Sad For England
I've read that an
advertisement for a food supplement company showing a bikini-clad
woman and asking is “your body beach-ready?” has attracted some
50,000 complaints at a site called change.org and some 216 to the
Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). I find it very sad that these
complainants have apparently nothing better to do with their lives
and sadder still that they can attract such publicity.
Admittedly, the
company concerned took a bit of risk in showing just a bikini-clad
woman, and a white one (the woman not the bikini) at that. A male
(black) in a swimsuit alongside might have been deemed more “correct”
if the company had bothered to consult political correctness
advisers. The woman is slim but not anorexic; she simply has a good
body. Yet the vitriol unleashed has not been confined to a plethora
of complaints but resulted in the posters being defaced, with people
risking life and limb in dangerous places to deface them, and threats
of violence to the company's staff and even a bomb threat. The ASA
is currently pondering on whether to act on the complaints it has
received. I hope it does; I hope it has the guts to tell the
complainants to grow up.
Fifty thousand
control freaks in a population of 60+ million is actually not too
bad; there are unfortunately bound to be some. But they don't have
to be taken seriously. However, the country having got its knickers
in a right old twist (probably deemed an unacceptably sexist
expression now) over sexism and racism seems to be leading the way
internationally in taking these people seriously. Some other nations
whose lack of democracy and freedom we despise have religious police
to enforce their intolerance. The UK, it sometimes seems, is simply
substituting them with thought police.
Website User
Unfriendliness
Some time ago my son
and I did a search of the internet to see if we could find a site
that commented on the inadequacies of design in commercial websites.
We couldn't find any. I'm not talking about aesthetic design, as
that is largely a matter of personal taste, but difficulties in
carrying out what should be simple transactions. So I've decided to
start a blog on the subject which I shall endeavour over time to
display in French as well as English.
In the first posting
I've outlined my gripes and given several illustrations of what I'm
on about. The reason for advertising the blog's existence here is
this. I need people to join in with their own experiences of
difficulties encountered trying to do something that should be simple
on websites. I shall do some research myself but that won't be
enough to keep the blog going. So please join in yourself if you
can, tell your friends and don't let anyone tell you about
difficulties experienced on a website without asking them to write to
me.
I tried to register
the obvious names for the blog, such as various combinations of
website user (un) friendliness, ease of use, etc, without success.
So I've fallen back on the ELSE clause
(www.theelseclauseonline.blogspot.com).
You/they can leave a comment at the bottom of the blog or write to
me at hugo.ian@wanadoo.fr.
For your ease of use I've copied the first posting below.
User
Unfriendliness
Have you, like us,
ever been left swearing and cursing when trying to do something that
should be quite straightforward on a website? Have you ever had to
second-guess what is required as an entry on an apparently simple
field, because the obvious entry is rejected? If so, this is a blog
where an account of your experiences will be warmly welcomed.
The point is this.
If you have struggled so probably have many, maybe many millions, of
others. By recounting experiences of user unfriendliness on websites
we hope to encourage/shame the companies that own the sites to
improve them. That will help everyone: users will no longer have to
struggle and site owners will improve customer satisfaction and
increase customer activity. It's a win-win situation. We'll relate
our own experiences and be doing our own researches and, if you can
add your experiences, we should quickly have a very useful amount of
feedback to give to site owners. Then we can put pressure on site
owners to improve their sites for the benefit of all concerned.
All software is
supposed to be subjected to tests of ease of use by its intended
users. If the software is a public website, then the intended user
is Jo Public, perhaps nationally but more probably globally nowadays.
Commentators and marketeers like to talk glibly of the global market
but evidence from websites suggests that few, if any, understand the
implications. The root problem is that it's all too easy to leave
user testing to the people who created the site or their colleagues
in the office, probably all very IT literate. The real test would be
to expose the site to your 90-year old granny who's going blind,
lives in Kazahkstan, got a PC for Christmas and has just learned to
use a mouse. Trouble is, such grannies are not always available,
although useful equivalents can usually be found if site owners want
to look for them. Site owners who can't be bothered, even when it's
in their own interest, need, shall we say...... prompting? Join in
and we'll make life easier for everyone.
Some
Examples
Example 1: UK
government
Years
ago, when I had started living in France but was still subject to the
UK tax system, I tried to file a tax return online only to find that
the HMRC website insisted on a UK postcode for my place of residence.
I had to phone HMRC to get the problem sorted. It turned out that
HMRC had an artificial postcode for those not resident in the UK but
hadn't bothered to put this in the website. A year later the same
problem occurred; I'm mercifully out of their clutches now so have no
idea whether the online problem has been fixed.
However,
I recently tried to obtain card for health insurance outside my
country of residence but within Europe (EHIC). I have to get this
from the UK health service. I tried to apply online only to find
that I can do this only if I live in the UK or Channel Islands; no
other place of residence is recognised.
Example 2: SNCF
When
I go to Paris I normally take the train from Avignon; it's the
obvious way to make the journey and I can purchase a ticket
online. The website insists on knowing my age, which I find rather
strange for a train ticket booking but not in itself an apparent
problem. I am over 60 and if I enter this on the website most of the
trains schedules immediately disappear. Why? It's because the site
assumes that I will require a reduced-price ticket because of my age
and therefore only the trains on which such tickets are available
will be of interest. In fact I don't care about the reduced-price
tickets but in order to obtain a normal one I have to falsify my age,
which is what I do. I've no idea whether SNCF keeps statistics on
the age of its passengers but if it does it has ensured that they
will be completely misleading.
