GRO Website Usability Improves

Took a look at the GRO website again yesterday after mentioning a difficult process last year in ordering certificates. Well, despite clinging on to the default ‘no’ option for the reference number (see original post for explanation), I’m pleased to say that they have re-structured the body content on the page to highlight certificate ordering within each registration category. In a delineated ‘shortcuts’ box you can click through to a generic ‘ordering’ page. There are still too many click involved from the homepage to get to that point but it is an improvement from having to dig around in text on the page.

Now, if they could just fix that right-hand menu on the category pages…

one Amnesty Announced

I hereby announce that most noble of things, an amnesty. An amnesty that is on the long-suffering staff of one, my commuting nemesis since 2003. However, before this officially starts I need to add a few qualifiers: that the amnesty lasts until at least December, that it exists notwithstanding a catastrophic service failure and that it begins only after I’ve had my final constructive words to say.

A couple of things have brought me to this point, this zenith of invective. Primarily, a desire to avoid being a one-track blog as the principle focus for it must be my day job, web user-experience. Secondly, frankly I could do without entering into dialogue with staff at one who are as impotent as I am at changing their corporate culture, even if they’re trying nobly. Their hands are tied by process, budget and management and until their bosses (Dominic Booth particularly) start reading this and understanding the pain, there’s very little point. Organ grinders and monkeys.

But, as I say, before the amnesty, one (ahem) last post. Yesterday I applied for my new season ticket. When you complete the bi-annual NX appraisal of one they ask you whether or not you’d choose to use the service again but, like many commuters, I have little choice and so, whilst disgusted by the service, I am forced to hand over money. Money this year which amounted to £4,480 (Chelmsford to Norwich annual season ticket) which is an incredible sum. To put this in to perspective this could buy me a reasonable second hand 2001 model Golf 1.9TDi, or it means that if you work as a one call centre advisor you’d probably have to work from January to mid April full-time on no pay just to cover the season ticket cost from your salary.

What does this get me? It gets a journey time of 1hr 30mins in the morning and 1hr 15mins in the evening at roughly £6.30 per hour. (There’s a cruel irony that when the journey time is longer I pay less per hour so perhaps I should be grateful for delays.)

Now, imagine I’d spent the money on that Golf. Imagine the frustration then if when I went out to drive it, one day a week it simply would refuse to open and let me drive it for ten minutes or so, without telling me why leaving me standing for an undeterminable amount of time. Imagine if, on the coldest, windiest days after work I turned up at the car park and it wasn’t there, for two hours. Imagine if when driving home it just stopped and sat on the side of the road without explanation every 10 minutes for a few minutes. Or as soon as the weather warmed up the air conditioning would pack up and be entirely unserviceable until October when it would work again. Or perhaps if I got in the car only to be told that I’d have to transfer to another one which would drive me somewhere else and leave me in a car park at Stansted Airport for two hours with several hundred other Golf drivers, little advice, no shelter and a requirement to push and jostle to get on a bus to go to another car park when the Golf would then be able to drive me home.

You’d be pretty irritated by your purchase wouldn’t you? But at least your £4480 would last for more than a year, probably – in the case of a Golf of that age - another ten years. With one, I pay for that level of service and it lasts me 12 months at which point I’ll have to pay over £4500 for the same again despite assurances that next year I might get new seats and someone would re-paint it.

I’m not saying that the Golf could get me to work in the same time, the drive from Chelmsford to Norwich is automotively grotesque and it would cost me money in tyres, petrol and maintenance. The point is to get some perspective on experience and service expectations.

The final subject of my criticism is the ‘one’ website. Yesterday morning I didn’t know the cost of a season ticket between Chelmsford and Norwich (blissful ignorance) so I thought I’d have a look on the web. I anticipated it would be a simple process of selecting start and end stations and clicking ‘Go’ or similar. Well, this is genuinely the route I took and the customer journey I experienced (download PDF document 670kb).


