Mail Quotas, Shortcuts, & Other Horrors

OK, a quick one – I just sent a message to a friend of mine who works at Temple University in Philadelphia. Immediately I received a message with the subject “Returned Mail: Over Quota”. Now, I know enough about e-mail and technology that I was able to decipher the following to find out what had happened:

…which is a darn good thing because below that little “inline message follows” indicator? Yeah, you guessed it: there was no message following (although even if there was, that still might not get the point across (by itself) to some users).

1. Skip The Tech-Speak, Threepio
So my first gripe is that this is a techy and jargon-heavy message that wouldn’t make sense to a lot of people who, based on the appearance of this message and lack of any kind of context, might either a) think it was spam and delete it or b) not have any idea what it was trying to convey and in both instances might very likely have no idea that the message hadn’t actually been received by the intended recipient. We all know that universities frequently deal with time-sensitive and confidential information, so wouldn’t it be nice to let the sender know what had happened in no uncertain terms? What is a permnent delivery error? What exactly does that mean? Something like this could mean the difference in an application being received on time or something even more serious. It’s unacceptable for that to be at the mercy of poor interaction design.

2. Beyond the Message, Look at the Vehicle
In some ways though, even the poor messaging is beside the point because the sender of the message should NEVER be the recipient of an e-mail like this. Why? Because THEY CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. If I send a message to someone whose mailbox is over its size limit, well, that’s on them – it’s not MY fault – why am I made to feel like I’m being shut out with little more than what is essentially a “tough luck, kid”? What if I don’t have any other way of contacting them? What do I do now? If I’m crafty enough I might make a call to Temple to find a phone number or a name of someone else in the department I might be able to contact…wasting my own time as well as those who have to route my call (or another e-mail to an inbox that isn’t over its size limit).

3. Mail Quotas? Seriously?
OK, Temple is a large organization and I guess I understand mail quotas on some level, particularly if students are on the same server and they’re sending large movie/sound files around, etc. But for business users to be hamstrung by those same quotas feels incredibly inefficient. Regardless, here’s a newsflash: as a user; I don’t really care what your technical issues are – the experience is all I know, and it’s not good. Space and storage is cheap these days…so this feels antiquated. But even so, I’ve worked with organizations that have mail quotas that are instituted much more intelligently – the recipient gets a message that their mailbox is over it’s limit, all messages are still received, and they simply can’t SEND any messages until they clean up their room. It’s still a little old-school, but at least it’s on the owner of the mailbox to fix it.

GRRRR.
This is just one of those days that poorly designed technology is infuriating me. Add the fact that I had to type this twice because during my first attempt I hit “Backspace” (I know, hitting Backspace while typing? I should be committed) and my browser decided I wanted to go to the previous page and erased what I was typing. Thanks, Internet Explorer! That was a helpful keyboard shortcut!

And how about when I went to a page earlier to demonstrate some functionality, started typing my username and password, and after a few seconds the page automatically placed the cursor back in the first field and I exposed my password to the whole room?

As a designer, I know there are technical reasons these things happen. Let me reiterate: as a user, I don’t CARE. Enough apologetics. Fix it.

It doesn’t have to be this hard people. It really doesn’t.

Logitech Customer Support Gets It

Two years ago, my fiancé bought me some portable Logitech speakers for my birthday. I put them through their paces for two years, and they worked great – you could charge them up and take them anywhere.

Recently, I turned them on and the volume was blaring (they do get pretty loud too). Each time I tried to turn down the volume, the speakers would just turn it back to the max all on their own. I logged on to http://support.logitech.com to look for answers, and was greeted with multiple options to find my product: Search by Image, Search by Name.

I immediately found my product by looking for the image:

This approach is awesome; who actually knows what their product is called? Especially when technical items often either have cryptic names like “LS21” or else have names that are too similar to one other like “Pure-WiFi Anytime” versus “Pure-WiFi Anywhere”.

After selecting my product, I followed a few troubleshooting steps. The steps were easy to follow and complete, but unfortunately nothing solved my volume problem. I had to resort to the dreaded “Email Us” troubleshooting contact form.

I reluctantly filled out the lengthy form and sent it away to cyber-space, but did not expect anything – especially within the first few days. They must get millions of these, right?

I immediately got an automated response: “Your question has been received. You should expect a response from us within 24 hours.” While that’s a nice touch, it doesn’t do much to instill confidence. However, about 16 hours later, I got a very polite reply from “Ron”:

“Hello Amanda, Thank you for contacting Logitech Technical Support. My name is Ron and I will be assisting you with Incident # 0923-00442.”

Ron asked me to simply send him my original purchase receipt, and he would send me a brand new replacement set of speakers since it appeared that the set I owned was defective. Great! But I couldn’t find the receipt. It had been two years after all, so I let Ron know the bad news.

Amazingly, the reply was essentially “no receipt? no problem!” Ron sent me an email with several UPS links:

I was even more impressed that when I clicked “Find the Closest Service Location”, it knew my address and was already showing me the closest locations.

So easy! I immediately packaged everything up, slapped on the label, and dropped in the nearest UPS drop box I could find.

A couple of days later, I got another email letting me know that they received my speakers and were shipping out a new set. All correspondence was done in an extremely timely fashion with complete follow-through.

Maybe that seems like an obvious and logical transaction, but the fact that I was able to relate the complete story in a few short sentences (where there were no “pain points”) is exactly the point. I am amazed that this was so easy, and that I actually got a new set without spending a dollar. But why am I so amazed by this? Shouldn’t this be the way customer support always works?

Most of us will agree that it usually doesn’t. It’s sad that we’ve come to expect such a low level of service from most companies that we’re essentially resigned to bracing for the pain whenever we begin these interactions. In fact, there are plenty of us who simply assume it will be a waste of time and energy and don’t even bother.

