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.