The Perils of Punditry

Yahoo acquired the social bookmarking service del.icio.us two and a half years ago, and essentially let it lie dormant. Yesterday the company rolled out a thoroughly overhauled del.icio.us, and the results are marvelous. If you have heard of del.icio.us but were put off by the austere interface and geeky URL, now is the time to give it a try. Check it out at the new and much less offputting delicious.com address.

The Information Architecture Institute has a vibrant listserv, filled with insightful comments and thought-provoking questions from skilled practitioners. Often the questions have to do with how to get a grip on what a client really needs. Steve ‘Doc’ Batty has just posted his response to that question as it relates to a User Experience project.

Batty’s list of User Experience questions is excellent because it helps clearly define the “why” of the project. This makes defining the “how” much easier.

When is the last time you heard someone crow about their mobile carrier? More often than not you’ll hear them complaining instead. They complain more often than not about how difficult it is to interact with these companies, rather than the cost of a mobile plan.

For example, in spite of the fact that I have a Verizon account, I don’t want to handle my interactions with them via my phone. The quality of call center personnel is always hit or miss, and frankly I’d rather just be able to look up my question on line and not waste time speaking with someone.

The other day I tried to find out my contract expiration date. I jumped through several hoops to get signed up with a My Verizon account, which they continually push customers to do. “Great,” I thought. “They’ll certainly have that basic piece of information available in My Verizon.”

Wrong.

I understand the reasoning. Why would they give me access to that information, when the odds are high that I’m only going to use that info to make a decision about whether to switch to another carrier now or at some point in the future? It’s 20th century business thinking at its worst.

Annoyed but determined, I used their email form to ask the question. Lo and behold, it’s actually a commonly asked question! So common, in fact, that it’s a menu selection in the email form. Who would have imagined? Gee, it’s almost like they want to make it more difficult for me to find out this important and rather rudimentary information. 

I’ve heard that other carriers do the same thing, and I’m not surprised. Contempt for customers seems to be a common theme in the telecom industry. Perhaps it is part of their conventional wisdom, which implicitly treats customers as rodents to be caught, caged, and placed in a Habitrail. I assume this approach has worked thus far. But it won’t work forever.

It reminds me of AOL in the 90s (and perhaps now, for all I know). They made you go through countless screens to get to a phone number they made you call in order to terminate your account. At one time AOL was a colossus. Now they’re a limping also-ran, run over by competitors who provided more for less, and listened to their customers.

In August of 2006 the iPhone was still a formless, shapeless phantom to those of us outside 1 Infinite Loop. Signal vs. Noise bemoaned the pathetic state of mobile phone technology, pointing out that most users simply didn’t use the extra capabilities of their phones because of “software/interface failures” and general incompetence from the market leaders.

The blog post elicited 71 comments. I threw my hat into the ring with this wish:

When we can get past the numeric keypad as the primary interface, we’ll be in business. Cellphones are not phones any more than cars are horseless carriages. The company that can build a completely new interface from the ground up could make life a whole lot easier for all of us.

My point was that the numeric keypad is a terrible interface for entering text and selecting functions. Hitting the “4″ button five times in order to text “hi” is proof that piggybacking text entry functions onto a numeric keypad creates inherently awkward interactions. I did not mean that numeric entry was unnecessary, but apparently that’s how it registered to one reader, who thought I was a dolt and made no pains to hide his impression of me:

This is an extraordinarily dumb statement. Not only are phone addresses the world over numeric, there are zillions of automated systems with primarily numeric commands. This statement demonstrates zero understanding of everything phone-related.

The commenter seems to have conflated the entry of numerals with the dominant fixed numeric keypad entry mechanism. I used the term “interface” twice in my brief post, but it still seems I didn’t make it clear enough that I wasn’t seeking to eliminate the numbers altogether. Then again, I’m not sure how I could have made it any more clear.

Perhaps the commenter simply couldn’t imagine a contextual touch screen interface. The function of sending numbers over a mobile phone had been handled by numeric keypads for decades, so how could one remove the keypad and not remove number capabilities?

I certainly didn’t know how it would be done. My guess was that Apple would use a scroll wheel to handle both text and numbers. I was, however, just smart enough to realize that while I couldn’t figure out a solution, someone else might. Apple succeeded by throwing out the old playbook and rethinking the mobile phone from the ground up. No wonder so many people were startled by the iPhone.

There are some excellent comments in the Signal vs. Noise thread, from people who underestimated what Apple would do and from people who appear to have been looking for exactly what Apple delivered.

Image Credit

Keypad Closeup by Bill Bradford - http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/149716493/ - Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license