A few days ago I got so frustrated with Korean Airlines’ online booking system I decided to share the horror with the rest of the world.
I admit, because of what I do I am a bit more sensitive about bad web pages. Sometimes I overreact and get cranky (you web designers know what I mean). But this is the second time I’ve ever gotten so far as to write about my bad experience on the web.
The whole thing started the previous night, when I lost my patience with their web site and called the sales line to make the order with a live person. I was surprised that the toll free number connected me to the USA (I live in Europe). The overseas call was paid by Korean Airlines so I did not care. I was connected to a nice lady, who spent about 20 minutes with me trying to find the right flight. What was very surprising to me was that she couldn’t email me the options she found, that my only options were either to buy the flight right then and there or write down all the times and flight numbers and hope I could find the paper again the next time I call the sales line. The lady was so kind and helpful I took a deep breath and wrote down all the details. Which I lost the next day, so I had to give the web a second chance.
I was buying two long distance flights for approximately three thousand dollars
The next morning I opened the Korean Airlines site, which is a narrow (760px) stripe looking a bit funny in the middle of my big monitor. Approximately 90% of the narrow space was covered with ads, menus and options I did not care about. What I needed was the flight booking form displayed using gray on gray tiny font, where the select boxes with dates are so small the data does not even fit and is partially hidden.
(This is a screenshot in actual size, the letters blending into each other is what gets displayed on the actual site)
When filling this form one has to choose the continent and then the city for the departing and return destinations. It is not possible to type in the airport code, or the date, which has to be selected from a miniature calendar. This turned out to be quite annoying when I filled out the form for the tenth time.
The next page showed the date I had selected with a price matrix displaying three previous and following days. I was flexible in the dates, so I wanted to make sure the previous or following weeks are not significantly cheaper, but I could not change the dates in the matrix, I had to go back to the home screen and keep filling the booking form again and again. Filling the stupid form from scratch every single time!
After about ten iterations I found the flight I wanted for $1200 and proceeded to selecting the flight times and other usual stuff. After 10 minutes of fine-tuning our journey to the maximum degree of perfection I realized I forgot to add my soon-to-be wife (I was booking a honeymoon) and I could not add another passenger at this point.
I had to start all over again.
At this moment I was getting really irritated, so the next obvious thing was that I made a mistake in the date. My excuse: I could not clearly see the date in the booking form, because it was half hidden in the small “select” box. When I discovered my mistake, the only option was to start all over again.
The next attempt got me almost there. I had gone through the price matrix, times, and even the inconvenient login form, this time I typed my and my girlfriend's names and proceeded to the checkout, gave my card number, billing address, expiration date, security code and all that. At the final check I realized my girlfriend will have different name after the wedding. Being so far in the process I could not believe I could not go back to change the name and my only option was to start all over again!
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I thought it will go fast this time. But after filling the destinations, dates and number of passengers, the price had changed and the flights were now $350 more expensive.
And here I have to admit I lost control and almost broke the keyboard.
I had spent almost two hours with this, did not accomplish anything and felt angry and defeated for the rest of the day.
How is it possible that airlines with billion dollar budgets give such a poor user experience when they’re booking a ticket - the most crucial part of their business? Fixing this problem by adding a back button is probably less expensive then the tickets I have bought. Changing the layout of their web, such that users can see the important information, would cost less than what KA must have paid for the phone call I made the to customer support centre?
How can a company be so ignorant and blind about how users interact with their systems?
My wife and I recently received a wonderful gift: an electric juicer. Normally, I fight to keep contraptions like this off our kitchen counters, which I view as workspace, not storage or display. But the juicer is a really neat machine (albeit a bitch to clean). Here it is:
Great piece of kitchen kit!
Our friends brought along a whole shopping basket full of berries, apples, oranges, limes, red beets, ginger, celery, and other goodies to stuff down its plastic gullet. But what was the best way to combine them? I needed some advice.