We’re nearly at the end now just to say that there are things that one get right:

:: The staff at Ipswich station. Before I moved to Chelmsford I commuted from Ipswich and the staff there were almost entirely excellent, friendly and helpful when things inevitably went wrong.
:: The ticket buying process at the counter/on train. With chip and pin this now takes less than a minute.
:: Delay Repay (-ish). Some recompense for delays but for annual season ticket holders not using season direct it would be nice to have the cash or vouchers for the on-board catering. A week of free coffee in the morning would be a nice touch.

Just think of all the things my £4480 could help to add to that list (reliable punctual trains, new information screens at every station, clear timely relevant announcements, exceptional delay contingency plans, full online ticket facilities, universally clean and comfortable trains, ticket barriers at every station to eliminate free-loaders, pro-active customer service culture from Director-level down …)

And that’s it, from this moment on one are immune, on this blog at least, from criticism.

Don't Just Stand There, Do Something. Advice For Dealing With Delays

Forty minutes late this morning. So glad I got up before 5am to catch a train … turns out a crew member was late into London from Clacton as his train had failed. The ticket inspector on the train appeared not to care and the announcements at Chelmsford station all took place on the wrong platform so I had to sit craning my ear for forty minutes to see if I could find out when I’d finally be heading North East. Still, I’ll still be here next week shovelling £52 golden pound coins into ‘one’s’ grasping little fingers to keep me ticking over until my season ticket comes up for renewal in August whereupon I’ll have to part with over £3000 for the privilege of such personal service for another year. But, in a change of heart I’ve decided that, with every moan about ‘one’ I should propose a solution, thereby giving them my Customer Experience expertise for nothing.

In The Event of A Crew Member Delay ‘one’ should:
1. Have a back-up crew member in position or on call from the starting station to prevent it occurring, failing that, invoke options 2, 3 and 4.
2. Have clear announcements at every station explaining why the delay was caused and what the most effective solution is i.e. wait for the train or catch train x and change at y etc. etc.
3. Distribute Delay Repay leaflets on the affected train at the same time as apologising personally to customers for the delay, without insipid grins.
4. Detail (on the train’s PA system) estimated new arrival times for each stop along the way.

There, I feel better now, much nicer than ranting at them all the time.

Wired Lifestyle Usability Issues

I’ve just moved into a new place (see previous posts about Ikea) and bundled in one of the drawers in the kitchen was a telephone book sized folder containing all the manuals for the respective household appliances. I’ve not got round to reading many of them yet as, frankly, there are better things in life.

But this raised a interesting point, how much of the technology and engineering scattered about my place is intuitive and usable? There are certain things that, as a tech-savvy 20-something I should intuitively know how to use: microwave, washing machine, oven, electric shower. Additionally there are things that are new to me: dishwasher, integrated multi-room audio, under floor heating and I’ve enjoyed fiddling with this stuff to understand how it works to some extent. The hardest to ‘get’ was the audio system (an EGi Domos) though to be fair I’ve not even started to look at the heating yet.

To start with there are two main interfaces, a central control panel and individual room controls. The first is a complicated panel with multiple tiny buttons and LEDs, icons and descriptors are small and not always intuitive. The second is considerably smaller but, being concealed and discrete, was quite confusing in its own way. Within a few seconds of turning the control panel on I was able to start piping radio to at least one room, good stuff. It did seem quiet though… I went to the room control and pressed the two visible buttons, the station changed and it made beeping sounds. That’s all I could work out. It seemed to have two channels which presumably meant one room could be on one channel and another on a different one. Great, still quiet though….

