Design Sapling.com

Bad Experience
Some friends got married last year. They were expecting to get their wedding album created and sent to them by November. The company they used didn’t send it to them by mid-November. The bride called and asked what the hold up was. They said the CD they sent the photo CD to Italy to get the prints made and the CD was broken when it got there.

Why didn’t they tell her as soon as it happened? Why did the customer have to take action?

Eventually, April comes around and they STILL don’t have their album! No contact from the publisher.

Guess what you’ve got there? An irate customer. A customer that wonders why a CD was being packaged and shipped to Italy instead of sending the files online or printing them in the USA. A customer who lost faith in your competence and then in your integrity.

No updates. No apologies. They could have sent flowers or a partial refund…any pleasant contact is better than no contact.

Do you think she recommended the company to anyone or did she tell people to never use the company? Bad experiences are sticky.

Turn a Sticky Experience into Something Good
There have been times when a company has a made a mistake and the attention and sympathy I received made me happy to recommend the business to other people.

This goes for designers too. Let your clients know upfront exactly what you are going to do and keep in contact to let them know the progress of the project. Not only will they appreciate it, but you might even learn something that will save you a lot of time.

Sean Tevis is an Information Architect running for State Representative in Kansas.

http://seantevis.com/

Check out his source code! That’s smart campaigning!

IxD is an art, not a science. Trying to make it a science can get you bad data.

Jakob Nielson’s article on Quantitative Analysis explains why sometimes numbers are misleading.

Chris Fahey alerts you to not get caught up in looking for science in the art of user research. He explains how some companies require statistics to prove something works. You can make numbers say anything you want.

I’m not saying statistics are useless and user research doesn’t give data. But user research is about finding patterns in a specific set of users: patterns that should translate into product behavior.

I finally picked up a Nintendo Wii (new and LESS than MSRP!) and got started surfing the internet through my TV. Being on a low-rez TV, it’s hard to read text unless you zoom in, and with zooming, you sometimes you have to scroll horizontally. The help with that, the browser developers (Opera) created a mode that displays pages in a single column fitting nicely on your screen with text the perfect size. It looks a bit like a page with the CSS removed, except for colors. I haven’t looked at a table-based layout with it yet.

Sites designed for accessibility (including this one) look just fine in it and are very readable. Unfortunately, many of the sites on the web still haven’t discovered how to make sites accessible. Maybe with the proliferation of more web-enabled devices like the Wii, people will realize that not everyone views the web the way they usually do. The benefit for most people is that they can view the web on non-standard devices. Another more important (my opinion) benefit is that people with disabilities will have access to the same content that everyone else takes for granted.

An interesting thing about the web is that anyone can participate. You can get specialized news from experts in the fields your are interested in.

And there’s a lot of crap out there.

It’s hard to believe things from people who are only posting to convince you of something.

You can buy a newspaper, and with some reservations, believe what was printed. Go online and get the same info for free.
When you buy a newspaper, you’re actually buying journalistic integrity. You can trust those writers because they have fact-checkers and they’ll be fired if they abandon that trust.

You might think that a newspaper used to sell the news, but now they sell you trust. But in reality, their product hasn’t changed. The product is less valuable, however, if they are marketing the news. To continue to succeed, they need to market the trust.

This is an old perhaps obvious idea, but you’ve got to sell people on the benefits they get from using your product. In an dynamic world, the benefits people receive from a product are also dynamic. In order to really understand the benefit of a product, you have to understand your customers. It’s more than marketing, it’s truly and honestly fulfilling needs.