Learning From Overbooked Flights

This weekend I had tickets to see Andrew Bird and St. Vincent at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, where I was also planning on catching up with a close cousin of mine and his girlfriend, whom I rarely get to see. It has been on my list for a long time to see a show in the venue that housed the Grand Ole Opry in its formative years, and my wife and I were psyched for our little getaway that we had booked back in July.

However, thanks to U.S. Airways (and I suppose to the poor practice of overbooking by the airline industry in general), those plans were dashed. The culprit: multiple severely overbooked flights in a row, no takers for a consensual bump with a future voucher, and general mayhem and confusion on the part of the terminal employees. Of course I could give you a detailed blow-by-blow, but my own particular experience isn’t really the point – we’ve all been through it, so you more or less know the horror story. What is more important are some of the overarching things I thought about as it was all unfolding that would have either avoided the situation altogether, would have made it more bearable, or can serve as warning signs when designing experiences elsewhere.

1. Don’t Make Your Customers Suffer For Your Own Business/Industry Shortcomings
Look, as a business person I know that it is common practice for airlines to overbook flights, and I know there are algorithms to determine by how much they should oversell to generally have full planes without too many people getting hosed (like I did). I also know that the organization takes a hit that really adds up when there are unsold seats on flights. However, as a passenger with plans, I DON’T CARE about any of that. It’s not, and it shouldn’t be, my problem – I have no sympathy for any of that when I’m standing there watching my plane take off and I’m still on the ground. I’ve gotten used to not getting meals anymore and having to pay for everything I consume or “borrow” on the flight, but when the fundamental thing I’ve paid for – transport itself – is denied to me based on something that in no way is my fault, it simply feels like a swindle. I can’t think of another industry that gets away with behavior quite like this…why does flying always feel like a game of roulette? Why do we willingly continue to pay for something that we know (weather aside, even) might not be worth the paper it is printed on once we’ve packed our luggage, taken time off, gotten ourselves to the airport, and paid for parking? Why are we always pretty shocked and bemused when it goes smoothly and we end up where we’re supposed to be on time? I realize we’re not talking about something as simple as running a lemonade stand here, but as consumers we’re also paying really good money for this service…why is all of this emotional strain being put on the customers, for something that the business can’t effectively figure out? The industry needs to find more effective ways to manage schedules, cut costs and/or maximize efficiencies, to make sure that we actually get what we pay for and can be confident in our purchase. Without that, you’re certainly not going to increase the amount of people lining up (and emptying their pockets) to say “thank you sir, may I have another?”

2. Don’t Burden Expensive and Important Transactions With a “Luck Factor”
Our flight was oversold by 12 tickets, and we were numbers 8 and 9 – having checked in at the airport a little less than 2 hours before the (domestic) flight. Some people have said to me, “well, you should have checked-in online during the day”. Well, it just wasn’t that kind of day – we’ve all had ‘em. Regardless, that is airline apologetics, and we shouldn’t be in the business of giving them an “out” – would you say that to your grandmother who doesn’t really get what “online” even means? It isn’t OK that we’ve learned the rules to their flawed game so therefore we can exploit it at the expense of those who haven’t – that is just unfair. A ticket purchased in July shouldn’t require another mad-dash of confirmation on the day of the flight three months later to make sure it’s still valid.

3. Set The Rules, and Stick To Them
I wasn’t happy about the oversold situation but I wanted to be clear about the rules, so I asked. “You said we’re numbers 8 and 9 on that list, right? So if 9 seats free up, we’ll be on that flight? Right?” I was told that was correct, by the attendant who was being actively badgered by a woman who announced that she was 12th on the list and HAD to be at work that evening in Nashville. So explain to me then how that squeaky wheel got on the flight and we were still standing in the terminal? Because the rules were broken. Look, I know it can’t be easy to listen to that one (or those few) nut-job(s) jabber on about how much more important the flight is for them than for anyone else. But rewarding that behavior not only destroys your organization’s credibility in anything they “officially” say or do, it reinforces those behaviors in the future (and therefore makes your life even more difficult) – because in this instance you can bet you’ll read that little “tip” on a travel blog.

