It was the second straight time that I had received this message after pumping gas at a neighborhood station. Doesn’t that sort of defeat the whole purpose of paying at the pump. I want convenience. I want to be able to pump my gas, get my receipt, not have to interact with anyone, and then get on my way. I wonder if they do this on purpose to get people into the store, where they are enticed to buy something sweet.

A poor customer experience.

Tonight on the way home from the office, I was at my neighborhood Walmart. One of the things I like about this store is that it is close to my house and it is convenient. One of the reasons for it’s convenience is self-checkout. But on recent visits, those lanes have been closed and only one register is open. So I have to stand in line when I want to be on my way home.

Tonight, they only had two of the four self checkout lanes open. It meant I had to stand in line there, or go to another line where I had to interact with a cashier. I want convenience and to be on my way to spend time with my family.

Another poor customer experience.

Where Shopping is a Pleasure

Contrast my Walmart experience with going to Publix later tonight. (I really like Publix but go to Walmart more often because it is closer to my house and the prices are lower.) Publix’s tag line is “where shopping is a pleasure.” I cannot think of an experience I have had at Publix where it was not a pleasure. I actually like interacting with Publix employees because they have a smile on their face and genuinely want to serve the customer. They value their customers. I don’t always feel that way at Walmart.  I usually leave Publix with a smile on my face, or at least in my heart because it has been a pleasurable experience.

Going Online

As a Web designer, I think a lot of customer or user experience. My passion for user experience comes from the fact that before I was a Web designer, I was a Web user and I still am. I learn so much by reflecting upon my own experiences online.

Tonight, I was online trying to register for State Farm’s Web site. My car insurance premium is due and wouldn’t you know it, I am out of checks. I hardly ever use checks except to pay a few bills and give to my local church. So I went online to pay my bill. It would have been nice if State Farm mentioned this online payment option on my bill. I found out about this option by calling my local agent. I can only describe my online experience as painful. I had log-in multiple times and encountered several application errors before completing my task. A poor experience.

Minutes later, I was paying my Discover bill online. Discover has a great Web site. They make it easy for you to get your task done and get on with your life. A lot of the success of their user experience is due to the visual design that make the interactions clear. Nice big buttons help me to navigate my way to my destination. Of course, most of the time, I don’t even think about the experience. It meets my expectations and I accomplish my task. Not memorable but definitely pleasurable in the sense that I accomplish my task and come move on to things like writing this blog post. Way to go Discover Card.

So what do I take away from my experiences tonight. I am challenged to consider how I help the people that use the sites I design.

• Are the call to actions clear?
• Can they easily find what they want?
• Are they able to accomplish their tasks quickly and move on to some other aspect of their life?
• Does the visual design I create provide an pleasurable environment that the user may not be consciously aware of?
• Do those who visit my sites have a good experience as they accomplish their task? In the end, that is what matters the most to me.

How do your good or bad experiences in the offline or online world affect your work as a designer or developer? Please share your thoughts.

“In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say ‘no’ to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world.” — Dave Caroll

This video show the importance of providing a good customer experience. United Airlines failed. And this guy has created expressed that.

What I like about this video is that it is not hateful and angry, but it is a really classy and truthful response to a frustrating  situation.

Thanks to Chris Coyier for sharing this on Twitter via The Huffington Post

Chris points out the problem with most CMSs is that they are really only useful to Web people, those who have experience with working with Web sites. WordPress is Chris’ favorite CMS and mine as well. But as I have done more development with WordPress, I see that is does fall short in really empowering content owners in the way that I would want.

A possible solution: “light” CMSs. There are a growing number of these solutions available on the market today. Several of them are free services and at least one of them costs money. One of the reasons that I like WordPress is that it is free, open source software that is continually developed. The price is right for the non-profit organization I work for.

These light CMS solutions contain less features which make them simpler, and I believe, a better user experience for the content owner.

