Pat’s Point of View

Yesterday my wife gave me the most fantastic early Christmas present, laser eye surgery. It’s given me a new perspective on, well…everything!

I look forward to seeing you properly for the first time.

At least it is when it comes to customer experience.

Today I purchased two gifts online, from a small proprietor. Their website doesn’t calculate the shipping costs when you place the order, instead stating that they will work out the best method of shipping the goods (many of which are bulky or odd shaped) and then contact you with a final price.

An hour or two later I got a phone call from one of their staff who informed me of the shipping costs, which were quite reasonable, and confirmed that I still wished to go through with the order. The person who called was a pleasure to deal with; friendly, efficient and helpful.

Now, in this day and age we’d label this as backward, inefficient…a bad customer experience. But I put it to you that this is preferable to some of the awfully complex or unusable interfaces for online ordering I’ve seen.

This particular organisation has accepted the limitation of their online ordering system—the fact that it can’t accurately calculate the cost of shipping for their variety of item shapes and sizes—and turned it into an opportunity for a positive customer interaction. I got personal service, solid confirmation that all was well, and I got the best possible shipping price (calculated by a human!).

Sure, it would be nice if everyone who does business online had a highly sophisticated system that would handle complex shipping calculations whilst providing a good user/customer experience, but that’s just not realistic. In the absence of that, it’s much better to take part of the process offline and optimise both the online and offline parts for the best possible experience.

What examples have seen where a good offline customer experience beats a bad online one?

[image credit: Yanko Design]

I’m quite pleased to be able to tell you about UX Storytellers, an eBook containing stories from UX practitioners from around the world, including yours truly.

It’s quite an honour to have my contribution included along side people such as Andrew Hinton, Dave Malouf and Mark Hurst (and many others!). Each author has shared a story, either a story from their career in the UX field, a story about using a certain technique, or like mine, a story based on their experiences with users.
Read the rest of this entry »

You often hear people refer to the tendency for Apple to hide functionality from the user. Most recently the iPhone and it’s gestural interface has been the source of complaints from users who discover stuff they didn’t know they could do (eg swipe to delete an email from your inbox).

Well I’ve found another one whilst driving to a business meeting the other day. When you stop at a set of lights and think it would be handy to look up your business associate’s number to give them a call to let them know you’ll be late. But as soon ad you grab your iPhone to perform that task, the traffic lights will change to green and you won’t be able to find the information you need (unless you keeping using your phone while driving but I don’t recommend that).

It also works when trying to use the maps app to check your destination, or anything else you might really need to do while stopped at traffic lights.

Go on, give it a go :)

(image credit: http://nittygriddy.com/2010/04/17/traffic-light-changer-iphone-app/)

Yesterday I presented a short session at Oz-IA 2010, entitled Five user research methods you’ve probably never seen…

I departed from the norm and rather than talk about the five methods I listed in my presentation outline, I went for something a bit more cheeky and light-hearted; the dangers of field research! The idea came to me because so many people I know who have done user or market research have told me stories about the weird and scary situations they’ve found themselves in out in the field. (In particular Stephen Cox and Raymond Van Der Zalm gave me some great anecdotes!)

I got some decent laughs so I was pretty pleased—and relieved—about that. I ended with a practical demonstration of the tongue in cheek self-defense techniques I had talked about, for which I must say a huge thank you to Gary Barber and Oliver Weidlich who volunteered to take part!

A few people have asked me if I’m going to talk about the five methods I originally said I would, and yes I will as there is obviously interest in those topics! Stay tuned.

(This post was originally published on the USiT team blog, republished here June 24th 2011)

A user research method I’ve used many times, and talked and written about several times too, is the cultural probe (also known as a ‘diary study’ or simply ‘user research diary’).

Briefly, the purpose of a cultural probe is to conduct user research from a distance. So rather than having to literally follow the user around for two weeks, they contribute to the probe, either explicitly by writing ‘diary’ entries, or implicitly by leaving ‘digital footprints’ of their online activity. One might label the former as a reflective diary probe and the latter as a ‘lifestream’ log probe. Both types are useful, the lifestream log as evidence akin to analytics of what they actually do, and the reflective diaries in terms of exploring the motivations behind what they think and do.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been very bad and not uploaded any photos of my girls for a long, long time. Busy I guess. But the two of them are growing steadily, too fast it seems, and are becoming good friends.

Evangeline is a little crawling machine, and today she started ‘talking’. It’s only baby talk but it’s very cute for an 8 month old. She’s very happy, always smiling, but she’s tough and doesn’t take any nonsense from her big sister. In fact, I think Evie will be the one dishing it out!

Grace is still talking up a storm; we’re just not sure which language she’s using sometimes! She’s almost 2 and a half, and bounding through each day like the curious and whacky chick that she is. I’ve started driving her to day-care three days a week on my way to work, and I’m looking forward to spending that time on the road with her.

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be speaking at this year’s Oz-IA conference, October 6-9 in Sydney. I’m running a pre-conference workshop User Research Methods for Information Architecture and I’ll be giving a short presentation during the conference on Five user research methods you have probably never seen.

The workshop is a new version of one I’ve run a few times before, updated with new examples and activities. The presentation will give a short intro to a few research methods that are not so common in the IA field.

Hope to see you there!

Lately I’ve been having fun (that’s a lie, it wasn’t fun at all) trying to get VOIP to work as our home phone. If you just read that sentence and are asking yourself “what’s a VOIP?”, then the rest of this post probably won’t be very useful to you. But so that you don’t leave here totally and utterly bewildered, VOIP stands for “voice over IP” and is a method of replacing a normal telephone line with calls made over the internet.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m slowly and not-so-surely making my way through Good Thinking that I talked about in a recent post. It’s full of really great tips for researhers, not just with regards to methods and methodology but also in terms of mindset.

In a chapter discussing the psychology of small groups, the author talks about the effects of deception and economy with the truth, on the part of the researcher. In her opinion, and I agree, a good researcher must adopt a more respectful attitude with regard to the people they are researching:

It means a shift in perception from treating respondents as laboratory experiment ‘fodder’ or human guinea pigs to consenting adults who have points of view to contribute. It means letting go of the idea that the information the client is looking for can be extracted from respondents whether or not they give permission. It means challenging the view that both client and researcher have the right to be manipulative and controlling because they have paid respondents to attend the session, or have paid the researcher (or company) a large amount of money to retrieve information to solve a marketing problem.

This passage is followed by a ‘quote’ from David Ogilvy:

The consumer may or may not be your wife, husband, child or parent, but you can be sure that he or she is a real living, breathing, thinking and doing human being, who has as much of a right to their way of life as you have to yours.

I like this, and in fact I have used the sentiment embodied in the above quotes as the basis for a ‘principles of user research’ blurb in my research proposals.

Read the rest of this entry »