Design Sapling.com

It used to be that newbies to a program would have to read the manual while the geek power users took pride in easily figuring things out on their own.

Now-a-days, it’s the opposite.

Programs should be simple enough that newbies won’t have to read the manual. The power users may still take pride in figuring things out on their own, but they are the ones more likely to read the manuals to find out the shortcut keys and specials options hidden to the newbies.

Sometimes, customer service doesn’t seem to be much of a service at all. A recent bad experience was only made better after I got the company president involved. In the end, keeping me a loyal customer cost them more than it had to simply because they forgot that customer satisfaction is their job.

I recently bought two items at an online store that were on clearance. I accidentally selected the wrong size for one of the items only to realize it after I checked out and paid for it. I immediately sent an email asking them to change my order. I didn’t get a response for over 5 hours. I finally called to make sure they got my email. They said it was too late to make any changes as the item was already being shipped, and there were no returns since it was a clearance. Well poop! I had even mentioned a replacement item that they had in my size that was the same price.

After the call, I sent a second email asking why they hadn’t read my first email, noting they would have had enough time to change the order since I sent the request immediately after payment.

Hours go by and no reply.

Upset that I was being ignored, I sent a third email saying their neglect in answering me was going to lose them a customer. I finally got an email saying “Our records indicate this issue has already been dealt with over the phone. Thanks, Customer Service”!

I sent a fourth email indicating that their dismissive reply was not appreciated and the issue wasn’t the money, but the fact that they simply ignored my request for assistance. I explained that had they been more prompt, my order might have been changed. At this point, I had a useless item coming to me and nobody at the company seemed to care.

I found the president’s profile at a networking site and told him the story. I told him that his customer service staff weren’t living up to his mission statement, which stated that the company was focused on customer service. The next day, I got an email from the same costumer service in response to a message forwarded from the President. It said they were refunding all the shipping costs (since shipping two items costs the same as shipping just one, this worked out to almost the full price the item I was receiving.) Originally, my request was only for a 10% off coupon for a future item purchase. This was a far better deal for me!

So it wasn’t until the president got involved that the customer service folks realized that keeping a customer would be worth much more than the amount they’d lose by giving me a partial discount.

I think that’s pretty sad.
But, since they fixed my problem I’ll continue to be a customer.
(And since this doesn’t paint them in a good light, I won’t tell you which company it was.)

A new episode of JapanicTV from fellow Reverends Zensho! and Will! is out at JapanicTV.com!

JapanicTV is super awesome!

Check it out!

Months ago at work, I proposed a design methodology based on Alan Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design as featured in About Face 3.0. This was the first step of my current goal. Things are going well!

We’ve started to implement usability testing into our application development process. Unfortunately, the project that we’re doing usability tests with was started before we had created our design process.

However, the results from the tests have been very positive; I think this is because I tried to design it with the user in mind.
However, I didn’t have a style guide, which would have made delegation of tasks much easier.

I believe planning is essential for a successful project. I did plan the functionality of the project. However, without proper usability testing BEFORE production began, things changed late in the game due to clients requests after seeing things in action. This caused further delays.

In the end, I’m very happy with the final result and the usability tests we did DURING the end of production show that the end users would be happy with it and indeed this has been the case.

For our next projects, we will fully implement our design process. We’ve already implemented an organization of resources for the development of the products. Currently, I’m creating a company-level style guide, which include things such as best practices for coding, file naming conventions, variable naming conventions; as well as a project-level style guide template. Additionally, I’m developing documents that will make it easy to follow our design process. This goal has definitely moved in the right direction!

Just a few projects to prove its 100%! With the design process not only documented, but easy to use and remember thanks to the templates, guides, and checklists, I think things are going to go very well for this goal.