4. If You Can’t Avoid It, Have A Very Clear And Well-Communicated Contingency Plan
OK, we’ve already established that it’d be great if the need for the whole ugly practice of overbooking could be squashed somehow. However, in the end we’re talking about an industry that is really hurting, so we may already be at wit’s end as far as that is concerned. OK, but how to mitigate that then? U.S. Airways chooses to keep this practice as quiet and ill-explained to its passengers as possible in hopes that it’ll only affect a small percentage of them and things will generally just clunk along as they do now. Interestingly enough, as a result it is not only completely baffling and frustrating to passengers when they get bumped, but also to U.S. Airways employees – who obviously don’t know what the correct next-steps are, what the lines of communication should be (witness us being sent to 4 different desks, having to re-tell the exact same story 4 times to people who had no idea what we were talking about and generally treated us like we were criminals trying to steal something from them), or how to maintain their composure in the midst of what is no doubt a frustrating experience for all.

Until Next Time, Nashville

What it all boils down to is this: we missed an important family visit and a concert. The airline owes us more than just the price of the flight refunded, but at least we did finally receive that several days later (I wasn’t too confident even that would happen). I was ticked, but even more ticked when I thought about things that other people have missed as a result of these practices (or, at best, just bafflingly terrible experience design). I posted my plight on Facebook and heard from people who had missed weddings, funerals, and more. This isn’t buying a TV, bringing it home, and finding out it doesn’t work – this is denying people visits with their friends, family, and attendance at major life events. You cannot possibly provide me with an excuse good enough for that.

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.

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.

The Wild & Crazy World Of Inhalers

My wife had asthma as a kid and it has been coming back recently, usually when it’s time for the dog to have a bath. Every few weeks she gets a mild attack, and the last time it happened (during a snow storm) I asked her “well, can we do something about this instead of just waiting for it to pass? What did you do in the past?”

The Culprit

That resulted in my heading out to buy an over-the-counter (OTC) inhaler for mild cases such as hers – only to find out that at 4 out of 4 stores I visited, after being told the aisle in which I could find them, they were no longer stocked. None of the pharmacists seemed to have a clue as to why, except for the last fellow, who believed they had been discontinued…but didn’t have any details. The only alternative? Being told that perhaps taking some medicines designed to treat a multitude of unrelated things might help, or taking the one product I could find (in only 1 of the 4 stores) that was supposed to treat asthma….which turned out to be a pill, subsequently took hours to kick in, and kept my wife up all night. Score!

We had no idea why OTC inhalers were no longer available, just that they weren’t – and nobody seemed to know why. Even those who really should be in the know said it was a pretty mysterious thing and didn’t have any additional insight. To me, that felt like reaching out for a banister that had always been there – and finding it missing. It would only take escalation of a few conditions to turn that into a trip to the emergency room instead of just up to the drug store. I want to know why I can’t get that good hot salsa at my local grocery store anymore, but I really want to know why I couldn’t get my wife something she had previously relied on when she was short of breath and there was no decent substitute. Not only does the lack of communication feel insulting and make me resent those responsible, it’s downright dangerous. When they discontinued the contraceptive sponge, everyone knew it (heck, I did, and I was just a kid) and was abuzz about it – where was the communication this time?

So I turned to my most reliable source of information – Crazy Aaron, who, before I ever even asked him, sent me an article he had read in “Spray – Technology & Marketing for the Aerosol Industry” (I kid you not), because he was intrigued by the human factors issues involved with the discontinuation of CFC emitting inhalers. You can’t make this stuff up.