By this point I was a little bit disappointed and complained to the missus that it must be a consequence of the location in a block of similar flats that the volume is restricted. She sighed and got on with her important stuff. About twenty seconds later I heard a loud laugh and a call to come and see what she’d done. She’d turned the volume up by simply opening the smart plastic flap covering the control and pressing the + button. She’s delighted of course, she’s worked out in about ten seconds (she claims it was obvious) and if it wasn’t for her I’d still be listening to it at library volume. Except I wouldn’t because I’d have read the manual eventually in a bid to understand what it ALL does (something girls seem to care little about, they only want to know the functionality that they’ll need). I wanted to write something insightful about how this demonstrates why users are stupid, why the obvious isn’t always so, why basic users (her) are more clever than potential experts (me) and so on but my own personal embarrassment wants to get me off the topic as soon as possible.

Not before I’ve mentioned the manual though. Which is dire. I’m so used to being fortunate to read manuals in my native language that when you find one in ‘foreign’ it can be either amusing (Asian hardware manuals in over-polite Victorian English) or baffling (in this case). The manual was originally in spanish but had had the English translation on the same page in italics making it really fiddly to keep finding the English bits and meant that the pages with diagrams were confused with twice as much text as they needed to have. Why not simply repeat the information in English as it’s done in 90% of guide manuals with the same layout? They’d decided to reduce costs by printing one manual for every product in the range too. So you have to thumb through and find the specific version of the control panels you’ve got installed and then read their pages complete with footnotes explaining that feature x might not be available depending on your installation. I’d really rather be given a piece of paper inviting me to their (ghastly) site to download the specific manual in English for my installation. It would cost less than sending one rubbish bi-lingual manual to every customer and be a hundred times more effective.

To that end I’ve not even bothered to set some of the more advanced functions, pre-set radio, wake alarms, door entry intercom etc. etc. Finally, the input interface for external audio equipment … a 7-pin DIN! I can’t remember the last time I saw one of these for audio, probably on my Dad’s 1970s B&O tape deck. It’s unbelievable that there wasn’t a dual phono or 3.5mm jack input. I spent ages in Maplin trying to find a cable to fit, it did but wasn’t in stereo (presumably down to the peculiar wiring in the DIN) so I had to order a specific part from the manufacturer. The customer experience of owning something like this shouldn’t be such hard work

Nano Technology, Not So Smart Now Are You?

(This is my first post in the new Beta version of Blogger)

Sometimes the little things bug you. Despite being an astonishingly effective product and, more than that, a lifestyle accessory my Nano can still irritate. Why is it that Smart Playlists are not smart on my Nano? I have gone through and set a complicated series of playlists (based on nested IF statements) which meant that, in iTunes at least, I get to hear songs I’ve not heard for ages within a certain genre and given certain ratings criteria. If these core tunes are available in my Nano’s library, why can the software not cope with live updates of the playlist? Sadly it has to wait until the ‘pod is synchronised with iTunes before it updates the play dates etc. However, this information is clearly available on the pod which stores the play date and time and even creates a recently played history. Does anyone know if they fixed this in the new ones?

"Both James and I are looking forward to getting our hamster back."

Just like the rest of us, Clarkson speaks for a legion of Top Gear fans after Richard Hammond's accident.

Tags: top gear + richard hammond + jeremy clarkson

one aware of blog

UPDATE 20.SEP.06
This week I've seen a big increase in people searching for one related stuff and landing on the blog and the IP logs show plenty of hits from 62.172.97.11 which, if you do a simple WHOIS relates to LER, London Eastern Railway, one's official name.

Technorati Tags: one railway + customer service

You Pay For Swedes, You Get Turnips

Regular readers will be aware of my evident joy at laying-in to ‘one’ for their dreadful customer service. I enjoy it because, to some extent, it’s easy to poke fun at their efforts. Today is a different story. For years I’ve told anyone who would listen (and several who weren’t interested) that everything Swedish is great: design, usability, lifestyle. Reading back over past blog entries you can even see me spouting off about Ikea.

