This Friday Jeroen Visser organized the knowledge day for the mailing list of Dutch internet creatives in Delft. Various speakers from the creative internet disciplines presented on their work and ideas.

I met Jeroen at last year’s Reboot and I couldn’t miss this interesting and affordable event right in my backyard.

Design research in branding

André Weenink of design firm Booreiland was the first presenter and he presented his findings on research in design branding by applying generative techniques.

His research forced on getting insight into the user experience of customers of Sissy Boy and he did this by having a representative set of customers of the company create artefacts that they thought were Sissy Boy.

There are several techniques to do design research: question customers with interviews, questionnaires or other means, observe customers in construed or natural surroundings and deduce principles from their behaviour. André opted for a third technique to let his participants create their ideal vision and in doing so communicate with their experience.

The things that were generated were diaries, graphics, collages and other objects in workshops with the selected customers. From the stuff that was created principles and patterns were deduced by André which he then translated in a brand identity and a visual vocabulary that could be used by Sissy Boy in their future communications.

The advantages of these generative techniques are that they are fun, they allow for empathy with the user and co-creation with users and different departments of the company. The result is not a boring report which is thrown over the fence but a rich set of human created data.

Downsides are that it is an intensive process involving a lot of effort and creating a lot of material that needs to be synthesized. The reach is limited by the selection of the number of people, physical presence required for some steps and no use of online facilities.

One of the questions that André asked the audience was how to use online means within a process such as this. This discussion quickly strayed to various designers being very concerned by the integrity of their design process and the influence of the designer and the various departments in the company on the end product.

Generative techniques in interaction design

I think it is a more interesting question to ask how to use generative techniques in interaction design for the web. A lot of design for the web uses the first two techniques, question and observe, to gain insight into the requirements and wishes of their users. Users are observed and then interaction designers, web designers and developers fit what they have seen into the structures they are familiar with.
I haven’t heard of generative techniques being applied so much. Having users create their ideal vision of a website seem to me to be an opportunity to create websites which are better attuned to users’ wishes and open to free and fun interaction.

A generative technique for webdesign would be to ask users what they would like a website to do for them. So what kind of a web experience would users design if they could do it themselves? I think the results of such a workshop with prospective users could be very interesting and revealing. Especially because users are in no way constrained by technical feasability and only somewhat by pre-existing concepts.

Probably none of the resulting concepts could be created outright but the design synthesis of those user wishes would probably result in a website that is better attuned to users and more fun for them to use. Users increasingly want to make their own web experiences and at least have a say in them. Most websites currently are very boring and constrain themselves to what is easy to create in rails. I think this is a gap that should be bridged.

Flash and HTML, tips for a happy marriage

Bob Corporaal showed that since Flash8 the external interface and javascript bridge part enable reliable and direct communication between Flash and the DOM. He then proceeded to show how you can use communication with javascript to solve gross deficiencies in Flash.

Picture by Robert Jan Verkade

I see how the techniques he demonstrated fix real problems but mostly these are problems not worth having. Flash is so ridiculously crippled that by using it you break pretty much everything: text selection, scolling, text resizing to name just a few extremely basic features which are missing in Flash. By talking to the DOM it is possible to fix these problems piecemeal but you can never be sure you’ve got every one of them. Most regular Flash developers don’t even bother with fixing the basic stuff let alone make an accessible and progressively enhanced version. To sum it up: things which are not easy to do in your platform are essentially absent.

Mark Wubben then showed an example of progressive enhancement using Flash and sIFR to display custom fonts on pages. Mark himself admits that it is a hack and should be used sparingly, but at least he takes care to have the Flash break as few things as possible. Web fonts are already working in current builds of Safari and Opera and display any font you like using native rendering. There is some discussion going on about font piracy but that is mostly academic.

IC Pixel Art

Arjan Westerdiep gave a presentation on how he creates pixelart. You can see some of his work on his site Drububu.

Picture by Robert Jan Verkade

Curious was that he had written a C program to calculate the differences between subsequent frames of his animations to save on space so as not to use Quicktime. I am pretty sure that Quicktime with most current codecs already implements its own highly optimized version of differential image compression or motion compensated video encoding but this presentation was not really for asking about whys.

Why do people create?