Spray didn’t provide an answer as to why there are no new OTC inhalers (although the change from CFC is probably at the root of it), but it seems that the folks in charge of the change-over to the new HFA 134a-propelled prescription inhalers (buy stock!) missed a few opportunities when switching to the new product. New mandates were designed to improve the product, but resulted in a bit of a bumpy rollout (particularly for life-long users of the previous versions) due to a lack of understanding of the full needs and habits of the audience. Here’s what some good solid user-testing could have helped avoid/better manage:

1. Dose Counter

Older products would, as you got close to the last few doses, become noticeably weaker – a strong indicator to replenish. A new regulatory requirement states that every dose has to be the same strength and potency. Sounds good on the surface, but how do you know when it’s kicked? You don’t, until it is. We can all do the math on the dangers of that scenario. Suggestions included telling patients that they’d have to keep track of the doses they’d already used themselves (talk about user-friendly). But chalk one up for GSK: they are (so far) the only ones to introduce an inhaler that has a built-in clicker on the side that tells you how many times you’ve used it. Win!

2. Taste

Apparently, the old stuff that everyone was used to had a mild taste of “rubber or cabbage” (sweeeeet). Not ideal, but it went with the turf and people had learned to deal. There are two kinds of formulations available now – one without alcohol in it (which is more tasteless than before and surprisingly garners mixed reviews for that reason), and one that has 10% ethanol and produces a burning sensation at the back of the throat and can taste weird due to impurities in the alcohol. I wonder if the lack of a standing ovation for that little development came as a surprise?

3. Speed/Energy

Older products would give patients a “punch” of “chilled” air that many of them equated to it “working” and getting into their lungs faster. The newer products deliver a slower moving plume of air with finer particles in it – proven to be more effective. Some patients think it is weaker and not working as well as the old ones. Sounds like solid communication and training might be the answer for that one.

4. Finer Particles = Nozzle Blockage

Those finer particles mentioned above? They get the medicine to the lungs more effectively, but they’re more likely to clog the nozzle – so now patients have to regularly clean it to prevent that – something they never had to do before. Is there a mechanical fix here that was too cost prohibitive to undertake? Is there some alternative to adding additional maintenance chores?

Beyond that are a few other issues like storage (the new inhalers are much more susceptible to moisture and can be rendered ineffective much more quickly depending on the environment) and even electrostatic charges making doses less effective. Did they miss the boat entirely? Absolutely not – the negative feedback came from a minority of patients, and we all know that when it comes to pharmaceutical regulations, you can have your hands tied in so many ways that you’re lucky if you ever get a helpful product to market – let alone one that doesn’t have associated gripes. But, things like the dose clicker in particular are easy wins that some more focus on the psychological needs of the patient, not just the physiological, can achieve.

Oh, and I never did find out for sure why OTC inhalers seemed to have vaporized. Anyone have any idea?

False Interfaces are Today’s Loc-Bloc

My parents did a fine job raising their children – five kids, and not a felon among us. Not yet, anyway.

In my opinion they made only one critical error in judgment. This error will haunt them for the rest of their lives – mostly because I refuse to stop bringing it up. Sometime in the late 1970′s, my parents gave me a massive set of LOC BLOCs. What? You have no idea what a LOC BLOC is? Nobody did. All the cool kids had Legos. I was a Pariah.

Warning: these are not Legos

My father cited that the LOC BLOC set was ‘close enough.’ My mother noted that we got a lot more LOC BLOCs than Legos for the money. That’s all fine, but as the Wikipedia article states:

Incompatible

The blocks were of a very similar grid pattern to the Lego system, but not quite. The knobs were too tall and spaced just a little bit off. The result was that children who owned the much cheaper LOC BLOCs were often excluded from group play with other children who owned the overpriced, but more popular, Lego bricks. – (wikipedia, 2/12/2009)

Anyway, where am I going with this? Well, the feeling I had when I first tried to attach my LOC BLOC rocket ship to my neighbor’s Lego space station is the same feeling of disappointment that I experience when I encounter app-like interfaces on the web only to learn that they only look like apps – they don’t act like them. For example, behold the “Pictures of the Week” interface on time.com:

Time.com's deceptive interface

When I encounter what looks like a photo flipper with dedicated “Back” and “Next” buttons – I expect the items within the frame to update when I click a button. In the example above, the entire page refreshes. This was acceptable in 1998, but today, clicking on that “Next” button and watching the whole page refresh just feels like someone went for the cheaper, “close enough” version. Why pretend to be something you’re not? At the very least, simple text links outside of the image frame might have deterred me from thinking I would be interacting with a self-contained app.

