user experience

There are 84 posts filed in user experience (this is page 2 of 21).

where does crazy come from?

You can imagine how this went down.

The lawyers decided that the privacy policy needed updating, so they updated it and put it on the website.

Then they decided that they had to make sure people knew about it. Who knows why… I can only imagine because they’re actually starting to do something that they know people probably won’t really be happy with (or they’re beginning to admit that’s what they’re doing), so they need to prove that a certain number of customers knew about it.

They say, ‘put a sign up in the stores, we have to do this because this is a risk to the business. It could damage our brand and cost a fortune in law suits’.

No one wants to be the person who is putting the company at risk and responsible for lawsuits, so they don’t ask any questions except for what is the cheapest and easiest way to meet the lawyers’ needs.

I imagine the email the lawyers sent (it would totally have been an email and not a meeting), the meeting to discuss what to do about the lawyers email, all the emails to argue about which type of signage they’d use, what would get bumped so this sign could exist, arguing over the wording. And finally, the meeting where someone approved this.

And so it is that, as I go to buy some paracetamol, I am informed that the privacy policy has changed and I can find out about this on the website.

I wonder – is this just the website privacy policy, or the Boots loyalty card privacy policy, are those the same things or different?

I wonder – how many people would pull out their phones or rush back to their desks to find out what changes have been made (I did… I couldn’t resist. There’s nothing to draw your attention to this information on their website and the section on privacy doesn’t make any reference to recent changes). Even if I do want to find out about the changes to this policy, I can’t see how on earth I might meet that need on their website.

I wonder – did they think about how it would make people feel or act to see this.

I wonder – did anyone fight for this not to happen? They probably did. Fear won.

I wonder – if a law suit did come up, could Boots actually prove that this has sufficiently informed people of the change to the privacy policy? Probably not.

I wonder – what opportunities were lost to actually understand the end user need and design a way of meeting that need in a way that benefitted the relationship between Boots and their customers.

You see these little things that companies do, you can see that all they’re doing is ‘ticking a box’, a token effort for the lawyers or whoever else, and you know that they’re pushing the burden onto the customer, and probably missing gigantic opportunities to be really great.

Fixing the crazy way things like this happen is at least as important as designing the shiny signs and the websites.

Visa-eve. Anxiety.

I’m taking my kids out of school tomorrow afternoon to go to the Home Office in Croydon to – hopefully – get our Ancestry visa renewed so we can remain in the UK for another four years.

I say ‘hopefully’ because, despite having checked and rechecked the paperwork – to the point that it has almost become a nervous tic – and paid an enormous fee, over £4000 in advance – you never know what will happen on the day.

And I am nervous.

I’m not nervous for any particular reason, except that this process is almost entirely out of my control and is not governed by logic but by however the person we end up having in charge of our application tomorrow interprets ‘proof’.

And because, and perhaps I am making this overly dramatic, if things go wrong, it feels as though it could have a life changing impact on my entire family.

And I can’t assume that anyone involved will just apply common sense.

After all, this is the organisation that insists that every four years we reproduce a piece of paper, my husband’s birth certificate, to prove that his ancestry has not somehow changed in the intervening years.

I’m acutely aware of this requirement because the first time we applied for an ancestry visa we were in Australia. We had to apply to get copies of both my husband and his late grandfather’s birth certificates. Having acquired our visa, we gave both of these documents to my mother in law (who is good at not losing things, and who lives in Australia) and emigrated.

The first time we renewed our visa, we turned up to the Home Office in Croydon without the birth certificates – after all, they’d already granted us an Ancestry Visa – surely it was unnecessary to prove an ancestral relationship to the UK again. We were sent home without being able to even lodge our application, and to make frantic phone calls to mother in law to have the birth certificates express couriered to the UK while the expiry date of our current visa rapidly approached.

This time around, the documents are in the UK but we don’t have Pauline to rely on to not lose them. Of course, when it comes time to gather the paperwork, the grandfather’s birth certificate was there in the ‘birth certificates’ folder of the filing cabinet, but the husband’s birth certificate was nowhere to be found.