Gert Hans Berghuis from internet firm Fabrique talked about the rationales for user generated content.

He listed a number of reasons to the question: Why do people generate content?

• because they need something
• because of curiosity
• to come to terms with emotions
• to come to terms with their surroundings
• to do good, to contribute
• for recognition
• to be part of a group or greater whole
• to show off knowledge/skills
• to reflect
• to make money

This is a pretty generic list of motivations which can be used to explain many actions including why people create works.

He also discussed intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. It is believed that adding an extrinsic motivation for something for which there was an intrinsic motivation, kills the intrinsic part. Some sites which rely on crowdsourcing have tried to incorporate some sort of revenue sharing to keep the users happy, but these systems both destroy intrinsic motivation and stimulate gaming the rules.

I think anybody creating content on a website should keep in mind that they are in fact sharecropping on somebody else’s land and they have hardly any standing if the owner of the lands decides to sell it or make broad sweeping changes. Sites usually try to make their users happy, but sometimes different motivations can take over. Users have the single recourse of taking their activities elsewhere, though currently it is the question if they can take their data with them.

That session was the last after which the event was concluded with drinks and dinner.

Yesterday the irregular Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hours (organized by the inimitable Peter) event was hosted by Philips Design.

The UX Cocktail Hours are a networking event for the IA and IxD crowds frequented by tremendously nice and knowledgeable people. As an aspiring experience professional it’s great to get to know them and pick their brain.

Every session is hosted by a company who get the chance to present their experience practice and various things are presented. I must say I pretty much always take home something which I use or refer to later on (it’s nice like that).
Philips showed a lot of stuff about how the go about designing experiences and we got to see the process how they developed a competing MP3 player to the iPod which was pretty interesting (not to mention revealing).

The next session is at TomTom and as I have a more than passing interest in transit data, I think that could be very interesting indeed.

Tijs and I have just returned from a quick weekend in Berlin, let me write a quick wrapup of the Plazecamp and try to answer the questions I posed before we went.

The day at the Plazes HQ started with a brief explanation of the API (video) and a day of hacking with access to the plazes devs so any problem could be fixed very quickly. Peter Rukavina, Plazes’s advocate, had flown over and he wrote a detailed wrapup of the event.
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Today we met up for some Four Starters Sushi lunch at Sushi Express underneath Potsdamer Platz. We had some excellent sushi for rock bottom prices. Good food for low prices is a very welcome experience. We haven’t been disappointed yet.

Our rendez-vous was the Sony Store in the similarly named Sony Centre. What appears to be a reasonable implementation of an Apple store, could very well have been geek heaven, but fell short on some important points. This comes back to the stuff about experience design we had been talking about yesterday, with some of these products you really wonder what they were thinking.

All sony stuff was live on display to play with. Some of it more succesfully than others. Nice batch of HD videocameras, a mediocre range of SE phones and the Sony SLR range, which is decent but I don’t understand why anybody would bother with.

The real killer was the laptops section where there were some 11″ laptops. The size of the screen was pretty tolerable (Apple should bring out one of these) but the keyboard was shrunk in such a way that typing normally had become impossible.

Even worse was the Sony UMPC that was on display. Clunky —I think you could call it massive— with plastic sliders and other strange controls. Slides open to reveal a keyboard and even has a webcam and finger print scanner. I don’t know what function this device is supposed to fulfill but playing with it for longer than a couple of minutes was an actively painful experience.

Add to this the horribly negative reviews of the T-Mobile Shadow and the Nokia N81 and it looks like device managers are getting desperate. Who will save them?

As I said, Reinier and I were in the Apple Store Regent Street yesterday, mainly to have a look at the Apple Store, but also to have a look at the new iPods. Apple announced a complete update to their iPod lineup last week, most notably replacing the iPod Nano with a new smaller version and introducing a new iPod Touch that is based on the iPhone interface.

Although the iPod Touch was the big announcement, it isn’t available yet in store. Still, the iPod Nano and iPod Classic (the new name for the old style iPod) have gotten a few updates that really make a difference, so we had a look at those. I didn’t bring my camera so I don’t have any photo’s, I hope to get some of the iPod Touch once it’s in store.

