Here’s another guest post from Andreas Bossard, who you may remember did a well-received post last year on the Sony Ericsson PC Suite. Thanks for contributing again Andreas! -Paul
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How fast things change. I wanted to write about a workflow in LinkedIn, which had annoyed me for months, but they have fixed it in the meantime, before I could publish the article. :) So anyhow, here is the article. -Andreas
One of the most used functions in Linkedin is to add a new user to your own network. If you don’t know the e-mail address of the person or other personal information you can choose “I don’t know xy”.
Then the user can enter a personal message and click the “Send Invitation” button. Which opens the following message:
The only way to proceed is to click “Go back to xy’s profile”. The personal message is lost! You stepped into the Linkedin user trap.
Of course, according to the Linkedin policy you’re supposed to add only contacts you personally know, but since you can bypass this rule anyhow by selecting “Friend”, it’s illusory to educate the user by punishing him to re-enter a personal message.
There are two solutions to avoid this unpleasant interaction:
- A “Close”-Button instead of a “Go back to xy’s profile”-button
- Pop up the message immediately, when the user selects “I don’t know xy”, instead of giving him the feeling, that he now can enter a personal message for that person.
As we can see, they solved it with a “Cancel” link.
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Not much to say about this little guy, except that it reduces peoples’ trust in a website when these types of error messages show up.
I know, I get it: this type of message is helpful to the programmer. But does it have to be exposed to the customer?
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Here’s the thing, Intuit: that *is* a valid email address. Gmail has this really neat feature where you can append “+[foo]” to your email handle, and it’ll still get delivered to your regular gmail address.
Why would I want to do this? It’s a great way to filter email, for one. You can simply set up a filter that searches for the “+” strings, dropping them neatly into different folders on your desktop email client.
More importantly, using the “+” is a great way to figure out who’s selling your email address to spammers. If all of a sudden you find that you’re receiving lots more spam to your “+badcompany” address, you can be sure that Badco has sold your address to spammers and other ne’r-do-wells.
So is that what companies are afraid of? Are they afraid that they’ll be found out as a company that aids and abets spammers?
Or is it simply that their programmers are too lazy to write accurate validation code for their web forms?
Caveat: I’m not calling out Intuit exclusively on this. Intuit’s a great company and I personally use several of their products. This has happened to me at many other sites.
Maybe I should start my own little “accept the plus sign” Internet meme…hey, everybody has their 15 minutes…
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This is a great example of how poor service design drove an unnecessary support call.
I received my TxTag toll tag in the mail, along with a TxTag starter kit. (TxTag is the Texas version of an EZPass toll tag thingy.)
I read through the welcome letter, looked at the card, and noticed something: the number on the tag did NOT match the number on the welcome letter. My first thought: oh crap, they sent me the wrong tag, and now someone else has MY tag..and is probably racking up toll charges with it!
Great, I thought. Now I have to call the Texas DoT and chase down a solution to this problem. So I picked up the phone, slogged through their barely-tolerable IVR, and finally got a human. When I explained my issue to the rep, he said that everything was actually fine.
It turns out that everyone is actually assigned a *tolltag* number and an *account* number…and even though they both start with a (very Bond-esque) 007, they do not have to match.
Well great…so I basically wasted about 20 minutes feeling like my account was screwed up and figuring out how to contact the agency, only to find out that their poor service design was at fault.
This is not the right way to kick off a relationship with a new customer.
My latest column at UXmatters was just posted. It’s part 2 of my December article “The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters.” Again, my main points are:
Organizations making enterprise-level technology selections often do an incomplete job of assessing the real-world effects of the new applications they impose on their staffs’ workflows and processes.
and:
The technology selection process typically neglects methods of evaluating the goodness of fit between the enterprise users’ processes, workflow, and needs, and the vendors’ solutions. Organizations could avoid many a rollout disaster simply by testing the usability of vendors’ solutions with employees during a trial phase.
In this part 2, I pick up where part 1’s “j’accuse” leaves off, and actually provide a framework for enterprise user experience practitioners to employ when trying to get involved in the assessment of enterprise software under consideration by their organization. Rather than recap it all here, I’ll just point you to the article.
The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters ::? Paul Sherman
A tweet from @whitneyhess about UPA’s value proposition (“I’m sorry, but I’m not renewing my UPA membership. It’s $100 a year, and I don’t get anything for it”) made me acutely aware (again) of this underlying problem with professional associations, and UPA in particular: just what do people want from UPA? What do they want the association to do for them?
And more to the point: what should the UPA *be*? Since I joined in 2000, I have always seen it as an organization that supported people who created user experiences; i.e., not solely the organization for people who *do* usability testing. Do others share this perception?
And since I became a board member in 2004, the question took on more urgency. Unfortunately, I’ve never really heard any definitive answers to these fundamental questions.
So Whitney’s tweet – and it’s not the first one like that I’ve seen (@matto said the same thing a few weeks back) – makes me want to just put the questions out there.
So, UsabilityBlog readers and hopefully visitors via Twitter – what should the Usability Professionals’ Association do for its constituents? For the UX community as a whole? And what should the UPA *be*?
Thanks @whitneyhess and @matto for bringing these questions up.