Up until the weekend I’d only been a drop-in visitor to Ikea and my impressions were favourable. (I should, at this point, clarify that I’m referring to the Ikea store at Lakeside, Thurrock). I’d managed to wander through the showroom, pick-up minor items and – with my brother – select and buy a self-service chest of drawers which he assembled with no problems. This weekend my experiences were wholly different.

I’d had a fraught couple of visits in the proceeding weeks trying to determine what we needed for our new flat in Chelmsford. We made the mistake of going at the busy peak times at the weekend so, for that, I couldn’t blame the store. On Sunday we got there early, early enough to have half an hour of quiet browsing before the tills opened and the crowds began to build. This is where things started to go wrong. I’m going to break this post up into sections because there’s loads to talk about.

:: The Experience vs. Aspiration
Take a look at the catalogue and you’ll see the items in store set up in show-home situations. Generally these seem to be large lofty apartments or grand drawing rooms with acres of space to fill with rack upon rack of storage solutions. Take a typical catalogue page and itemise everything on it, it would costs thousands to re-create those looks and most of the people that visit the Lakeside Ikea are lower middle-class Thames Estuary dwellers with little sense of design. Not a problem in itself of course but it starts to chip away at the aspirational image you hold in your head of your clean, simple, Scandinavian life-styled room. In all honesty it’s more likely that you’ll recreate a Basildon New Build. Secondly, but related to this point, the images and the showrooms in-store show a level of co-ordination and order impossible in the real world. Few people can present an open clothes rail in their bedroom kitted out with just shades of white and brown. This, of course, makes you buy into an idea but feel let down when you get it home and your room doesn’t look the same. It’s hard to take furniture apart, put it back in the package and bring it back (particularly if it only cost you £45 and you live an hour or more away), so people don’t and Ikea keep the money.

:: The Quality & Consistency
Say you wanted to create a co-ordinated look in a bedroom with matching furniture. Ikea would recommend you select a range (in our case Malm) select a colour and away you go. This doesn’t work. One look at the units side by side show that inconsistencies in the production of the product’s veneer mean that one mid brown is generally quite different from another mid brown. You have to select a shade where the colour variations are easier to disguise, in our case Oak veneer. Again, in terms of quality (and I know the place is supposed to be cheap) take a look at a sofa like the Klippan. It looks great in black in the catalogue and on the website. Go in-store and you’ll find the cover fits so loose it looks like a tatty student room day-bed. The furnishing equivalent of the Big Mac reality not matching the photo on the menu board.

:: The Shopping Experience
We wanted to buy a sofa and a bed (amongst other things). We picked up a product sheet for the bed, which ostensibly listed all items we’d need which – I assumed as it wasn’t clear – that we could pick up from the self-service warehouse. For the sofa I assumed this worked the same That is to say we’d locate it in the warehouse and check it through the till before going to the delivery point. Nowhere was I told that this was a ‘full service’ item and that we’d have to arrange the order in the showroom first. I found that out only by the time we’d got down into the warehouse via the showroom maze, requiring my fiancée to scramble back to the upper levels of the showroom to do so. In addition, when scooting around the warehouse on my own looking for the bed I’d discovered that the mattress wasn’t there, so we’d have a bed – which we’d have to pay to get delivered – with no mattress. We’d have to wait for the mattress, come to visit again and pay another £50 for delivery. Likewise, the bedside tables we were after weren’t in stock … and, by the way, it’s no good suggesting a stock-check before you go if you need to go to work out what it is you want! Finally we got everything on the list and checked out through the tills, over £700 lighter …

:: The Delivery/Fulfillment Experience
The delivery was on time, just after 8am today in fact. The deliverymen dropped the sofa but said nothing to my better half (she’d seen it from the window and hoped they’d mention it). They went through the items and we realised we’d bought the wrong colour bed, evidently picking up the wrong parts sheet from the display. Our fault entirely but the delivery guys wouldn’t take it back for us, neither could we arrange for it to be collected. We’d have to hire a van and take it back (another £50) and pay again to have the right one delivered (assuming it’s in stock when we get there) at another £50. To further compound the issue they told us we’d need fixing brackets – which weren’t on the parts list for the bed. Again, it’s down to us to return to the store to collect these (presumably at a cost).

