhere.

If I was running Ocardo (or, at least, in charge of sending out this email), I’d definitely be finding a way not just to remind people about my product, but also to initiate a conversation, a dialogue. Don’t assume I’m just a dumb user who forgot or got distracted… ask me.

If you’re smart enough to look for customer intelligence (who’s stopped buying what), then be smart enough to respect a customer’s intelligence. You’ll end up with a much more more clever company… and maybe even an organic box that I’d want to buy from you again.

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Vodafone UK redesign – clean and simple on the surface, but it ain’t necessarily so.

Vodafone were certainly well over due for a redesign of their website, and so I was pleasantly surprised when I went to look up some contact details and found that redesigned they had…. and what a nice change. Compared to previous design (you can see more or less what it was like here), this design is calm and controlled and much less frantic. The old design used to make me feel stressed even before I started trying to negotiate it. My starting point with this new design is much more positive.

How have they achieved this? Dramatically cutting down the complexity and busyness of the old design and taking a much simpler and more cleanly structured approach. The clear division of the personal and business section certainly helps this, but even within the sections, significant work has been done with the information architecture to achieve this apparent simplicity.

But does the new design work better?

The thing that *really* aggravated me on the old website was the web interface for buying new ‘Pay As You Go’ credit, or Topping Up. I could find the functionality very quickly, but ended up caught in an endless cycle of error messages that never resulted in a sale.

So, I tried to perform this task on the new website and I found:

1. it was much harder to find where I was supposed to go to ‘top up’. Perhaps this is low down on the Vodafone priority list (although I’d be surprised at this… a whole lot of Vodafone customers PAYG customers). The information scent around this functionality is much weaker than on the previous website. I assume, although I’m not entirely certain, that I would find it somewhere in the ‘Manage Your Account Online‘ section…. I tried this after I tried Shop and My Vodafone without success.
2. it looks to me as though this design just re-skins the horrid software that I’ve battled with in the past to ‘top up’ my PAYG account (it certainly has the same look about it). I gave up when I struggled with the log in. Given that there is virtually no information provided as to what exactly I can ‘manage’ in this section, there is little incentive go through the registration process and maintain patience with the system.

So, from this quick evaluation, it seems to me that although the Vodafone redesign is, in some respects, an improvement on the previous site, particularly with regards to visual appeal, there are still plenty of opportunities for Vodafone to deliver a much more impressive customer experience online… perhaps focussing a little less on the flashy animations (yes, they’re still there, just on the lower level pages now), and more on supporting user tasks.

A step in the right direction though. I wonder if this design is now going to be implemented globally?

Technorati Tags: vodafone

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