Company forums, personal information and the World of Warcraft

Those of you who have forums on your Web site understand that spammers and trolls can be a real nuisance. Perhaps you can relate to the trouble Activision Blizzard has with dealing with the multitude of undesirable posts on their official World of Warcraft forums.

On July 6th, Activision Blizzard, Inc. unveiled a controversial plan to help regulate the forums: Anyone posting on forums would have their real name displayed. The philosophy is that with real names associated with each posting, personal accountability will come into play and subscribers will be more civil. There was immediate backlash from WOW subscribers and users concerned about this proposed policy change. Personal privacy advocates were particularly concerned about publicly displaying real names in connection with Warcraft. Posters also worried about the possibility of cyberstalking and out-of-game harassment.

In an attempt to show how "harmless" the proposed change would be, a forum moderator posted his real name in the Blizzard Forum discussion on this topic.
Within minutes, community members posted all matter of personal information on him. Using only Google searches and his real name, they found and posted such info as his:

• Cell phone number
  
• Twitter and Facebook accounts
  
• Personal photos
• Mailing address
  
• Maps to his house.

The community used this opportunity to illustrate how much information can be easily gathered, and how it could be dangerous when your real name is displayed in the forums.


There are simpler ways to combat undesirable posters than by publicly displaying personally identifying information. In her post, forum moderator Nethaera provides the basic methods used in forums to ensure that useful information will be seen and found by users:

• Having the community rate posts (the Slashdot commenting model)
• Highlighting posts based on rating (YouTube's "highest rated comment" model)
  
• Improving forum search
  
  YouTube has successfully adopted most of these methods to improve the comments on their videos (highest rated comments, voting up/voting down and automatically hiding spam/comments with a low rating).

The lesson is that spammers and trolls will make it on to your company forums, as they find their way onto EVERY board. The undesirable posters can manage to defeat almost any automated security precautions you can set up. The presence of an active group of forum moderators (employees of your company or a trusted enthusiast of your brand) goes a long way to creating an active, safe community. Even though forum trolls and spammers are a nuisance on forums, you do not need to take the drastic measures of posting your customer's personal information to combat them.

-by Kyle Kulakowski

Good food, great Web experience

Recently I ordered Domino's Pizza for the first time in years and discovered that the new sauce isn't their only innovation. Their new Web site includes the Domino's Tracker, an application that gives you the real-time status of your order (the Tracker activates after an order is placed, so I'm including a screencap from a recent order). A glowing status bar tells you exactly where your pizza is from the moment you place the order, to when Terrence puts it in the oven, to when Dmitri the delivery driver is en route to your house. It's a great example of online customer service.
One of the drawbacks to delivery service is the open-ended nature of the delivery time. A quoted delivery time of 45 minutes could mean anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes before that pie hits my counter. As the timer ticks down I often end up perched on the edge of my couch, eagerly jumping up each time the outside gate creaks only to be disappointed by my neighbor's face. As a customer, I love the transparency offered by this app. No more guessing about if I have time to take a shower or run to the bank.

That simple addition to their Web site made for such a great brand experience that, a week later, I ordered another pie just so I could get screen caps of the Tracker in action. Now my only question is how long will it take other brands to do something similar?

Babysitting the interface: The myth of self-service

As we prepared for another road trip and the attendant joy of air travel in America in 2010, I was musing about the common sight of a human being helping passengers use the so-called "self-service" kiosk. It was in that frame of mind that I went to Facebook; I had to laugh when I saw this screen with the instruction: DO NOT CLICK THE "Go to Application" BUTTON ON LEFT!

Human intervention with software, Web pages, and kiosks is a regular occurrence across corporate America. You see it first-hand at airport counters, supermarkets, a co-worker's desk. We see it inside call centers and controlled environments. How much does this cost business, education, and nonprofits every day?

Well into the year 2010, we are still seeing an utter failure to budget - or even account for - the design of information structure, meaning: Where will this digital media experience begin and end? How does the user know where he is in the morass of content? How do you know whether you've seen and experienced all the content? How does he get to related content? Did anyone design or plan this experience? What are the opportunity costs related to this basic failure of planning?

In 2000, seven years into the commercial Web, a failure to plan and structure digital media interaction was understandable. Skeptics were still expecting (or hoping) that the Web would die. In 2010, the failure to plan and structure digital media is unforgivable.

If your digital media project lacks a budget item for information design (information architecture, task sequence design, user interface design), it is destined to under-perform and disappoint. Web sites and applications, software applications, kiosks, intranets, instrumentation interfaces - any digital implementation must include planning and architecture beyond simple functionality and appearance.

The Self-Service and Kiosk Association begins to address the usability issue in a blog post by Stephen Kendig, but the industry is just beginning to scratch the surface. If we use the Web as an object lesson, bad information design proliferates more quickly than good design. We will be living in a dystopian reality if the same problem propagates across self-service in a world that seems determined to eliminate human-powered customer service. The current economic woes will only exacerbate the problem.

If we're going to eliminate the human from the equation at all the transaction points of daily life, the digital interface must be bulletproof. Else we are destined for the worst of both worlds - unhappy customers, unhappy workers. Babysitting an interface is no one's career goal.

Error message of the day from Tweaker Speakers Grandmax

I loved my Tweaker Speakers until one inexplicably died. So I go to Grandmax for tech support. After clicking the support link, here's the error message:

"We're sorry, we're temporarily undergoing maintenance!
[Saeven|CRM cannot operate with register_globals set to 'On'. Set this to 'Off' using php.ini or a .htaccess directive, and restart your webserver thereafter.]

If you would like to contact us in the interim, please do so at admin_at_toqen_dot_com"

Grrrrr.