I understand that there are business reasons for not wanting an actual image flipper on your site. Page refreshes provide those much-desired view counts advertisers want. Just don’t trick me into thinking I won’t have to sit through an entire refresh when I click your button. Apps are becoming more and more ubiquitous, and even casual users now have expectations regarding the style and speed with which they react. Be what you are, not a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or, a LOC BLOC in the Lego pile.

UPDATE: there is hope out there. Some traditional print media outlets are exploring actual app behaviors in their interfaces – such as the New York Times’ Article Skimmer Prototype. Now, if I can only resist the temptation to rob a toy store for a set of Legos, maybe I’ll make my Mom proud and run for public office.

MLB Store Doesn’t Get It: Costs My Wife $6, Me One Cap and Delays World Series

A while ago, my loving wife heard me mutter, “All I want is an old-school Phillies cap, from the late 70′s, where the P had a baseball in it.”  She went on the prowl and found one on the MLB shopping site, ordering one to arrive just in time for game 3 of the World Series. It was quite a surprise, but there was one hitch – they shipped a size small. So we both jumped on line and ordered a replacement for overnight delivery hoping I could cover my head for at least games 4 or 5. Of course, shipping was late and the Phils had to battle the Rays in the rain. Although they were winning most of the game, the Rays tied the score right before the rain delay – most likely because I wasn’t wearing my new old-school cap.

The new cap arrived yesterday, but when I opened it – it was not what we thought we had ordered. When my wife called to complain and ask for the overnight shipping money to be returned, customer service told her, “No Ma’am, that’s what you ordered. If you want to return it, you’ll be refunded the cost of the hat minus $6 for the return shipping. I’m sorry I can’t credit you the return fee.” There are four reasons why this is so wrong:

Note the absence of a size selector pull-down menu

ISSUE #1: POOR DESIGN OF SIZE SELECTOR

The MLB store ran out of all sizes except small. So, rather than give you a size pull down that only says “Small” they replace the size selector with straight text that says “Small.” My wife didn’t see that for the first order and thought the hat was adjustable. We’re willing to accept that mistake.

Visually similar "You May Also Like" items cause confusion

ISSUE #2: POOR DESIGN OF SHOPPING CART

The second time we ordered, we noticed that the cap was size small, but in the margin on the right was an image of the cap. The screen grab above shows a different cap, but the cap that landed in there before was very similar to the cap I wanted. THAT cap had a size selector – so we just thought you chose sizes in your shopping cart. Sure it’s odd, but this is MLB, their key strength isn’t designing shopping carts. When we selected the size and saw two similar caps in our shopping cart, we simply deleted the small size.

ISSUE #3: CUSTOMER SERVICE HAS NO AUTHORITY

Once we figured out what caused the mistake, we didn’t want a free cap, we just didn’t want to pay a $6 return fee again for their poor site design. The customer service rep insisted it was our fault, not because he’s a jerk, but because he has no authority to please the customer. Just a note to all the online merchants out there: things will happen. You want loyal customers. If you fear giving authority to customer service reps, you may be in the wrong business. Don’t hogtie all of your CSRs because one of them may be dumb enough to steal from you. There are better ways to prevent employee theft than keeping them from doing their jobs.

ISSUE #4: GAME 5 WAS DELAYED FOR TWO DAYS BECAUSE OF RAIN

This wouldn’t have happened if I had my Phillies cap on.

fivethirtyeight.com – Sometimes Gets It, Sometimes Doesn’t

It happens every two years. During a Senatorial or Presidential election cycle, I get a little obsessed and I end up having to check in on the pulse of the nation way too regularly. Every time this happens to me, I find a few web sites that feed my need for political crack. This time, it’s FiveThirtyEight.com. And it’s not just me: for a blog launched in March 2008 to be in Blogpulse’s top 10 linked to blogs is quite an achievement.

