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.

Do bad things happen when developers design user interface?

We work with some incredibly talented development teams around Web sites, Web applications, and software projects. Unfortunately, teams missing a user experience specialist often find that they cannot come to consensus on what the user interface should look like, or what it should do. This leads to a sub-optimal user experience, with the common result being that powerful software functions are invisible to the user. That wastes money - and obscures the excellent work of your team.

The cost to business of skipping the critical planning stages - which include user profiles, usability testing, information architecture, user interface design and task sequence design - is incalculable. Skipping these steps means endless hours of expensive meetings where everyone has an opinion, but few have real data.

Stop for a moment and consider the areas of expertise your employees own today. Is there someone on staff with formal training in user interface design? Information architecture? Task sequence design? If the answer is "no" or "sort of," it's time to start adding up the cost of all the hours spent in meetings with no consensus, so you can reallocate those funds to usability training or professional services that will bridge the gap.

What is usability? Remove the jargon and it's just common sense.

What is usability and user experience? The Web is so full of jargon and buzzwords it's easy to easy to write off terms that like as more of the same. But, while somewhat clunky, these two terms do state exactly what they are. How usable is something? How good was your experience using it?

Let's look at a weather site for some basic usability. I need to know if my outdoor practice will be rained out tonight so I go to weather.com. I'm not sure where to start looking in the navigation until I see a search box where I can get local weather info.

Great start - right until a Mentos ad popped up and my fingers reflexively twitched toward the command+w keys. Like all the users we've tested, I hate pop-up ads that hi-jack the content I asked for. But I restrained my trigger finger and the info I need is available in a variety of presentations on the same page. There's not much chance of rain so I'm ready to gear up for practice.

Overall I was able to find what I was looking for right off the home page. Score one point for task-based usability! However, I'm not sure how I'd find anything without the search box. Let's see if I can find a satellite map of the weather in my friend's town, where she's been without electricity due to storms.

Starting from the home page, I click on the "maps" link under the big picture. The first things I see on the new page are animated ads. Next, a list of map options: outdoor activities, health and safety or weather details. I don't know the difference so I'll try "weather details".

Now there's another menu with at least 20 options that don't mean anything to me (US regions, US satellite, severe alerts, short term forecasts). When I pick a map to enlarge it doesn't identify any cities or get big enough to make an informed guess about what cities are under the glowing green blob.

At this point I'm muttering out loud and ready to just start Googling. That's a huge ding in the usability points - confusing your user to the point where she just leaves the site is exactly what you don't want to do.

Finding a satellite weather map on a site dedicated to weather shouldn't be this difficult. But the glut of options and lack of explanation about what any of it meant left me confused, irritated and empty-handed. Although it did leave me with inspiration for a blog entry about bad user experience.

Usability isn't about what you hope people will do or what advertisers want them to do. It isn't about being the most cutting-edge, the most expensive or providing the most options. Often those frills end up making something that's more frustrating than useful. Good user experience means your users are able to do what they need to do, simple as that.

Why US travel sites needlessly fail their users

Recent dust-ups such as the gratis redesign by Dustin Curtis of spreadsheety American Airlines and the Mr X response have drawn attention to yet another hole in US business: Dreadfully unusable travel Web sites. National Public Radio's recent article exposes the tiniest tip of this iceberg. From the NPR story:

"Since 2007, there's been a steady decline in the percentage of travelers who actually like using the Internet to research and purchase any kind of travel, according to an online travel survey conducted in February by Forrester. Those who enjoy using the Internet to both plan and buy travel dropped from 53 percent in 2007 to 45 percent in 2009, the survey found.

"Forrester projected that by year end there will be 68 million online travel buyers, up from 66 million in 2008. But the survey found that an increasing number of travelers are willing to use 'offline' travel agencies."

Do the math: You've spent big bucks building a Web site with high functionality - like, say, airline ticketing - but people are so frustrated with the Web site that they're abandoning the online transactions and calling the toll-free number. How did this expensive mess come to be? Our take: A lack of focus on information design - "we don't have time/budget for that."

Our work with call centers clearly demonstrated that there is a cost per second for excess time spent on calls. over a year, it adds up to a very big number. What are bad Web sites costing the US travel industry? Time for US travel Websites to commit to better business. Test your Web sites, then fix them. Or lose to a competitor that "gets it."