:: The Customer Service Experience
Being new(ish) to the process I’d hoped that Ikea would show some compassion and support us in returning the items and resolving the orders especially given that we’d spent over £700 there (which must be higher than the average customer), but they couldn’t care less. To resolve the issues will require (assuming some stock unavailability) several trips, at least two hire/delivery charges, petrol and hours of travel time. Probably totalling a couple of hundred pounds. Why can’t Ikea assist in any way? Perhaps at least arranging a redundant delivery van (which, after all, must return from deliveries empty on most days) to at least return the stock or allow us to at least hold the correct colour bed to ensure we don’t waste a trip returning to get the item we have actually paid for. I appreciate it’s not their business model to hold items and so on for cost reasons but – on a case-by-case basis - there should be more after care.

:: We’re not in Sweden Anymore
The trouble is the business hasn’t translated like-for-like from Sweden. It’s staffed with bored Essex teenagers and poorly trained customer service staff. As you walk around you begin to think about how basic and cheap it feels not that it’s customer centric, design orientated, stylishly functional and simple. Ikea in the UK has not got the Swedish friendly air about it other than in the marketing copy and catalogue imagery. When the in-store experience fails it fails badly and the fulfilment has seriously dented the brand’s image. So much so that I’m writing this entry.

In Sweden they can process online orders. I bet they could bend over a bit to help me were I to make a couple of novice mistakes like I did here. Just imagine if, when we’d called them today, the Lakeside store had said “fine, sure mistakes happen and seeing as you’re obviously keen on our products [based on the order value] we’ll ask one of our returning delivery vans to collect your items and we’ll hold an Oak coloured Malm bed for you for 48 hours”. I’d have been delighted and I’d be blogging about that instead. It would have cost them probably £50 but increased the likelihood that I’ll spend several hundred pounds in there again by a factor of ten. As it stands I’m more likely to go round the corner from home to Habitat, spend 25% more and be sure to be taken care of.

There were just two good moments on Sunday. One young warehouse lad who dashed off to get a trolley to help the missus with a mattress and a short bearded chap in the sofa team who said he’d raise a query with head office about why the Ektorp sofa had feathers in the fabric version and foam in the leather.

I’m writing to Jens Johansson in his role as manager at Lakeside in the desperate hope that he can inject those Swedish social principles back into his workforce and acknowledge that cheap products really shouldn’t mean shoddy customer care.

Technorati: Ikea + customer service + customer care

:: Similar rants about Ikea's customer service

Dominic Booth Is Sorry, And He's Cross With Network Rail

Dominic Booth is one railway's managing director and he is failing at his job. In my opinion. As his message today proves. In it he apologises for the debacles of last week and points the finger of blame squarely at Network Rail. However, he simply cannot grasp the scale of disorganisation at Stansted airport on Friday night. He should have been there, he should have experienced it himself and he should be man enough to speak directly to us passengers and determine what went wrong. His hollow statement where he indicated he'd 'review' proceedings is a groundless as the claim by his staff on Friday evening that 20 buses had been ordered to transport us and it is as flimsy as his staff's whimsical voices above the baying mob of disgruntled fare-paying passengers left stranded in a car park.

The experiences continue to prove that one don't think about their customer image - take a look at this screen grab of their site today for example. On the one hand there are no problems ("A Good Service Is Operating On All Routes"), on the other hand there are seven ("There are currently 7 line and service reports").

It's so bad it's almost laughable.

Technorati Tags: one railway + delay + train + customer service + Dominic Booth + Delay Repay

Web 2.0? That's SO Web 1.0 ... Tim Berners-Lee explains ...