Alas, the user manual looked like a thousand other user manuals:
- exploded diagram showing all the parts
- lots of warnings to unplug the unit before doing anything (except using it)
- "Make sure unit is plugged in"
So much for creating a good experience...
What's wrong with this picture?"
Having created a great product, why didn't the manufacturer, OBH Nordica, try to inspire me? Why didn't they include a couple of simple recipes to get me started? Why didn't they tell me about how this monster conserves vitamins and gets them from
their mechanism to
my metabolism? Why didn't they follow through and help me complete the experience they were helping to create?
"That's what our advertisements are for," explained the myopic marketing maven I spoke with.
The sale is NEVER closed!
It's a big mistake to assume that once the sale is made, everyone will be happy. In fact, several software producers have asked us to help their customers get better results from their products. Lousy implementation will kill any product, no matter how well-designed it is. Right now, my twisted mind is wondering what would happen if I stuffed oysters into our shiny new juicer...
"Nobody ever reads the user manual"
Wrong! We might ignore a user manual if you also give us a well-written "Quick start" guide. But most people glance through the real user manual at some point - particularly for devices that feature:
- moving parts that need maintenance (cars, lawnmowers, sewing machines, etc.)
- disposable/replaceable bits and pieces (vacuum cleaners, coffee machines)
- bizarre behaviour when you push a particular button
And folks will
always read the manual if your product's user-UN-friendly interface is particularly antisocial. My Danfoss ECL Comfort 200 home heating controller, for example.
So, if folks are perhaps going to look at this documentation, why not make an attempt to produce something as appealing as the physical product itself? In terms of user experience, I think most manufacturers are really missing a great opportunity.
The exception is Sandberg
I recently bought a USB hub. Naturally, it came with a user manual. Here's the EU-friendly cover - featuring all the flags of all the languages in which the manual was printed:
Cover of the Sandberg USB-hub instructions
Now, as this is basically supposed to be a plug-and-play device, I was sorry to see that Sandberg thought a user manual was necessary. So imagine my delight when I opened it up:
What a delightful surprise! Very cute, indeed.
The Sandberg people apparently felt that a user manual was as unnecessary as I did. So they turned the whole thing into a joke - boring cover, but with useful suggestions inside. Great. I'm a fan. Sandberg is a brand I will look for in the future.
And that makes user manuals part of the business model (wink, wink)
What is YOUR product?
Nokia's "PC Suite" software is arguably the most distributed in the world. But it crashes many computers. Apple's iPad and iPod are slick physical objects and the user interfaces are pretty good as these things go. Yet iTunes (the software key needed to get anything into these devices) ranks as one of the worst programs I've ever used. Sears Kenmore vacuum cleaners are great, but the bags are pretty much only available from Sears, which usually means driving quite a distance (I couldn't find the "replacement part number" I needed on their website - or even at the outlet store to which I was sent).
In short, don't think that you can get by with a great product. Your documentation and support mechanisms are key parts of the entire use-experience scenario.
Have you heard about “content strategy”? If you work in website development, the chances are you have. But what is it exactly?
What is content?
In the online world, “content” means stuff you put on a screen – words, pictures, videos, animations, sounds. Of course, there is also offline content. For example, when Tommy Hilfiger stations cute little pippins in tight dresses around your local department store to hand out white paper strips that stink of some expensive smell he’s created, well, that’s content, too. The sexual allure is content. The fragrant strips of paper are content. The Tommy Hilfiger logo is content. In my world view, “content” affects all five of our senses.
But for the most part, “content” means words and pictures on a website or application. OK?
What is “strategy”?
In the military, there is talk of “strategy” and “tactics”. Mostly, strategy relates to goals whereas tactics relate to the methods needed to achieve these goals.
Strategy (as expressed by the Lieutenant): “We need to take that hill, men.”
Tactics (as expressed by the Sergeant): Fat guys behind rocks. Skinny guys behind trees.”
What is “content strategy”?
