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rant

Bad IVR: If You Need Something From Me, How About Letting Me Know?

by Paul Sherman on June 23, 2009 · View Comments

in Everything Else

Once again I had a sub-optimal experience with an interactive voice response (IVR) system.

I called AT&T to check on the status of my service call – we haven’t had dial tone on our land line since mid-Saturday – and the system asked me to input “my ten digit phone number, starting with the area code.” Which I dutifully did. And you know what happened? Nothing.

And more nothing.

A whole bunch of nothing.

After a good 7-8 seconds of waiting I sighed and figured I should probably press “#” or something.

Sure enough, after pressing “#” the system cheerfully confirmed my input (“You entered yadda yadda yadda, is this correct? Press 1 if yes” etc.) and went? about its business.

This is deeply annoying and a bad user experience. From the experience perspective it’s bad because it puts a barrier in front of the caller and leaves her guessing what the system expects from her. And it’s bad from a business perspective because it increases the probability that the caller will zero out of the system and attempt to get transferred to an agent. Which costs the organization money.

So here’s a bit of advice to IVR designers…and know that even as I dispense this advice there are people out there who think about IVR’s and VUI’s 24/7, and whose advice is much more comprehensive. (I should know; I married one of these peeps.)

  • For touch-tone input where you know the length of the input, don’t require me to press “#” when finished. Just take the input and move on.
  • If you absolutely want (or, doubtfully, *need*) me to press “#” when I’ve finished entering information, then TELL me that you need me to press something. And tell me BEFORE you have me enter the information. Don’t just leave me hanging after I’ve fed you data. It just makes your organization look inattentive and/or stupid.
  • If for some bizarre and mysterious reason you can’t see your way clear to telling me what is expected of me up-front, then tell me something like “If you’re finished entering your number, press “#” to finish” when you notice that I haven’t entered anything in a few seconds.

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Facebook’s User Experience Is An Out Of Control Mess

by Paul Sherman on May 25, 2009 · View Comments

in Web

A few days ago I twittered that Facebook now feels like walking through the midway of a second-rate, shady fair, with barkers and carnies shouting at you from every booth, tent and dark corner.

Here is the screenshot that made me feel like this. It was one pop-up piled onto another…and they weren’t ads, this was actual functionality that I as a user was supposed to attend to and act on.

I’ll be honest with you: this isn’t a tightly-reasoned judgment about the usability of Facebook. This is a from-the-gut reaction from an occasional user: Facebook’s user experience is out of control.

I’m not saying that the whole “Facebook-is-a-platform” thing is wrong; in fact I think opening up to third-party apps was a brilliant way to jumpstart the creation of an ecosystem. But there are consequences to this move. And one of them is that, from the perspective of an occasional user who is loathe to annoy or Facespam his friends, Facebook’s user experience makes me feel like I’m always one step away from falling prey to a social virus masquerading as an app, one that is going to spam my friends and make me look like a bonehead.

Which is why I don’t ever, EVER knowingly poke, join a cause, throw a pie, etc. I say knowingly because it’s highly likely that I’ve inadvertently Facespammed my friends through the simple act of responding to another’s entreaty. Bad on me, I know. Honestly, I have no idea if I’ve done this or not…and that’s a big part of the problem. Facebook (or more accurately Facebook’s apps) doesn’t readily inform me of the consequences of my potential or actual actions.

Which leads me to the issuance of a blanket mea culpa: If I’m connected to you on Facebook and you’ve received something stupid from me, please accept my apologies. And know that from now on, my mental default when it comes to Facebook’s carnival of social-viruses-cum-apps is “no thank you, I’ll pass.”

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