One of the strange things about doing user experience work on software is that there’s often a considerable lead time. The disconnect felt odd when I was working at Microsoft and I had finished my work on Office:Mac and had moved on to future releases long before the new version actually hit store shelves. And, of course, I knew intellectually that it would happen when I left Microsoft to join VMware. I knew what I was working on, and I knew all of release plans at that time, so I knew that my work wouldn’t see the light of day for some time. Even so, knowing that it would happen doesn’t make the disconnect feel strange when there’s no-one around to share the joy.
Category Archives: user experience
junior user experience researcher wanted
Are you interested in a job as a UX researcher? My team is looking for a junior researcher. This is a great position for someone who has just graduated (or is just about to graduate) from a UX, HCI, or similar degree programme, or someone who has a year or two of experience. We’ve just started looking, so I don’t have a job description to link to yet.
We have some other user experience openings, including:
If you’re interested, email me with your resume, and tell me which position you’re interested in and why you’d like to join me at VMware. And, of course, you can email me if you have any questions, too.
iPhone notifications and time zones
Before I went on vacation, I cleaned up my calendar. I declined meetings organised by others that I wouldn’t be attending, and I deleted my own events that no longer applied. This was mostly to remind others that I was on vacation, but also to ensure that my iPhone calendar only had stuff relevant to my vacation on it.
I missed one event, which is my team’s weekly meeting. This led me to notice a not-entirely-unexpected display bug with the notifications on my iPhone. The event on my calendar is in my home time zone (PST, GMT-8), and I was in another time zone (AEDT; GMT+11). The event fired at the right time, adjusting for time zone.
The notification itself has an error in the display: it shows the time for the meeting as being “yesterday”. Which it kinda is: the meeting is scheduled for Thursday at 4pm, but it is Friday at 9am in the time zone that I was in. The notification system should be smart enough to tell me when the meeting is in my time zone. I’m not necessarily near my phone with the notification sounds off, so I can’t tell just by glancing at the notification when the meeting is. The notification looks like it’s firing a day after the event, but it’s actually firing at the right time.
Notifications are only useful if I know what they’re notifying me of and what action I should take. By showing “yesterday” when an event is actually occurring now, I think that I’ve missed a meeting when I haven’t.
the user experience of shopping overseas
I’m currently on vacation in Australia. I’ve been here several times before, and lived here for a few months in 2000/2001. This time, I’m here with my husband, visiting his family for the holidays. We’ve been to Melbourne, driven the Great Ocean Road, seen the Grampians1, and are now back in Sydney for the remainder of the trip2.
Shopping here, or rather completing a purchase here, is quite different than what I’m used to. In the States, when I use my credit card, it’s almost unheard-of for the salesperson to compare my signature on the paper with that on my credit card. I’ve made quite expensive purchases at home, such as furniture or a computer, and not had my signature or identification checked. I’m almost never asked whether I’m using a debit card or credit card. Here, the credit or debit card is the first one asked, and I have to remember to just hit the OK button instead of entering a PIN. Likewise, every single salesperson checks my signature, no matter how small the transaction. Yesterday, I was in a grocery store purchasing drinks, and the self-checkout didn’t accept cash. So I put the five bucks on my card, and someone still came over to check my signature!
This is all pretty minor, and is never a big deal. It does show how well I’ve been trained in the US shopping experience. But this week, shopping in Myer (a large department store), I found a user experience in shopping that ticked me off. I tried to purchase a hat, having an ability to sunburn that’s unequalled by mere mortals. At the checkout, I swiped my credit card. After not entering my PIN, I was then presented with a statement of how much that this would cost in US$, and asking me to hit OK to accept this and CLEAR to not accept it. So I hit OK. Then I got the receipt, where they were actually charging me in US$ instead of letting my bank do the conversion. I wouldn’t mind this if their exchange rate wasn’t so bad, and if they weren’t charging me a 2.5% commission to boot.
Aside from the exchange rate and the commission that isn’t disclosed in advance, this is a really bad user experience. I don’t mind that they detected that my credit card is American. When Myer’s credit card machine showed me the US$ amount, I thought that it was simply a courtesy, and that hitting CLEAR was giving me an opportunity to back out of a transaction if I didn’t realise how expensive an item was after the conversion. The question is worded poorly on-screen. What I learnt later, only through trial and error, was that hitting CLEAR actually results in a charge in the local currency instead of my home currency, and thus my bank will do the conversion.
As a shopper, we’re well-trained to hit OK on all prompts. CLEAR is a button that you only hit in the case of an error on your part, such as accidentally entering an incorrect number in your PIN. You never move forward in a transaction by hitting CLEAR. Overloading CLEAR in this case results in additional confusion.
Furthermore, Myer appears to be the only shop doing this, so the purchasing experience is completely inconsistent with what happens when I purchase something in other shops. Their salespeople have no idea what the credit card machine is trying to communicate to me, either. The one who rang up the hat tried to tell me that I’d been charged in AU$ instead of US$. Of course, the receipt wasn’t exactly clear about what was happening either, so I can’t blame her for being confused by it.