Amusing piece from the IBM podcast after it's passed through the web's summarisers ... connecting people with Web 2.0 is nothing new, it's what Web 1.0 (such as it is/was) has done all along. Read Alex Barnett's wonderfully entitled piece, "Sir Tim Calm Down 2.0"

'one' Unmitigated Disaster

Finally got back to Ipswich around 22:35, via a two hour wait at Stansted airport amongst a poorly marshalled baying mob of commuters and weekend passengers. The police were there and one guy from one. None of them had megaphones, the crowd were jostling and three coaches came, filled up and went before I could board one. There was no order of priority, just a bun-fight. I filmed the chaos and have uploaded it (QuickTime 3GP and not great quality). A full four and a half hours after I set off, for the second time this week. I thought Wednesday's lack of information was bad but this complete and utter ineptitude and lack of on-the-ground presence from staff was inexcusable.

:: EveningStar have first online reports.

Technorati Tags: one railway + delay + train + customer service

Twice in one week, overhead lines causing chaos...

Can't quite believe it but I'm sat here on a train at Liverpool Street (the 18:00 to Norwich) logged in via someone's open network as the trains are up the proverbial again, latest message from one:

Points Failure & Overhead wire damage.
Due to a points failure at Shenfield & also damage to overhead wires between Ingatestone &
Chelmsford, all services to/from London Liverpool Street to Norwich, Clacton,
Ipswich & Southend Victoria are being severely delayed. Trains are currently
unable to move forward from Shenfield at present. Passengers are advised not to
travel unless absolutely necessary.
Message received: 01/09/2006 at 18:09:15

Which is helpful if you're on the train. Just Skyped home to let m'lady know. We were supposed to be packing for our big move to Chelmsford tomorrow tonight.

Will update with 'one' service messages, last announcement was a full 30 mins ago...

A Smashing Swedish Design Blog

Adam's swedesres blog has not only got a gorgeous header graphic, it's packed with Swedish design resources. In three minutes browsing I saw this great link to the Volvo S80 site which does a nice job of showing off broadband-optimised immersive brochureware.

It also pushed me towards Starring's website where I saw a portfolio link for the AMF Pension campaign, the 'ageing' technique used here is an uncanny echo the the Norwich Union 'Ready For Tomorrow' campain (43 going on 17 and The Future)....

This blog's feeds are now fixed

Kept checking my Technorati listing to see that it was days out of date, the problem is that Technorati pulls the Atom feed from this site and not the RSS 2.0 one. The Atom one had problems with an incorrect character in the post about DENIM which I've now corrected so hopefully anyone using this feed via an Atom reader will be fine. Let me know if you use a feed reader to subscribe to this blog by the way...

:: RSS 2.0 Spec vs. Atom Spec

:: Technorati RSS + Atom + DENIM + Technorati

'one' fail to ease the pain of another major delay

A few days ago I was checking my blog logs and realised that I was still getting a wealth of hits here for people searching for various gumpf about one railway and their preposterous customer care. I hadn’t written for a while and despite seeing incoming links from monerailway I couldn’t really think of much to say. The service has been below average but not disasterous and I’d changed direction (I’m heading to London from Ipswich these days). The trouble is things can be just ‘ok’ with one but when it does go wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong.

My previous delay record was 2 hours 20 minutes, back in November last year on my way back from London, I beat that tonight with a three and a half hour delay sat just east of Chelmsford when power lines came down (BBC News 31.AUG.06) (can anyone explain how this happens?). We were trapped behind two other trains and could only pass one at a time incredibly slowly. The conductor did his best and told us he couldn’t tell us anything, on one occasion going for 1.5hrs without speaking to us. The trolley passed through once and never re-appeared. We sat in silence, punctuated only by the sound of people speaking to friends and relatives to inform them that, yep, we were still waiting to move. I fortunately had my Nano and laptop with me so I could at least keep myself entertained as long as the li-ion batteries would last.