Verizon: I love the Droid. I hate the Web site. How do I register for My Verizon?

On hold with Verizon for the second time after a dropped call... the problem is not my new phone or your great employees. It's - guess what - the My Verizon Web site! This is a great example of how brand experience must remain consistent from the Web (great promo site), to the physical store (great customer service), to the product (the rockin' Droid), and then back to the Web (broken Web site for account self-service). After much research on the Android phones, I finally settled on the Droid. I've had it for 24 hours and I love it. I got great service from Steve Liermann at Verizon's Park Place Tucson store (where I set a record for number of contacts transferred). And then... I tried to register for My Verizon Business version. Big mistake.

I've completed the registration form six times (twice in Safari, four times in Firefox). The Verizon rep is experiencing the same errors. Either the form asks me to input the business contact number (already there) or the wireless number (already there). There is clearly a bug in the form since the error toggles. Plus common interface problems (fields for phone number entry) that sure do look like sheer laziness.

After an override by the rep we finally got the My Verizon account set up. Time lost: Nearly one hour.

Verizon: Your network rocks. The Droid rocks. Your employees rock. Your My Verizon registration experience does NOT rock. The little laminated card you gave me with registration instructions says, "we've got your back." Not so much! It says all I need is my phone number. Not true.

This problem could easily be solved. We at Interface Guru would be happy to help.

If this is what buying the Droid via ecommerce would have looked like, I probably would have given up. Verizon! Wake up! Love ya mean it but fix this Web site!

Who exactly is taking my money? Poor usability = reduced online sales

It's ironic that online check-out - the point in ecommerce at which users are most sensitive - is the point where many Web sites fail to provide the brand consistency that users need to feel confident about entering personal information and credit card numbers.

Abrupt interface changes (from the main Web site to the ecommerce application) are the most common - and most destructive - usability problems on ecommerce sites. A startling new interface with different branding, combined with a new URL, will give pause to any user, regardless of technical literacy. They wonder: Am I on a different site? Is the privacy policy different? Who exactly is taking my money?

When someone decides to purchase from your Web site it's because they trust you and your brand. Our own research and usability testing has shown scores of users halting and not completing transactions when they encounter an unfamiliar screen at the point of interaction.

What caused this problem? Initially, many Web sites did not have ecommerce functionality, so it was bolted on as an afterthought. Third-party applications were used as the ecom stopgap. Brands were not allowed to customize these interfaces. The result: A bumpy ride for the user, reduced sales for the company. See examples below of the inconsis

The solution: Bring ecom under your primary Web property so users trust you - leading to increased online sales. Plan for ecommerce within your information architecture.

Example of a third-party payment system

Clicking on conEdison's "Pay by credit card" option takes you to a third-party company that handles the payment. The transition is jarring for several reasons:

• New URL doesn't mention conEdison
• NCO logo replaces conEdison's in the upper left
• New color scheme
  
• New privacy statement.
  

The payment agency does responsibly provide a link to their own privacy policy and disclaimer that they are a third party that handles payments. Yet, other than the inserted conEdison logo, it's difficult to tell that this page relates at all to conEd's parent site.

Privacy policies: Impacting conversion and online sales?

The last few years have yielded discussions of the role of text in interface, or text as interface. Stepping away from conventional interface design for a moment, we applied the principle of text as interface to an evaluation of the privacy policies on Amazon.com and Yahoo.com.

What did we find?
We learned that Amazon's privacy policy is highly specific about the type of information it harvests about its users, whereas Yahoo glosses over much of the same information. The end result is the appearance of a lack of transparency on the part of Yahoo, compared to Amazon's extremely specific and open policy statement.

Why does this matter?
Our usability studies have shown that privacy policies and clarity of how well they're stated directly impacts a user's likelihood to complete an interaction. Amazon and Yahoo both admit to collecting the following information:

• Email address
• Login, name and password
• Cookie information
• Address
• Occupation
• Social Security number
• Personal descriptions/interests
• Software and hardware attributes
• IP address

What else is collected?
Yahoo remains vague, whereas Amazon specifies that the following information is collected and why:

• Computer and connection information such as browser type, version, and time zone setting
• Browser plug-in types and versions, operating system, and platform
• The full Uniform Resource Locator (URL) clickstream to, through, and from our Web site, including date and time
• Content of reviews and e-mails to us
• The phone number you used to call our 800 number

Who else gets my information?
While both companies state that your information is shared with third parties and trusted partners, only Amazon lists names, which include:

• Target
• CD Now
• Verizon Wireless
• Sprint
• AT&T

Google Dashboard - a move in the right direction

Google's announcement today of Google Dashboard is a start in creating greater transparency. It allows you to view and manage information that Google is currently capturing. For example, you can view privacy policies and manage setting for all your Google accounts such as Blogger, GMail and Chat, view which of your data is private and which is visible to others, and remove items from your Web history.

We at Interface Guru encourage you to make use of tools and services that openly declare their usage of your personal data. Facebook's lack of transparency has been a recent hot topic - and rightfully so. Stand up for your digital rights!

Southwest Airlines extends great customer service with call-backs

Once again Southwest Airlines proves they get customer service, and the way you think. If you are going to be on hold for more than three minutes, they allow you to leave your number and recorded name, and they tell you EXACTLY how long it will be before they call you back ("three to six minutes" in this case). When they call back, they use your voice recording to say, "when this person is on the phone please press 1" (which means they realize the caller may not be at their regular number). They called me back before I had a chance to finish this post, and I will continue to choose them first! Spiffy new site design, too: Makes you look forward to flying, instead of dreading it.