The iPod Nano got the biggest update as it is now comes in a way smaller form factor and is able to play video. Bringing video to the entire iPod lineup (except the shuffle) is important to Apple as well as many other players like Podcasters. When I tried the new iPod Nano, I noticed that the video playback is “just fine” as it can only be so much impressive on a 2″ screen. Yes, the resolution is sharp and the playback is smooth, but I rather watch stuff on my Macbook if I can.

The iPod Classic and iPod Nano both got a new interface update, giving them both Cover Flow and a new split screen interface for certain views. We noticed that the iPod Nano is much faster in starting up and powering down than its predecessor, but somehow sometimes felt a bit slow in navigating and especially when scrolling through a whole lot of photos. Reinier noted that scrolling through photos is much smoother on his iPod Nano 2G.

To see if this scrolling went any smoother on the new iPod Classic, I looked one up and had a play with it. It’s way faster in the menu’s and the photo viewing, and I would even enjoy watching a video on it. Still, I noticed some performance problems when playing a song and scrolling through the Cover Flow at high speed. Somehow doing these things caused the music to “skip” repeatedly, but strangely we couldn’t repeat this skipping later on when we tried some other iPod Classics. Is this posibly a hardware defect or does it have something to do with the song I played?

In the end we really liked the iPod Nano as it is cheap, very portable (may I say it is a Shuffle competitor in size?) and the new Product Red color is very nice and funky. The ability to play video’s on it might seem trivial but it opens the world of Podcasts to those people who want to have something interesting to watch on the road. I am actually thinking of getting one myself, although I still love my Shuffle.

Reinier and I were at the Apple Store Regent Street this afternoon, admiring the new iPod line (short review to come soon). Besides finding some new details about the iPods that aren’t visible in the adds, we also noticed something about Apple’s personal approach to offering support: the Genius Bar.

The Genius Bar is a bar-like counter in the middle of every Apple Store, where a Mac user can get help from a so called genius. The Genius Bar can help you with hardware problems (which I have had a lot) but also with software problems. Across the bar is another bar called the iPod Bar where iPod users can get help with their iPod. These bars are in the middle of the store, among people buying their new stuff that they hope to never have to bring to the bar.

In a traditional electronics store like Media World or PC World, these service desks tend to be hidden in some kind of hidden part of the store, tucked away to hide angry customers from the new customers that are about to buy their new products. In some cases (like in the Media World in Arnhem, NL) this service desk even has its own entrance to avoid any new customer from ever seeingwhat goes on in the service area.

Clearly, stores like PC World have a good reason to make sure that you, the new customer, don’t notice that there are 10 people in the service area with the crappy product that you just wanted to buy. Imagine buying an HP laptop while you see 4 people in line at the support counter with the same laptop! Amazingly stores like PC World will even charge you £29 for installing your Windows again, while a MacBook can be reset in the Apple Store for free (within warranty).

Customer Support - Also Relevant to Experience Design

Apple’s decision to make their support desk so extremely present in the Apple Store doesn’t just show that they have major guts, it also shows that Apple considers support to be part of the product you buy and therefore part of their experience. When you buy an Apple you get support, it is there in the store, it is something that you can rely on. When you buy a PC or any other hardware, you just get the option of support. When you want support, you will first have to ask for it, as it won’t always just be there for you.

Obviously this comes with consequences as Apple will really want to avoid any really pissed of customers. I think that this is why Apple recently fixed my Macbook 1 month after warranty, simply because it was reasonable. Now, this it is probably also the reason that they gave those early iPhone adopters a $100 Apple Store credit. The end result is that Apple soon will have a lot of happy users in the store, that just had some excellent service as they got another $100 to buy a new experience. What is a better image to create to your other new customers?

In the end it is not that hard to do what Apple does, and I would hope that others would follow. To summarize what Apple does I hope to inspire some local companies to give the same experience here is a list of simple things you can do:

1. Make the service desk a nice place to be.
2. Make it present in the store.
3. Get some nice and honest “Geniuses”.
4. Be reasonable.
5. Give your “Geniuses” the power to decide what is reasonable.
6. Take responsibility for what you sell. (See this article for more elaboration)
7. Make customers that need support leave the store with a smile.

I’m over at Brighton already soon to be joined by Reinier and Cristiano to cover this weekend’s events over here. dconstruct looks to be a great event. The program is filled with interesting speakers and the venue is packed.