FiveThirtyEight.com is run by Nate Silver, a baseball statistician best known for developing a system to forecast the performance of baseball players. The power of this site is not so much the blog entries, but the collection of charts and graphs displayed on the edges of the site. You see, Nate has a method for compiling all of the political polls into a model and predicting the elections if they were held today. This isn’t as simple as averaging a bunch of numbers. For instance, we learned in 2000 that the electoral college can be more important than the popular vote. We also know that some polling agencies are more or less reliable than others.

To account for all of this, Nate weighs each poll based on its past performance vs actual results. After that, it gets much more complicated. Those of you into predictive modelling porn may want to look here – just scroll down to “Process Overview” and keep reading.

Nate has a clear bias in his blog entries, but he goes to great lengths to keep the stats balanced. It’s clear when it comes to handling data and predictive analysis that Nate Gets It. But when it comes to visuals, sometimes Nate Gets It, sometimes he Doesn’t Get It.

I routinely check four things on the site: the Electoral Vote pie chart, the Win Percentage pie chart, the Obama vs. McCain Projection Map, and his “Today’s Polls” posting. Sometimes I venture deeper and try to pretend some of the more complex stuff makes sense to me.  For instance, I really want to know what everything in this chart means:

what do the two red bars mean?

The primary message of this chart is clear: Democrats are going to dominate the Senate this year. Where I get confused is the zebra striping on the chart combined with the two red lines. On all of his other charts Red = Republican and Blue = Democrat, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what he intended here. The first red bar seems to say that’s where there is less than 100% chance, but why the other red bar at 25%? Wouldn’t it make more sense to highlight the part where the first likelihood is below 50%? Or maybe I just don’t understand the significance of the two red bars.

Then there’s this chart, which is so important that it sits right under the projection map:

Blue spikes = Happy Dems... I guess

All the words make sense, but I feel like I’m missing something. This chart is important to statisticians, but I feel like a child looking at it saying, “More blue simulations = happy dems… I guess.”

FiveThirtyEight’s charts are simple and get the point across, so this isn’t a classic case of what Tufte calls chartjunk. I may also not be the typical audience for the site. Clearly charts like this are important to the site, and I applaud Nate for displaying things visually. I’d love to buy him a copy of this. I think he’s too busy right now to read it.

What I would LOVE is a clickthrough for each chart with a short primer on what the chart is telling me, where the numbers come from and what the significance is. Don’t change your charts, Nate – just let novice statistics geeks like me in on the hard stuff.

US Airways Doesn’t Get It

OK so, I’m quite sure we’ve all had our share of complaints with airlines – and this isn’t your typical “they lost my luggage/my flight was canceled/the service rep was so rude” rant. That would be like shooting fish in a barrel, and we know that the user experience on that end leaves a lot to be desired. But there is another way that US Airways (in particular) doesn’t get it, and it has to do with the bone-chilling process of trying to book award travel with frequent flyer miles.

Most people who have tried to book awards travel with US Airways will tell you that throughout the process, you get the feeling like they don’t really want you to succeed. In response to that, some have said to me “well, of course they don’t – why would they want you to be able to fly for free?” and my response to that is, if that were true (and I sincerely hope it’s not true, though I have my suspicions), they shouldn’t have the program in the first place. So, giving them the benefit of the doubt, it should concern them that we feel that way – that we feel like we’ve faked them out if we actually manage to book a flight. Not good.

Part of this comes from the way that the Dividend Miles section of their website is set up.

ISSUE #1 – POOR INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE/LINK STRUCTURE

Now, you can pretty easily find out how many miles you’ve earned by clicking “My Account” under “Dividend Miles”, and you can book travel by clicking “Book Award Travel”. Pretty straightforward. Finding out how many miles you’ll need to score a trip is a bit more difficult – that is under ”Use Miles”. Not only did that take me several minutes to find, but it wasn’t a result of a logical thought process, like “based on the title of this choice, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to get when I click it.” It was instead a result of thinking “well, what I’m looking for so far hasn’t been anywhere I’d expect it to be, and since there is no other choice that makes sense, I might as well start clicking them all until I stumble upon it.” That, for starters, made me feel like US Airways didn’t really want to reward me. They wanted me to get frustrated and give up.