Kudos to Logitech – smart companies know that especially in these times, it’s the experience that will win you repeat business, and I will buy their products again based on this experience alone. They truly “get it”.

The Tyranny Of Choice Strikes Back

I’ve experienced a few things recently that have brought something I first read a few years ago back to top of mind – the idea of Tyranny of Choice. If you haven’t read the excellent article describing this phenomenon by Scientific American, do yourself a favor and download a copy of it here – courtesy of Swarthmore College.

The gist is that providing people with more choices is not necessarily a good thing – and in some situations can actually be debilitating. It makes sense – maybe you’ve had a similar experience to me: I’m in no way an expert on investment funds, but when it comes time to figure out where to put my money, I’m faced with a daunting list of options – and I’m such a novice that I can hardly even make heads or tails of the differences between them aside from a few very broad categorizations.

(Illustration Courtesy of Scientific American)

What’s worse, once the decision is made, since it affects me on an ongoing basis I continually ask myself “did I make the right choice? Was/is there a better one? How will I know? What am I missing out on?” As a result, there are plenty of people who just disengage altogether because they can’t or don’t want to deal with the various stresses associated with it.

So how can we tame this beast?

1. Don’t Provide Choices That Are Invalid And Prevent Users From Achieving Goals

The first time this resurfaced for me recently was at An Event Apart, during a usability session where Robert Hoekman, Jr. was doing on-the-spot usability reviews and was looking at a website for an airline (we’ll let it go un-named and give them a chance to act on the collective feedback of the audience at AEA). Even though the airline only flies out of certain airports, in their “select a departure city” drop down list there are hundreds of major and minor ones – many of which (or most of which, based on our results) they don’t even have flights out of.

Oof.

Is this an out-of-the-box list or something? Why in the world would they do this? Better yet, the drop-down for destination city includes the same list, which isn’t truncated in any way after the departure selection is made. If selections are made that aren’t 100% compatible with available flights, the user feedback is simply “Sorry, there are no flights that match your criteria.” This means that even if you are lucky enough to select a valid departure city, if you select an invalid destination, you get the message above and no prescriptive feedback indicating where the problem lies. Aaargh, we could spend paragraphs on this alone – but the faults should be obvious. The user experience is only a few notches shy of this.

2. Don’t Provide More Choices Than Are Necessary in the Interest of  “Showing Off”

Next I had an interaction that I’ve experienced plenty of times over the years in different guises. Without going into too much detail it boiled down to a desire to use valuable screen real estate to display numerous options and features that aren’t available (and therefore aren’t helpful) to users. This was an effort to show off the robustness of the product with all of the bells and whistles turned on. Instead of considering the tyranny of including choices that are smugly turned off, the thought was that a user would want to know why they couldn’t access those options and would try to find out how they could pay to turn them on. To me this is akin to visiting a car dealership and the salesperson trots you past every make and model on the lot regardless of your price range or other personal preferences and parameters. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, does it?

Walk The Lot With Me...

It’s OK to provide users with information about what other choices are available, but at best it should be when they ask for it – and at worst, it shouldn’t be a hard sell. Most people will want to get in and accomplish their goals quickly, intuitively, and with minimal distraction – not be constantly reminded of (and confused by) things outside of their workflow. Otherwise, your advanced user will see what you’re up to, and your novice will be confused and frustrated. Make your core product a killer, and people will ask what else you can do for them on their own terms.

3. Don’t Make Users Responsible For Making a Choice Unless Absolutely Necessary

This one is more of a stretch than usual and my example isn’t technology based, but I still feel it’s a great illustration of the mental strain that choices can create. Without getting melodramatic, our dog very recently succumbed to a debilitating disease and had to be put to sleep. There’s enough emotional baggage inherent in that as it is – but as my wife and I tried to decide what to do, we came to the conclusion that we simply couldn’t make the decision while it was a CHOICE. There would be too many “what if” questions; so we would do whatever we had to do (short of completely draining our bank account) if things were still at a stage where it was a “choice”.

Even when things were looking pretty dire, initial meetings with vets at a few locations had them saying things like “well, you could try acupuncture…or you could try putting the dog on wheels” – both of which would have done nothing for our dog in his particular condition, but were choices thrown out there (somewhat offhandedly, and I felt, irresponsibly – because of the pressure they placed on us) that confused us and made us wonder if we were doing the right thing. Those additional choices just didn’t seem consistent with what we knew of the disease and what we could see with our own eyes, but still we lost sleep over them.

Finally we met with a compassionate vet at Rau Animal Hospital who removed the tyranny of choice, explained the fallacy of the other proposed choices, and suggested to us that the most humane thing would be to let him go. While that was tough to hear, it felt like someone pulled a 10 ton weight off of us. The burden of choice had been removed, and we could make the decision to let our dog go without further loss of dignity or quality of life.

Rau Animal Hospital GETS IT

This is an extreme example with a heavy emotional component, but it proves a point – often times when you think you’re providing benefit by suggesting choices, it’s an easy enough thing for you to do but can have crippling effects on the novice users of your system. We’ve all interacted with clumsy systems that have way too many nodes of choice even when they could easily learn from individual user behaviors (ATM machines, anyone?), and some that even force you to make choices when there is only ONE OPTION (don’t get me started on the haphazard implementation of EZPass).

You don’t gain repeat business and loyal customers by increasing the amount of time someone spends interacting with your system – you gain it by minimal inputs required to accurately achieve a desired result, minimal cognitive (and emotional!) processing, and keeping advanced features and functionality available for the nerds who want to look for them but out of the way of those who just want to get on with their day.