What I am doing currently is a cross between web development and interaction design which is going towards experience desing. Most of the principles and examples are ones which are very familiar and which I am already trying to apply in daily practice. It is nice to have them retold by practical luminaries to fix these principles and strengthen the arguments to be able to advocate experience based design.

Here are some notes for the morning’s talks. The edits are quite rough, but I don’t have the time or opportunity right now to do proper writing.

Jared Spool - “The dawn of the Age of Experience”

Jared Spool started off by giving us some examples of succesful experience design such as Apple and Netflix. He told us the same success stories we have heard countless times before. It would have been more interesting if he had told us what we need to do to get to the same level, but of course he does not have the ready answers for that question.

One interesting observation is that these successes are getting the attention of board rooms all over the place. Board attention promises a lot of opportunities but experience design gone bad can also result in some catastrophic failures.

He then talked about how succesful experience design can be done by either research of the users and the target audience or by really thinking stuff through. There are good things to be said for either approach.

He finally said that succesful experience design is invisible and it integrates the user and the business and is incredibly multidisciplinary.

A nice talk about the importance of experience design with a lot of examples but not with that many concrete strategies to actually create a good experience. The essence of the field contains within it some elusiveness.

Peter Merholz - “Experience Strategies”

Then Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path started talking about how the Experience is your product for all your users care about it. No user cares about the technical details or the internals, you need to provide your users with a good experience.

There are technological innovations that make it possible to completely change the way products are made and stuff works and it revolutionizes the experience instead of playing the more features game. Talked about TiVo, the Kodak camera and the Wii.

He talk about the importance of focusing on products with great experiences. That you need an experience vision to sail for which will serve as a guideline for everything that you do.

Products are people too (The title of Matt Webb’s presentation on Reboot9 this year.) and the same things that make us like people also make us like products.

Leisa Reichelt - “Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good”

Leisa Reichelt talked a lot about how the waterfall model that is still quite pervasive throughout the software industry is bad and how a more iterative model dubbed the ‘Washing Machine’ is better attuned towards how people work.

I learnt the waterfall model for software development and project management at university. I think there now are some elective courses on agile methodologies but as we already commented in the post “The IT world moves too fast for universities”, they take some time to catch up.

Waterfalls are bad because they assume that you know what you’re doing when you start, assume that design is a discrete process step that stops at a certain point in time to be implemented and it assumes that it is a single discipline contained in a single phase. This is inherently not how people and designers function in large and complex projects.

She then talked about using agile methodologies and combining them with User Centric Design. This is still quite experimental and open and there is a lot of trying out and mixing and matching to do to find a combined methodology that works.

That’s all for now: I’ll write a wrap up of the conference at the end of the day or maybe tomorrow.

I have been fed up with customer support for ages, just like many other people. I am amazed by the amount of companies that claim to have the best call centers, but when you call them they are just as sad as any others. I have been thinking for a while about what can be done and I have come up with 8 free and fairly commonsense ideas that will make any call center a lot better. Here they are in no particular order.

1. Tell the Truth (a.k.a. Don’t Lie)Although I just said no particular order, I do think this is probably the most important one. I have been lied to so often for numerous reasons. The most obvious one, and maybe the hardest to prove, is when the operator knows if something is in stock or not but lies about it for the sake of the sale/repair. The same problem relates to repair or delivery times: don’t lie if you know it will take 3 weeks, because sometimes people rely on these kind of facts.

This issue relates to planning on the customer side, and that brings me to the next point.

2. Keep me Informed

If you tell me something will take 1 week, and you know it is going to take more time after a few days, than tell me as soon as you know. Most customer support will only inform you after the promised period passes, which gets the customers angry.

We, the customers, are counting on certain promises and if we know a promise can’t be kept, we need to find a new solution as soon as possible. The earlier you tell us, the sooner we can respond. I actually won’t get angry about this kind of honesty, as it gives me time to prepare and make arrangements. Keeping me out of the loop just pisses me of.

3. Tell the Whole Truth

This point is a bit of a double, as it kind of touches the surface of tips #1 and #2, as with keeping me informed and telling the truth comes the responsibility to tell me everything. It won’t be the first time that an operator insures me in an informal way that everything will be OK, only to be told the complete opposite a few days later when I talk to a different operator.