ISSUE #2 – SMART CLICKS vs. LESS CLICKS; CONFUSING NAVIGATIONAL REDUNDANCY

I realize there are more things you can do with miles than just book award travel, but I bet I know what happened there. “Book Award Travel” is a logical subset of “Use Miles”. Instead of making “Use Miles” the first choice, someone said “well, the most common thing that people want to do is book award travel, so let’s bubble that one up to the first selection under Dividend Miles”, even though it also exists under “Use Miles.” Two points about this kind of thinking: first, the old adage of “how many clicks does it take to do XYZ” starts to fall apart when you’ve got really complicated sites with a lot of functionality on them. Everyone wants their function “ONE CLICK AWAY!”, which results in a lot of mismatched things being moved to higher levels in the hierarchy. Second, this results in the kind of navigational redundancy that you don’t want – the kind that confuses people. See, “Book Award Travel” was one click away, but by the time I figured out how many miles I had and refreshed myself about how many miles you need (and a few other things), I had spent so many more clicks than if those things had just been organized intuitively. It’s not about how many clicks – it’s about smart clicks. I’m fine with a few more clicks if I’m making logical progress – then it’s mindless; it’s not work. Get Carl White talking about that subject at some point – it’s a huge pet peeve of his.

ISSUE #3 – CHANGING THE RULES WITHOUT TELLING US

But this is the one that kills me, and it’s really more about marketing and perception than anything else. Back when I was attempting to book my flights, the award chart (when I finally found the bugger) said that coach tickets were 25,000 miles for a round trip ticket excluding holidays, etc. That’s all it said. I was as far off-season as you could get, and every single combination of flights I punched in said that I’d need 50,000 miles. I called customer service and got a few different people, all of whom had different answers ranging from “that must be a mistake on the website, it’ll only take 25,000 when you book it” to “actually, that means 25,000 miles each way, even though it doesn’t say it” – so not only was the policy not communicated to customers, it wasn’t even communicated properly to customer service.

Let’s revisit that one statement, however – “actually, it’s 25,000 miles each way.” I had booked award travel before, and that was not the case. The website wasn’t telling me this was now the case. The metaphor for how I felt was this: it takes a LONG time to amass enough mileage to earn a flight…this was the equivalent of running a marathon, thinking you’re at the end of the race, and someone happily tells you “congrats, you’re half way!”

ACKNOWLEDGE IT, AND YOU OWN IT – HIDE IT, AND YOU’VE BLOWN IT

What is my point? Well, part of me just wants the cathartic release of blogging about this publicly. But the other part walked away with this: this episode happened right when gas prices were exploding and we all started feeling it, big-time. The fact that US Airways had changed their policy behind the scenes and not clearly communicated it made me angry for a few reasons, but probably the biggest was that I felt insulted – I felt like they thought I was too stupid to understand this simple equation: higher cost of fuel = higher cost of flying. Instead of owning it, and issuing a kindly and professional “we’re in this together” statement saying that the rising price of fuel that was affecting us all meant there would have to be some policy changes, there was silence – and what felt to me like an attempt to fool me into thinking that tickets could readily be had for 25,000 miles (turns out that those elusive fares are now called “mileage-savers”) , which was, and still is, misleading at best. So instead of being mad at the situation (whatever its cause), and being mad ALONG WITH the airline, I was simply mad AT them.

The lesson: always err on the side of treating your customers as intelligent human beings who can connect the dots. You can choose to communicate early and openly, or take the risk of being seen as dishonest and like you’re hiding something. And if you ARE hiding something…well, what goes around comes around, my friend.

