Good UX is harder to find but it does exist

Sometimes I get fed up with the amount of bad UX that's out there. It's much easier to find than good UX and therefore I find myself writing about it more often than good stuff. There are plenty of good lessons to be learned from bad UX but it is nice when you come across something genuinely good and that's what happened to me recently so I thought I should share it.

It's not unusual for me to order things from the internet - in fact I do more shopping there than anywhere else these days. Delivery companies are hit and miss to say the least but for a while DPD have stood out for me as a good example of user experience in the delivery sector.

The main reason for this is that some time ago they started sending me a text saying when my delivery would happen down to the hour. For example - "Your order will be delivered today between 14:22-15:22 by DPD driver Keith". They also give me the option to reply to the text and have the package delivered to a neighbour or reschedule for another day.

This is really nice for package recipients because the last thing they want when they're having a package delivered is to have to stay in all day hoping the package will arrive. More recently, I've had emails from DPD too with a link to a website that provides even better information. When I click on the link in the email I see this.

For me this is a brilliant linking of various technologies to improve the UX. The vans are all satellite tracked now and linking that data with the data from the handheld computers you have to sign to acknowledge delivery means DPD can tell me which delivery the driver is currently on and how long it will be before my delivery. This also means I can keep an eye out for the driver if I live in a place that's harder to find. That should ultimately cut down on the number of failed deliveries that they then have to put extra effort into - a win for the company.

As I said at the beginning of this article - it is really nice to find something that makes me go "wow, that's a great idea". I just wish it happened more often!

Simon on: ITCM - UX stretches beyond websites

User experience is something that most people believe only applies to websites, and while the UX of a site is important, when it comes to the events industry, it is something that should apply to the whole event.

Despite UX being very easy to get wrong, I think event planners need to look at their event through the eyes of an attendee to have optimum user experience and with it, a successful event.

Agree with me? Read the whole article featured on ITCM, by clicking here.

Pathetic unsubscribe mechanisms drive me crazy!

I suspect most of us are inundated with spam email these days. Some of it comes from unknown sources - that's true spam in my book but plenty of other email messages come from a retailer or mailing list I signed up to once upon a time.

Over time, I find that either they send me far too many emails or I just get bored of the content. If I notice that I'm not reading the content of emails from a particular retailer or mailing list for a while then I tend to unsubscribe to cut down on the volume of stuff in my inbox.

Doesn't sound too complicated so far does it? Well, the problem is that I have a number of email addresses that all go into my inbox. The problem then comes when I click on an "unsubscribe" link in an email and I'm presented with a stupid form that asks me to enter my email address.

"Stupid form" is quite a general description so let me explain further. If this was a "smart form" then it would know who I was. The retailer has sent me an email that generally is personalised to me (it normally has at least my name in it) and so they should easily be able to track which email address they sent the email to. Instead they make me play a guessing game where I have to try various email addresses until I find the one that they sent the email to.

That's bad enough but in fact, some unsubscribe mechanisms are much, much dumber than that. Let's take Aldi as a prime example. I subscribed to their newsletter a while ago but I then got multiple emails a week advertising baby food and all sorts of other "special offers" that had no relevance to me. So, I decided to unsubscribe and that's where the pain started...

Now in Aldi's defence, they did tell me the email address that the email had been sent to at the bottom of the page. That said, I could easily tell that their unsubscribe link is personalised but their form still doesn't know which email address I want to unsubscribe from.

Clicking the link takes me to a ridiculously slow loading web page (it took 25 seconds when I tested on a nice fast connection) and then I see the "Subscribe to our newsletter" page that looks like this

My screen is fairly large but I still can't see anything on the screen that talks about unsubscribing until I scroll down the page at which point I see this form

ok - at last I'm getting somewhere - so I filled in the only mandatory field on the form and clicked "Newsletter unsubscribe". Sadly, there are no bounds to the Aldi web team's stupidity - I got put back at the top of the form where I was unable to see the error message that is being presented for me. That requires me to scroll down again at which point I see this

Oh great - so a field that isn't marked at mandatory is actually mandatory even though there's only one option and I'm unsubscribing so it should be fairly obvious what I want to unsubscribe from. Still, I'm nearly there so I tick the box and hopefully leave the mailing list forever.

Unfortunately for me - the first time I tried this I went through the whole process on my mobile only to reach the end of the process and be told it wasn't possible to unsubscribe. 

Wow - how stupid is this process! If they have a dedicated page to say that I couldn't unsubscribe then why the hell can't they record my email address and say that they'll fix it for me later?

Sometimes - even processes that should be incredibly simple and pain free for the end user end up being complicated beyond belief by bad development. I'm sure there were undoubtedly some "geniuses" in corporate meetings who thought it was all excellent - they should get at least some of the blame too. I also realise that there is a possibility that the developer(s) protested at how crap this all was and was shouted down by their managers but there are also lots of bad developers out there!

The UX of any interaction between your clients and your website is vitally important and even big companies sometimes show just how badly it is possible to do it. When designing a system you should always try and experience the system from the customer's perspective - make sure you know how painful it is to use the system so you can make it better!

Simon on: Compelling content

A recent conference session included information from research carried out for MPI a couple of years ago. When asked to identify the most effective elements of a hybrid meeting, planners chose online chats, rebroadcast recorded sessions, online Q&A with speakers and virtual breakout rooms.

Attendees, on the other hand, put compelling content as easily the most important factor.

In itself this difference of opinion may not matter were it not for the fact that, if the MPI figures are right, content was put in a clear first place by attendees while planners reckoned it a poor seventh.

Why was this? Do planners want to boast about having the latest gizmos at their events or have suppliers’ sales people convinced them they can’t survive without this or that technology?

Whatever the reason, planners need to understand that the answer to the question, ‘how do you engage the attendees?’ isn’t ‘use the latest tech’ it’s ‘get the content right’.

Because if the content isn’t right, the sexiest technology in the world isn’t going to save the conference. The attendees will all be sitting with their heads bent over their mobile devices and they won’t be sending tweets about what a great conference they’re at.

Originally published in Conference News