Background anxiety turns to mild panic.

Gradually I start to run out of places to look and wonder if some how it has been thrown out with the recycling. I look into options for getting another copy made and sent here – there is no way to get it here fast enough. I call the Australian consulate to see if they’ll accept a faxed copy from Births, Deaths and Marriages in NSW. Only for an Australian passport application, they tell me – apparently the Home Office won’t accept a certified but faxed copy.

I start to wonder how hard it could possibly be to forge a birth certificate.

I almost citizen arrest myself just for thinking this. I am a ridiculously law abiding citizen. How has it come to this?

Days pass. The birth certificate can not be found. I can’t sleep. After a few more days I start getting severe diarrhoea (Sorry, gross I know, but who knew this was a really common manifestation of anxiety. Not me.) I start to get really dehydrated.

I think about what will happen if I can’t find that birth certificate – I will lose my job. Might my family be deported? Or detained? I worry about my children.

I already feel like a bad parent for deciding it is too ridiculously expensive to get us all Indefinite Leave to Remain, then citizenship. We’d planned to do that so the boys, who were born here, might have the right to live in the UK even if we return to Australia at some point.

Then they put the fees up again in April, and at over £7000 just for Leave to Remain and the rest to get Citizenship a year later… for us it is too much.

All that time I’d spent making a spreadsheet of the times we’ve traveled out of the UK in the last nine years (frequently!) has been wasted. I will probably put our UK Knowledge Test certificates in a frame somewhere though, as a memento of all the random British trivia we now know.

So, I threw out the paper form for the Leave to Remain application, printed out the 70 odd new pages of the FLR(O) paper form, and switched to just renewing our Ancestry visa.

And, after a final weekend spent searching, the birth certificate reveals itself.

That bloody birth certificate that they shouldn’t need to see yet again.

Sleep returns and after a few days my digestive system returns to normal.

But, until we get those new Biometric Residents Permits in our hot sticky hands, I will be feeling anxious. Muscle clenchingly, stomach sickeningly anxious. As I have, to varying degrees, for weeks now.

I’m an educated, English speaker who can afford (just) to pay the fee to renew our visa and a little extra to get an appointment to get it done on the day.

I can’t bring myself to send all our identity and travel documents off for an indefinite time having heard so many horror stories of lost passports and visas that take a year to be granted.

I’m pretty good at handling stressful situations, I don’t tend to suffer from anxiety in every day life.

If I feel like this, if I can get ill from this process, how do the very many people who have none of these advantages feel as their visa expiry date approaches? How do those who are more vulnerable financially and emotionally manage?

I can hardly bear to imagine.

These things, these ‘government services’, they are life changingly important.

Devastatingly important in many cases.

They are process diagrams and routine tasks for people on the inside, but when we are on the other side of the counter they are the exact opposite of routine and mundane transactions.

It is a powerful reminder of why I do the work I do, and how very much there is left ahead of us.

 

(Embargoed until after we successfully returned from the Home Office, because, you never know…. Turns out we still have to wait a while for the BRP cards to be sent out.

Already I am post-rationalising this experience and wondering why I was so worried about it. From your distance you might do the same. Doesn’t change the fact that, rightly or wrongly it was a hugely stressful experience.

Anyway, Britain, you are stuck with us a while longer. Thank you for having us.)

Help Joy help you. On the unusability of internal systems.

 

I am out here for you. You don’t know what it’s like to be ME out here for YOU. It is an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about, ok? Help me… help you. Help me, help you. – Jerry Macguire

 

This is Joy’s notebook.

At the airport earlier today I had to switch my ticket from one flight to another. Joy was the customer service person who helped me do this.

Joy’s notebook is about two inches thick, she’s created an A-Z index for it, it is packed full of handwritten notes about how to do different tasks in the various system she uses – steps that need following, codes that need inputting. It sits beside her every day, beautifully decorated (with stickers) evidence of the horrendous usability of the software she uses to get her job done.