AFTERMATH – A FEW IMPROVEMENTS

After this episode, I promptly canceled my US Airways mileage card (I now have an “anytime miles” card that is airline-independent…they don’t even know when I’m booking award travel! Tee hee!). However, I revisited the US Airways site for booking award travel before writing this to see if it had been updated in any way. Although the travel chart still doesn’t define what a “mileage-saver” is, when you try to book dates there is now a color-coded key telling you which dates are mileage-savers (25,000 miles round-trip), which are standard (50,000 miles) and which are blackout dates – a vast improvement from last time, when there was no explanation as to what those things even meant, let along indicators on the calendar. Picking dates was kind of like pin the tail on the donkey, but not nearly as fun.

For those who are curious:

Blackout Dates = any date within two weeks of something remotely interesting happening in the city you’d like to visit
Standard Dates = any other date that would be somewhat convenient to fly on
Mileage-Savers = a small handful of dates, always in the middle of the week, that would require taking a heap of days off from work to take advantage of (sucker!)

EPILOGUE

I still think the fact that roping people in by saying “25,000 miles for a round trip ticket!”, and then making it more difficult than panning for gold to find dates that apply, is dishonest. Another lesson: make people feel like they’re being abused or lied to, and they’re not going to like you very much. When people don’t like you very much, they will go elsewhere whenever they can.

P.S. We finally did book a flight – originally we were trying to fly to Santa Fe, but kept picking other cities until we found one that had a mileage saver opportunity…never again!

Apple Doesn’t Always Get It

Apple almost always Gets It. Design is integral to their brand and important to their customer base. But my recent experiences at the Apple store have demonstrated to me that even the mighty can slip.

We all know your users will always enter into an interaction with expectations for how things work. These expectations are based on conventions (good or bad) that your users have been conditioned to accept.

As a retail store consumer, when I walk into a store I feel compelled to execute my transaction at the counter with an object resembling a cash register. At an Apple store, you can go to anyone in a Genius t-shirt to complete your purchase. This is a great idea. Why shouldn’t I be able buy stuff from the folks on the floor? They’re smart enough to teach me how to set up my wireless network, they should be able to run my credit card through their nifty wireless devices. It’s Floor Clerk 2.0. Great idea, but bad execution…

Still looking for a good case

You see, nobody told me I could buy things from FC2.0. I went to the things that look like cash registers. For ten minutes, I stood in a huge line of frustrated customers at the counter until FC2.0 walked up to the line and told us we could buy stuff from any of the t-shirt clad FC2.0′s walking around the store. I left the line, found the closest FC2.0, and walked out in three minutes flat with my booty: a black and funky iPhone case that expressed my unique style and personality. Read more »

Gets It / Doesn’t Get It

From time to time, you’ll see posts on this blog categorized as “Gets It” or “Doesn’t Get It”.

It’s a simple concept. Think Brownstoners like to look at things, see if they work, take them apart and figure out how they tick. We like to applaud those who do it right, and when we see things that don’t work – we’ll take those things to task.

We’re not trying to attack anyone; we’re attacking design. Even the most talented designers can make bad decisions. For instance – Russ understands design better than anyone I know. If I need a second opinion on something I’m working on, I go to Russ. Russ is also a highly accomplished musician and rock historian. If I need to know who was the studio tambourinist on Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, I go to Russ. When it comes to design or music, Russ Gets It.

But even Russ has his faults. Perfect example: Russ is a fan of the 70′s rock band Uriah Heep. Yes… you read that right… Uriah Heep. He even met the band once, I think they were playing his 20-year elementary school reunion or his cousin’s sweet sixteen or something. When it comes to the Heep, Russ Doesn’t Get It. That doesn’t mean Russ always has bad musical taste. After all, he’s turned most of his friends onto the Rheostatics. Clearly, Russ Gets It 99.99 % of the time.

So, you see, when we find a design and say, Doesn’t Get It – we don’t mean they don’t get it all the time… we just mean this one is a hiccup. A lot of things can make a good designer skip a beat: timelines, technology, clients, regulatory/legal issues, or even nostalgia.

At Think Brownstone, we have worked through those issues our entire careers. You may be afraid your project ends up being a Heep, but we’ll make sure it’s not.