“Content strategy” means giving visitors – to a website or department store – whatever “content” they need to make a decision or carry out a task. The strategy part lies in how we present this content to influence these decisions and tasks. If we’re doing a sitemap for a website, we call this “information architecture”. If we station a girl in a department store, we call it “service design”. But it’s all closely related.
Here’s an article that shows how many content strategists view themselves:
http://knol.google.com/k/content-strategy#
Please note: I take exception to a couple of the things said in this article. I include it mainly to provide equal time to the hard-core proponents. I’m not out to declare war on anybody – but I do have a low tolerance for bullshit.
Birth of a buzzword
How did the web survive for so many years before “content strategy” came along? Surprisingly well - because “content strategy” has
always been part of the picture. It just got a new name and has since become a buzzword. I’ve had it on my business card for years simply because my clients didn’t understand the term “information architecture”. Incidentally, when I googled “content strategist” back in 2004 (when I first put the title on my card), there wasn’t a single hit.
My story isn’t unique. Many folks came to information architecture from a writing background. Think of “content strategists” as librarians who read
and write. Since we understood the content and were often providing it, too, we were the ones who got to create the sitemap.
Just for the record, my very basic description of information architecture is this:
- We gather stuff into convenient categories
- We call stuff by names people will recognize
- We put stuff where people can easily find it.
Remember, this is IA on a high, strategic level. Naturally, when you get down to the tactical nitty-gritty of information architecture, you’d better understand taxonomy development and the other cool stuff they teach at library school. This is also why there are no easily defined borders between the worlds of IA and CS. And if you ask me, who really cares as long as the job gets done properly – and in a way that provides measurable benefits.
Content becomes valuable by virtue of context
Here’s a piece of content:
“Strandøre 15. A ten minute walk north from Svanemøllen Station”.
For 99.99% of the readers of this blogpost, this snippet of content is irrelevant and therefore worthless. But if you were taking public transportation to the FatDUX office in Copenhagen, the content becomes useful and therefore acquires value. If content is king, then context represents the kingdom.
Information architects need to understand content. Content strategists need to understand context. In terms of traditional sitemaps, the boxes have no value without the interconnecting arrows. And the arrows have no meaning if there are no boxes to which to point. And that’s why there is so much gray area in the definition – and why the pedants will spend years fighting over definitions in the years to come.
Form cannot exist without content
There’s a video on YouTube that has achieved cult status. It is of the Russian singer, Eduard Kihl, featured in a 1966 video where he “sings” his hit song, “I Am Glad I'm Finally Going Home”. Actually, in the repressive Soviet Union of 1966, the lyricist apparently was unable to write a suitable poem that would meet with Party approval. So Kihl simply trololo’ed his way through the melody and today we giggle at the results.
My point in mentioning the "Trololo Video" here is that form without content becomes absurd. And now that I've provided some historical context for the video, perhaps you'll see that it is actually more tragic than comic.
The most attractive website cannot survive without meaningful and useful content – content that is arranged in a meaningful and useful way. And somebody needs to do the work - no matter what their official title.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z4m4lnjxkY&NR=1
Contrary to popular belief, Apple Computer didn't invent gesticular interfaces. Take a look at this short clip from the Warner Bros. Vitaphone production
Gold Diggers of 1935 (at the 27 minute mark of the movie). Choreographer Busby Berkeley seems to have figured out some key movements back in 1935.
In this scene, tenor Dick Powell is taking poor-little-rich-girl Gloria Stuart shopping in the basement arcade of a swanky new hotel. I apologize in advance for the quality; I simply used my camera to record my iPad in a decidedly analog fashion. (Don't even ask why this movie is in my iPad to begin with).
Notice, too, the graphic incorporation of metadata. Each department is coupled with the name of the woman in charge. For example, in "Lingerie", we find "Annette". Pretty sophisticated "menu" considering that this footage predates the birth of the web by 65 years.
If you want to see the entire number, here's a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=076OAOvEMJI&feature=related