Overall, the experience left a really bad taste in my mouth. Between the bad exchange rate and the commission, it feels like they’re taking advantage of tourists. I have to wonder what happens to the large number of Japanese tourists that I’ve seen in Melbourne and Sydney, who might not fully understand the English on the receipt. This experience with Myer has resulted in me skipping their stores entirely, and simply shopping at David Jones instead.
Before I left America, I researched my existing credit cards to learn which one had the best fee for purchases overseas. In the course of this research, I discovered that some other credit cards had changed their fees since I last looked, and found a few that don’t charge fees at all for overseas purchases. I ended up getting a new Visa card from PenFed, which both uses a fair exchange rate and has no fees for pretty much everything. Since I’m so happy with this credit card (their customer service has been exemplary so far, and the lack of fees has now made it the only card that I’m using here), I vastly prefer relying on them to handle my international purchases.
And no, I didn’t buy the hat. I went to David Jones and purchased one from a shop that I don’t feel like is actively trying to take advantage of tourists.
- Complete with a plague of locusts. ↩
- If you’re interested in what I’m seeing in Australia, I’m posting some pictures to twitter. I’m sure I’ll post the rest to Facebook when I get home. ↩
the user experience of lost luggage
Last week, I travelled to my hometown to visit my family for Thanksgiving. On the way home, the airline lost my luggage. Lost luggage is a bad experience all around. It’s been some time since my luggage has been lost (of course, I also usually don’t check bags), so I was surprised at how bad the user experience is for this occurrence.
There’s no status indicator for the luggage coming off the plane. You’re left to guess whether all of the luggage is off of the plane. This is especially difficult when you’re directed to a baggage claim that’s in use for multiple flights. It’s not really a lot easier when it’s just a single flight, though, since luggage appears in fits and starts. In any event, you have to guess whether you’ve waited long enough for your luggage to fail to appear.
Then it’s time to chat with the lost luggage guy. I consider that job to be akin to tech support, since you never call tech support when everything’s going well. There’s probably a queue, and it’s slow-moving. But this guy at least has some status information to share.
Problem is, his status information isn’t necessarily correct. In my case, he said that my bag had been placed on another flight. That other flight had originally been scheduled to leave before mine, but had mechanical issues and would instead land 45 minutes after my flight. I elected to wait to get my bag, learning an hour later that his status information was wrong. My luggage wasn’t on that flight, either. After checking again, his status information said that the luggage was lost.
Then I was directed to a kiosk to enter in my information for the bag to be delivered. I was appalled at how badly-designed it was. Amongst the questions that it asked was whether they could use a courier service like FedEx or UPS to deliver my bag. My reaction to that was that it meant that I wouldn’t see my bag until the next day, since the fastest shipping that they advertise is next-day delivery. I selected “no”, but then it didn’t tell me how or when my bag would be delivered. I was just prompted to enter my name, address, phone number, and email address. All of this is information that they already had on file. Instead of making me suffer through entering all of that data using the on-screen keyboard, it would’ve been nice if they had simply displayed the already-known information and asked me if that’s where I wanted my bag delivered.
At home, the bad experience continued. The website showed that my bag’s whereabouts where unknown. I finally got a call from the courier company, 6 hours after I’d landed, saying that they could deliver within a couple of hours. They did. Even after I had the bag, the website continued to show that my bag’s whereabouts were unknown.
In short, the lost luggage experience violates several user experience principles:
- show status information
- (corollary: show correct status information)
- provide accurate progress indicators
- minimise the amount of data entry required from the user
While none of these will make my luggage appear any faster, at least this would make me feel more confident in the ability of the airline to recover from their error and deliver my luggage to me in a timely fashion.
the design of the new Office:Mac icons
Along with all of the other changes, Office:Mac is sporting new icons for all of the applications. We worked with Frog Design to create these visual elements. Frog posted about redesigning an icon to talk about what went into creating the new app icons, and Fast Company Design has a discussion of it too: How Frog created the Mac icons for Microsoft Office 2011.
App icons are important. They’re one of the first things that you see when you install an application. They live in your Dock, and you see them every day. It’s important to get ’em right, and I think that Frog did an awesome job. I’m terribly biased, but I especially like that lovely goldenrod O that has been a constant companion in my Dock for months.
TechFlash interview with Eric Wilfrid and Takeshi Numoto
I just saw that my boss, Eric Wilfrid, and his boss, Takeshi Numoto, have an interview in TechFlash today: Mac and Windows: Microsoft’s two Office teams getting tighter. I especially like Eric’s question about how MacBU manifests its independence:
The pride is absolutely there in tailoring an Office experience for the Mac and for what Mac customers would expect. In 2011, you’ve probably seen the full-screen view in Word. That’s an experience that my team came up with based on Mac customer needs and something that we could do really, really well on the Mac. I think that you can expect to see us continue to do that, where there’s an experience piece of Office that really makes sense on the Mac, whether it’s full-screen view or the way we do the ribbon or the new dynamic reorder. We’ll continue to have a different voice that matches our customer needs.
And that is exactly why I do what I do!