Eventually we did move of course and passed the stricken train which still had passengers on it. The conductor piped-up with news about our revised ETAs and some arrangements for onward connections which everyone must surely have missed. As people picked up their phones and called to let others know their plight I couldn’t help but feel thankful that I wasn’t on the stricken train. Clearly they were in for a long night. I’m not sure what the evacuation arrangements are but surely a train that’s been stationary for over five hours constitutes a total failure and passengers need to be escorted onto road trainsport?

I know these things happen to some extent but I cannot comprehend why one do not react with more care. Announcements should be made every fifteen minutes – even if it’s to say “we don’t know more” and efforts should be re-doubled for every 15 minutes delay to determine exactly what is going on. The only thing worse than the delay itself is not being kept informed. In addition, arrangements should be made in the event of an exceptional delay (anything over two hours) for staff to board the train at the next station and distribute free refreshments – a small biscuit and some water for example – to anyone who wants it. These supplies could be held at stops along the way for this purpose. Announcements should be made to encourage people to stand and walk about the carriage to reduce the risk of blood clotting.

As a customer all I felt on the train was that people in ‘control’ just think it’ll get fixed eventually, customers can sit tight until then. The only concession to passenger comfort was an unscheduled stop at Shenfield for a cigarette break.

Once again I’d invite anyone from one to comment in response to this post but I’m well aware that will never happen. All I can look forward to is a complete refund of my ticket.

UPDATE: When I got home (around 11pm) I saw the following message on the one website ... can anyone translate? "Cuatomers [sic] are advised to use alternative travel where possible. The LUL and First Capital Connect are passing customers reasonable routes on their Network for travel easements." [see pic included]

Technorati Tags: one railway + delay + train + customer service

When I grow up I want to be a user experience architect.

I wonder if future spawn will utter these words? Does any child aspire to develop class-leading interfaces? Do kids play in the sand box at nursery attempting to create the next big thing in interaction? Possibly not yet, but there are plenty of 'adults' around who are looking to hone their skills in an emerging (though surprisingly resilient) job title in the dotcom industry and this week I've been trying to locate courses in the UK to formalise our training.

Before I get round to posting a summary of these courses (and thanks to everyone who's emailed me) I thought I'd post a link to a pertinent article by Dan Saffer (which is also a thinly veiled plug for his book ... which I'd like a copy of please Dan) and builds on an earlier article by Robert Reimann.

Longitudinal Experience With Sennheiser Results In Great Customer Service

Last week I listened to Tim and Tom’s podcast and picked up on their reviews of the PX100, a pair of headphones I’ve supported on this blog in the past. Well, like Tim’s Shuffle (see also), my PX100s went belly-up a month ago when the jack-plug developed a loose connection. I also own a pair of HD465 which I love and sent them a letter asking for a repair under warranty despite not retaining the receipt. Well, they said ‘yes’ and gave me a repair reference to send them in under and I got a receipt with an ETA for their return.

Then, just as I was about to post this item I get home to discover a parcel waiting for me with a brand new pair of PX100s in it. They did not fix them; they gave me a completely new pair absolutely gratis. So I now have fresh clean ear pads, tight hinges and brand new drivers. Very cool and keeps me happy as a brand advocate.

I told Tim this, by email he speaks about it on this week's podcast and even gives this blog a kind review. Thanks :)

Technorati Tags: sennheiser + px100 + hd465 + design critique + customer experience

DENIM Uses A Pie Menu And Promotes Rapid Prototyping

Just a quick post to reflect on something I mentioned in an earlier piece about Fitts Law. I downloaded DENIM recently to have a play (it’s free, go right ahead…) and discovered they use a pie menu. I loved it, even with a mouse it seemed really natural. Once I’d worked out that the middle circle was active too. There’s a picture of it in action in the tutorial.