In other words, don’t obscure the truth with weak promises and mumbo jumbo talk if you know better. It again comes down to us, the customers, having to plan our life around your procedures.

4. Remember Who I Am

Ok, so this is really about phone operators. Most of the time when I call a support line I end up with the wrong operator (see tip #5 for why this is). After explaining my long problem to the operator I tend to be redirected to another operator, which most of the times doesn’t seem to know who I am, what I want or that I have been redirected.

The first and second problems are “expectable”, but the last one is really ridiculous. How hard is it to have some system (I know that all these helpdesks have very complex systems running already) that know that I just spoke to Operator X, and that I have been redirected because of an issue surrounding Item Y? This should be so easy to implement and really removes the stress of the customers, and even gives a more personal experience.

5. Replace the Computerized Menu (with a Receptionist)

I think it happens to most people that when they call a number and get a computer menu, they just don’t seem to get to the menu they are looking for. Not only is this bad design by the makers of these systems, but it also leads to groups of people that either just do something, or people that go for the “press 9 to speak with a real person”-option. This is why I tend to end up it with the wrong operator and have to explain things over and over to the next operator.

I had a far better experience a while back when I called a company that had a real person pick up the phone, ask you for your intentions and then throw you in a queue that fitted the issue. This made so much more sense, as it saved me and the company time. In addition it also felt more personal, as I knew for sure I was in the right queue and in good hands. I think I was even less eager to hang up if the queue happened to be long.

6. Call me Back

British Telecom recently showed me that there is a better way to handle long phone queues, by having the option to be called back after pressing a simple code. This really made it less tiring to wait. I did still have to wait an hour before they called me back, and after that I even ended up in another queue, but at least this time it was on their costs.

In The Netherlands a minister recently wanted to introduce a law that people only pay phone costs for conversations, not queues. This is technically a bit difficult to accomplish, but a call-back policy would do just fine too.

7. Don’t be Afraid of a Smart Customer

I am a Mac user, as are the other FourStarters authors, and I know from experience that every time you call some kind of IT involved helpdesk and mention this fact, they totally stress out. A while back I called the Orange support line for my router, and after a few steps through their routine the operator wanted me to do something Windows only. I asked her what she wanted me to do, so that I could copy the process on my Mac (she wanted me to do an “ifconfig” command). On the word “Mac” she totally stressed out and dropped all responsibility and before I could say a word I was in a queue for Mac users.

The point here is that I happened to have a lot of knowledge in the area that I was calling about, and that is probably why I am even on a Mac. In other words: I was a smart customer that should have been handled with a different approach than a John Doe that just ordered his first internet connection. This goes with non-computer-related topics too as my father, who is a car technician, has the same problem when he calls a car company with some questions. In the end we are probably the easiest users to help, so don’t be afraid of us.

8. Take Responsibility

My last tip is a bit general, and affects many areas. Responsibility is an important issue to me and I want a company that I buy things from to have a lot of it. One example of where this often goes wrong is the example I mentioned in tip #7 where the operator used the “not my responsibility”-argument to throw me in a queue to another operator as soon as she could. It is just so easy to throw a customer from one operator to the other, but it doesn’t help the experience for the customer.

This also goes for inter-company issues, as when I buy a product at company A I would never like to be referred to a different company for my issues. A good (or is it bad) example are shops that tend to refer to the manufacturer for all your problems, making it unclear for the client what he needs for his guarantee, and increasing the amount of calls that have to be made. Not to mention the amount of throwing around between two companies that people have to endure.

When I buy a product or a service at a company, I buy it with them because I trust in them to take care of me. For any service I hope to be served through them, and with some proper respect. Again, it is just so easy to send a customer from one helpdesk to the other, but it doesn’t help the experience for the customer.

Conclusions

In the end I think we can conclude from my tips that it isn’t always all about reaching a goal, but also about the process. It is good if a helpdesk has a 99% success rate for solving everyone’s problems, but it has little meaning if it takes the customer through hell and back before they get there. The customer will probably even be nicer to the operator if the experience was pleasant.

I hope this will help some helpdesk-managers or technicians come up with some proposals, as I really feel that a lot can be done to remove all these frustrations.