user experience
It should not be difficult, slow or aggravating to use the website of a leading virtual fax service (eFax) to cancel a $16.95/month account. But it is all three.
For starters, you can't just fill out a form and cancel. Ugh! Anytime you enter a customer service web interface and find that canceling or downgrading an account requires either a phone call or an online chat session, beware. You are being "upsold" or "retention sold." (Newspaper companies, my old stomping grounds, maddeningly do this all the time. Want to subscribe online? Sure. Want to put in a vacation hold? Sure. Change your address? Absolutely. Want to cancel? WTF?)
Lots of lessons about what not to do in my chat transcript with eFax, which follows. Note that this is not the entire conversation -- I did not include two false starts with chat hosts who pointed me to a dead web page and then suddenly logged off. This is just the final attempt:
Please wait for a site operator to respond.
Despite plenty of conversation and posturing, we're a long way from regulations or even standards for a "Do Not Track" registry as pushed by the Federal Trade Commission.
If "Do Not Track" were to come about, would that be the end of many of the ad targeting forms we have seen evolve on the web, in email marketing and elsewhere on the Internet?
I doubt it.
Geographic targeting gets better with each new consumer conversion from proxied dial-up accounts to broadband. If you visit a site using home DSL, cable or fiber access, or use the mobile web via a 3G or 4G connection, chances are the broadband Internet provider sends along a host name that at least reveals what town you're in, if not what part of town. This targetable -- though not personally identifiable -- bit of information goes to the site even if you use a browser that successfully anonymizes you and your computer.
With today's launches of Operation Tune-Up on KPAX.com in Missoula and KAJ18.com in Kalispell, Cordillera Interactive finished its rollout of new site architectures to all seven station.com sites Cordillera runs in Montana.
We will pause and sigh, relieved, before moving on to more site launches the first weeks of October, November and December.
We stepped up our game nicely in Big Sky Country, and that's just for starters. Op Tune-Up sits very early in a long cycle of new product development and enhancements.
Cordillera is not a big company, and we do not operate in top-25 markets -- but the work our corporate and local teams do, on projects like Tune-Up and everyday operations, stacks up against anything I've seen in the big towns. Makes my job a lot of fun!
Cordillera Interactive launched two more Montana site rebuilds this week in its Operation Tune-Up project: KTVQ.com in Billings and KXLH.com in Helena. Here's the before (left) and after.
The changes under the hood matter most in this project, as I described last week: lighter page weights and scripts mean faster load times and fewer nagging browser incompatibilities. Visually, we cleaned a lot of things up, but the differences should not be jarring or confusing to an occasional visitor.
We'll finish Montana sites quickly then move on to a series of launches in early October. As always, I welcome comments from my friends in the user experience and Web programming fields.
I have not shared much here about my new role leading Cordillera Interactive. I have wanted to, but had very little time to share stories of our rapid progress on this blog.
This week, we have something I'll pause to shout about.
Back in spring, we started a project to update the designs and underlying HTML/CSS architectures of our TV station.com sites. We named the project Operation Tune-Up.
Starting yesterday, we moved Operation Tune-Up out of the lab and onto its first site: KRTV.com in Great Falls, Montana. We still face a couple more days of inevitable debugging and clean-up work. But you can see the effects of Tune-Up on the KRTV.com home page, story pages and most index pages.
Thanks to Joey Martin, CI's senior director of operations, and his folks nationwide (with a special hat-tip to Neil Wagner in Billings, who also provided the terrific graphic design) for a successful launch!
We wanted big improvements in three key elements of the site user experience, and we think we got 'em:
- Site pages, especially the home page, load much faster. That, alone, justifies the project.
- Site content is easier to find.
- Stories are easier to read.
KTVQ.com in Billings is on deck for Tune-Up, and we'll start that launch process as soon as we winnow down the clean-up list for Great Falls. All Cordillera station.com sites get their own Tune-Ups before the end of the year.
Would I invest our limited resources in a Web tune-up if I felt the Web were dead? Maybe not, but I don't think it matters. My objectives in any interactive redesign project roll up into two main principles:
- A redesign should make the next redesign faster and easier to execute. At some point, the pace of user interface innovation on the mainstream/consumer Web may begin to slow, but for now, the end of one design project still seems to signal the beginning of the next. So we have to cut the time and resource requirements to keep up.
- A redesign should make it easier to collect, store and distribute all kinds of content assets using today's, and tomorrow's, communications forms. Get it from anywhere, anyone, anytime. Put it anywhere, with anyone, anytime. Seems simple, really isn't, but we should push to make it simpler with every project.
If we succeed at both of those, and the Web does die, we're still OK -- ready for smartphones, tablets, car-dash systems, home media centers or virtual carrier pigeons. Whatever we learn along the way, we can and should share with our paying customers -- advertising clients.
Hope you like the new KRTV.com!