Here are the light CMS solutions that Chris highlights in his article:

• Unify — Currently in private beta. It is a product of Unit Interactive which is headed up by Andy Rutledge, one of the designers I follow on Twitter and RSS. I was not able to take a close look at it.
• Cushy CMS — this seems to be the first player in the light CMS. It is a free service.
• Page Lime — in free public beta. It has a visual editor and reminded me of Contribute.
• Perch — I really like their Web site and they have great documentation. Perch costs about $57 per domain. You host it on your own server.

Anna Debenham reviewed Perch on this week’s Boagworld Podcast. She has also used Cushy CMS. She pointed out that the major advantage of using Perch over Cushy CMS is that the files are all hosted on your own server with Perch. She had problems with the Cushy CMS server going down which meant the service was unavailable. PageLime is also hosted on their servers.

Cushy CMS, PageLime, and Perch have videos introductions about their service and good documentation to get started. It seems pretty easy to implement any of these three solutions. Cushy CMS and PageLime involve adding classes to your HTML code. Perch involved using specific PHP tags and reminded me a lot of WordPress.

From the little research I did this afternoon, I believe that Perch would be the product that I would choose. Yes, it costs money, but the big advantage is that you don’t have to worry about another server going down that you have no control over. As I mentioned, some of it’s features remind me of WordPress. It would take more technical knowledge to setup Perch. It looks like their templating system is quite powerful and gives more control to the Web designer or developer. But the advantage it has over WordPress is it’s simpler interface for the content owner.

One final note: I really liked Perch’s site. It has nice texture and illustration. It uses JQuery for some fun animated effects. The birds in the tree at the bottom animate and move into the screen on pages where you can see the footer right away.

A very telling video about what the average person is thinking when they use the Web. I listened to an interesting discussion about this subject on Sitepoint’s podcast.

I think the reason there is confusion about the difference between a browser and a search engine is the integration of search into the Web browser. Search is the function that users do the most of. I could see why they don’t understand the difference.

I believe this video is evidence that a lot of people are not so concerned about which browser they use and will probably stick with their default. Web designers are going to still have to consider IE6 for a long time and then determine what strategy to employ with IE6.

One strategy that I am investigating is Andy Clarke’s Universal IE6 CSS. I have implemented it on this site. I like the idea of serving up the user the basic content without styling.

BTW, a browser is software that you use to view Web pages. The more popular browsers include Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome.

A search engine is a Web site that you use to search for things on the Internet. Two of the most popular are Google and Yahoo. Many modern Web browsers use Google when you use the Search box in the right hand corner of the browser.

Yesterday afternoon, I received this email from raysbaseball.com. I had bought tickets over the weekend to see today’s game.

I was really impressed with the information in this email. It told me about the starting pitchers for both teams and had links to relevant statistics. There were also links to information about visiting Tropicana Field. And it was information relevant to have a better experience at the baseball game.

This is a great example of thinking beyond your Web site and having a Web strategy. It utilizes other technology means to enhance the experience of the product, a Major League baseball game.

Paul Boag recently posted 10 ways to put your content in front of more people. This email is a fine example of what Paul was mentioning.

A talk from SXSW on the clever things designers put in their design to add pleasure to the experience. I listened to the audio but look forward to viewing the slides since this was a very visual presentation. I would like to think more about the ideas presented here. It goes on usability to adding value to people’s experience and I am really motivated by that in design.

First, You have to go to the top right to a “home” graphic to link back to the home from a secondary page. It took me several seconds to figure out how to get back to the homepage when I got deeper in the site. I would suggest making the site branding into a link back to the homepage which is a common practice.

Second, the polaroid photos in the Flash animation eventually cover up the last parts of the sentences in the welcome message. Not a good practice to cover up text that is conveying a message. A small but important detail to make sure one page element does not overlap another and make it unreadable.

This site serves as a reminder to me that elegant design needs to also be usable and think about the experience of the user. Sites “behave,” they are not just an artistic canvas. I want to be able to create sites that are elegant and provide a good user experience.

Given all that, I do like the visual design of this site. The monochromatic is nice and gives character to what the Web site is promoting so I think it does a good job of visual communication. The photos look even more vibrant because they introduce other colors into this brown palette. I also like the “realness” feel of the site and real world objects such as the photos, tape, paper, and passport.