A word about DENIM itself. Using a tablet PC or a pen-equipped device you can sketch out web architecture and basic design elements and watch the site build in front of you. I’m inclined to implore you to watch the demo video of this. It think it would be awesome for rapid prototyping in the ‘ideas’ section of a project, gives you the chance of making board-room ideas tangible to stakeholders etc. It’s not going to replace traditionally more labour intensive wireframing and prototype development but it might just be a good way to get your foot in the door.

PhotoSynth Shows Vast Potential to Fundamentally Change Information Navigation

Following on from yesterday’s post about interactive television, I was delighted to see the BBC picked up on the PhotoSynth project. I first heard about this via Alex Barnnett’s blog and downloaded the Channel 9 video and the high-res Live Labs promo package. Clever stuff from the effervescent chaps in Seattle, must be all that caffeine. Once again, like the previous post, the technology is the first step; it is the sheer scale of the possibilities that this opens up that interest me.

The tool, such as it is, takes collections of photographs or images with a common reference point and links those points together taking into account angle, distance, scale, resolution, ambient light etc. etc. rather like a jigsaw to create a 3D virtual world. The environments they present so far are tourist spots navigated at high-speed (all due to progressive resolution encoding I think) and almost seamlessly. I am not explaining it brilliantly but the videos do a great job so take a look at them.

It does not take a genius to see the power that this technology has in terms of its application for information architecture on the web. The algorithm effectively links commonalities and provides a space into which communities can delve to enrich it even further. Imagine, if you will, that pictures are tagged (like in Flickr) or given hotspot areas such that if you submit your photos to the engine for recognition, suddenly the random picture of a statue you took in Florence comes alive in a 3D context with information about the sculptor, the location, the social context and so on…

Imagine too that a piecing together a crime scene from shots taken by members of the public at a given time or that a terrorist propaganda video can be interrogated for common visual landmarks to place it accurately. It’s a case of blending Flickr and Google Earth with Wikipedia and SETI and suddenly you're really unleashing distributed computing power and social networking to provide a virtual earth. At this point, I am sure people are considering the protection and privacy issues but, for the moment, I’m nothing but excited to see where and when I can get my hands on PhotoSynth and start adding every photo I’ve ever taken to the project.

Technorati Tags: PhotoSynth + Microsoft + Live Labs

Using Ambient Audio To Serve-Up Social and Interactive Television

What I plan to do in the forthcoming days is post a regular sequence of smaller posts, all of which will hopefully cover a user-centred topic. In the past couple of weeks I’ve amassed a Targus case full of printed blog articles (I know, I know, think of the trees…), magazine columns and jotted notes about podcasts all of which I’ve intended to post about.

Regular readers and colleagues will know I’m not the greatest ‘completer finisher’ on the planet and am full of good intentions so here’s my chance to produce a consistent, topic-focussed output.

Using Ambient Audio To Serve-Up Social and Interactive Television
Xan passed me an article this month that (despite being a little too CompSci for my simple brain) introduced me to the work of Michael Fink (Univ. of Jerusalem), Michele Covell and Shumeet Baluja (Google Research). The premise, in a nutshell, is to use your laptop’s on board microphone to record the audio of the TV programme you’re watching and match that to a database of broadcasted material to serve up relevant media content from the web. This is quite clever stuff. In the same way that you can point your mobile to a speaker and send music audio to Shazam for identification, this system identifies broadcast content in real-time. There are a host of privacy issues and technical problems that the paper covers, and I’m not going to. I wanted to think more about the social element of this tool. There’s a host of personalisation, tagging and social networking stuff that can be thrown into the mix here. Imagine, for example, watching your favourite sitcom/drama/film and identifying that at that moment 20 other people were watching it too, you could chat about it via Skype or instant messaging or you could add tags to the content to identify places, objects, fashion etc. ABC drama ‘Lost’ is a great example, the online experience for the show is vast and tying this directly to the action feels neater in this model than it would via existing interactive TV channels (red-button etc.) Have a read of their paper and add your comments to this post by clicking ‘comments’ below.