Joy has been working for this airline for years. She told me that some of the stuff that is in her notebook she doesn’t need anymore – either because they’ve upgraded to a new system or that, after years, she’s finally managed to memorise it.

She told me that each time they upgrade the system it seems to get harder, not easier, to use. Joy told me that all the customer service reps have a notebook like this. You can’t use the systems without one. Joy is digitally literate and confident with the computer, but it is impossible to use without the notebook.

Joy is frontline staff for a major international airline. She is delightful and doing her best to do great work and look after her customers, but this is what she’s got to work with. I wonder if I’d be so cheerful if I was in her seat. No wonder so many others are not.

Internal systems are the tools we give our frontline staff, the people who are in charge of the customer experience for the face to face and telephone channels. If you pay attention to people using these systems (either out of general professional interest or because you’re fortunate enough to work with the on a project), you’ll find that notebooks like Joy’s are not uncommon. They’re everywhere.

They are everywhere because the people who bought or made the system didn’t even think about the experience for internal staff. The internal staff who are stuck using it are so far away from the people who bought that expensive crap that they’ll never know how awful it is (or their jobs are in peril so they don’t dare complain).

Internal systems allow an organisation to deliver great customer experience throughout the customer journey. These systems let people like Joy be fast (or not), accurate (or not), joined up to the rest of the organisation (or not).

And yet, all the time, we say ‘It does’t matter, we’ll sort that out with training’, ‘Call the tech writers, we’ll make a manual for this system’,  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll inflict this piece of crap on our employees, unlike our customers they’re stuck with us’. Except they’re not really, are they.

This might have worked with Joy but as our employees begin to join our workforces as digital natives, familiar with the well designed exteriors of organisations, how well do you think they’ll take to the tools we offer them to book the tickets, create the content, manage the accounts.

I kind of fancy that they’re going to start telling us to lift our game, to stick our crappy internal systems up our jumpers, and to give them so decent tools so that they can be as efficient as we want them to be. So that they can offer the kind of customer service everyone wants to experience.

I really hope they do. I hope that they will demand that we do allow time to work on the usability of the content management system, not just the website. That a company will be able to win on customer service because they actually bothered to hire design team that lets the customer service people offer faster, better service. That the news company that optimises the content management interface wins because their journalists can write more, better content rather than battle the content management system for hours a day (true story).

And I really hope that one day Joy will be able to stop battling the interfaces she uses to give such great customer service and leave her notebook at home.

If you’re going to do this user experience thing properly, you’ve got to look at all the angles. If you respect for your employees and your customers you need to care about the user experience of internal systems. Challenge yourself to solve the often more difficult design problems of internal systems, and know that by doing that, you’re creating a better user experience for all.

Can there be too much empathy?

It is exciting to be the person on the team who is responsible for bringing the end user to life in a project team. To be the person who is advocating on behalf of the end user, to be fighting in their corner, to be trying to build an empathetic sense of who the end user is within your project team. It’s a fun job and it feels like a valuable contribution. It’s something I spend a lot of my time doing.

It’s important we don’t oversimplify our responsibilities when it comes to empathy.

Empathy goes rogue if you empathise with one party only. If your fervour for empathising with your end user affects your ability to empathise with the needs of the people in your project team, things will go badly. Your ability to be effective for the end user will be diminished or neutralised if that is the only perspective with which you can truly empathise.

That’s not to say that the needs of the developer or the delivery manager should outweigh the needs of the end user – user needs come first*. It is to say that in the way that you involve the rest of the team in experiencing empathy with the end user you are also seeking to understand what is important to the people in your team.

So, no, there probably can’t be too much empathy, just make sure you spread it around.

* this, of course, assumes that you’re working on something that you should be working on – if you’re in government, something that only government can do. If you’re in a business, something that is going to, if successful, help build a sustainable business.