This site is drawing you into the world of being a student at Baldwin Wallace. Jared Spool classifies this kind of content as Inukshuk content (see previous post to find out more about Inukshuk content).

One thing that got my attention is that it looks like once you are a student at this college, you are able to create an “action plan” online that your professors access and make recommendations based on what is in that action plan. I think this site uses Flash well to create a good user experience as you meet 4 different students and hear their stories.

What? I look through the letter that came with my card. There is nothing that says “verification code.” The instructions tell me if I do not have the code to enter my business phone number. I try that and told I am not in the system.

My colleague had just finished talking to a person so I ask him how he got to that point. He said that he just did not enter anything when asked for verification code. I decided to press “0” and I talk to a person. So after three phone calls, I finally activate my card. It would have been a whole lot nicer if I had been given better instructions on the front end and the telephone menu had told me that I could press “0.” I have learned that through experience but it still would be helpful. The phone system did not have an “escape” clearly noted (I’m learning about that in a book on interaction design).

Just another reminder of how important experience design is.

I like what this comic from Josh Porter communicates and I like how he chose to communicate it. those that read/use our Web sites are not so concerned about which is more important, design or content. What is important to them is that they can use it or that they want to use it.

MySpace is a great example. From a design standpoint, I hate it and it irritates me. I no longer use it partly because I did not like the design but I also did not care for the raunchy ads or the friend requests I was receiving. But I digress …
A lot of people do like the site because they use it. They use it to keep up with their social network. (One of the biggest reasons I left MySpace is that my social network was not using it. But they are using Facebook and I use it.) People using MySpace are not thinking about design or content but that the site is allowing them to do what they want to do, keep up with those in their social network.

This comic serves as a good reminder to me to keep what is important to the user as the most important thing. I think both good design and good content will lead to better use but a good evaluation of a site would be, is it being used?

You can take a tour of the new features which uses Flash video. It combines screenshots, animation, video of Martha and her voice over. I was wowed by the first experience I had with the site. I particularly liked a “Photo Gallery” module that uses CSS and Javascripting. I would love to learn how to do that.

Usability answers the question, “Can the user accomplish their goal?�

User experience answers the question, “Did the user have as delightful an experience as possible?�

Read the full post by Jared (one of my Web design superheroes)

I thought about this again this morning when I read Josh Porter’s latest post, 7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail. One of the reasons is that the apps are sold the wrong way. He suggests talking about “how your app empowers users to improve their life.” It reminded me of some of the things I have been reading on Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users blog. This leads me back to the need to answer the question, “what problem is a website trying to solve?” so I can understand how the solution should improve user’s lives or their ministry.

As it becomes easier and easier for designers to pack more features into the little boxes they want us to buy, it’s going to become more and more important to ask the questions about which features should be included and how will those features improve our lives. This is what experience design is all about…

This is part of a post by Jared Spool. I post it here mainly for myself. I found this helpful to think about for the future. I think about being part of team’s creating tools and features that will help make ministry happen on local campuses. I want to keep these two questions in mind: which features should be included and how will they improve the lives of those they are intended to help.

Web 2.0 has empowered me to get the content I want without having to go browse for it. Using RSS feeds, I can “subscribe” to a blog or website. My RSS reader goes out and finds the new content and “delivers” it to me. Sites like Flickr empowers me to share photos with others or use other people’s work to enhance my own. Using this blog, I can share with others things that I have learned or tools that I have found helpful. That empowers others as I have been empowered through many of the blogs that I read.

So Web 2.0 is really about creating better user experiences that that users can easily accomplish their end goal whether it would be to find good content, share a picture, connect with their friends, find an apartment, purchase something or become more productive in their work.

Last week when I purchased some books, I went back to my wishlist to delete them and noticed that Amazon had automatically done it for me. I was so excited.

This is an issue of useability and to me it only made sense that once I purchased something from my Wishlist, that item would be removed. I am glad that Amazon finally made that a reality.