Example 3:
Air France
I
recently wanted to book a ticket on an Air France flight from Paris
to the Caribbean island St Martin. The Air France Home Page asks you
to choose one from its several websites. That was a bad start; I
didn't actually want to choose a website, I wanted to choose a plane
ticket. The Air France websites are each devoted to a particular
geographical area: France, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, etc.
I think it must have occurred to Air France that people sometimes
travel from one geographical area to another; it is, after all, what
planes frequently do. In fact, this is what I was proposing to do.
The problem for me was which website to choose, since I wanted to
travel from France (website) to Caribbean (website). So I had a look
at both websites and deduced an unstated assumption; each
geographical area website apparently assumes you are starting your
journey in that area. So I chose the France website. This provides
a drop-down menu of possible destinations, all in France, which of
course includes St Martin (it is still officially part of France).
So I clicked on St Martin only to find that is is not allowed as a
destination. To cut a long story short (tearing hair, gnashing
teeth, etc) in despair I entered the airlines official destination
code for St Martin, SXM. It worked! It wasn't in the list of
possible destinations but up popped a list of possible flights. I
think Air France has some work to do on its website.
Example 4: HifX
A
friend of mine recently wanted to make a money transfer from the UK
to France. He decided to use the HifX service, which offered the
option of using a debit card to make the transfer from him to them in
the UK. However, the debit card owner had to have a UK (or Channel
Isles, etc) address. Since he lives in France he couldn't supply
this. In the event the problem was sorted quickly and amicably by a
phone call; but that shouldn't have been necessary. The website
design was inadequate.
Example 5: Oxfam
At
the beginning of December I usually buy Christmas cards and some
small gifts from a charity and the charity I usually choose is Oxfam
(Oxford Famine Relief) as I worked for them as a volunteer after my
retirement. Last year I had to do it all online. I went through the
Oxfam website picking what I wanted and found, only when I got to the
payment page, that Christmas cards were not available to be sent
outside the UK. What I then started to do was go back page by page
to delete the invalid Christmas cards. However, the site was very
slow in responding and so, after a couple of pages, I got fed up and
scratched the whole order. It would have been simple for the site to
display, at the point that the cards were chosen, that they were not
available outside the UK; not doing so cost Oxfam money last year
and, for all I know, may have done so in previous years and will
probably do so in the future if they don't improve their website.
Rules
that can be derived
Unwarranted assumptions
Commercial website owners seem to pay a lot of attention to the
cosmetic appearance of their sites but frequently fail to address the
logic of assumptions they make about clients. It requires only a
moment's thought to discover numerous obvious if sometimes fairly
trivial errors. I'm sure everyone must have encountered a website
that asks you if you are male or female. However, it is very well
known that some people have a mixture of physical characteristics of
both genders; they are transgender, sometimes known as “shemales”.
What are they supposed to put? Similarly, I have often been asked
to enter my “title” (Mr, Mrs, etc) but never seen Lord, Viscount,
HRH, Sir, etc, in the options offered. It doesn't affect me but some
status-conscious people might resent the constraint. A simple
“other” option (the ELSE clause; see below) would resolve the
issue.
Those examples may not be considered of much consequence but
epitomise the lack of rigorous thought applied to (usually unstated)
assumptions. A global economy requires that any assumptions made
should be tested in that context, not simply a local one.
The ElSE clause
When
I was young and green in the computer industry, in the 1960s, I was
taught that any conditional (make a choice) statement in code should
always be ended with an ELSE clause. Even when choices were
apparently all inclusive as in, for instance, true or false, an ElSE
clause should be added. Maybe that was simply an acknowledgement
that you are not God or that even Homer can nod but
it was extremely important as a discipline. It seems to have gone
out of fashion and it needs to come back into fashion as it would
have prevented a number of the inadequacies I have observed
in websites.
What Do You Want
To Do?
I've
never yet seen a website with a home page asking: what do you want to
do on this website? Maybe it conflicts too much with cosmetic layout
concerns yet it seems to me the most obvious question to ask. Forget
the winsome models (I nearly wrote bikini-clad girls; Oh sexist me!)
dancing across the screen, the most important point is what you, the
surfer, want to do. A drop-down menu of suggestions such as browse,
search (for what), purchase, enter an inquiry, etc, would be
enormously helpful in most cases and would avoid the site owner
having to make unwarranted assumptions. That, of course, would
conflict with sites wanting to lead you along to what they want you
to do but where is customer friendliness in all this?
Contact us
Another
common mistake (in my view) is that many sites make it very difficult
for users to contact the site owners. For them, this is presumably a
cost issue; they don't want staff to have to spend time answering
queries from clients or potential clients yet the same organisations
probably spend a great deal of money trying to foster “relationships”
with their clients or trying to entice potential clients. Using
“contact us” is an obvious way to do this and since websites are
essentially an online medium an email address (with a guaranteed
response!) has to be the best way. Yet many sites give just a HQ
address with, maybe, a telephone number. That's just crazy.
Anyway,
I want you to contact me and I want to hear of any difficulties you
have had in doing what should be simple on websites and wasn't. You
can do that in one of two ways: you can leave a comment in the space
allowed for it at the bottom of this blog or you can write to me
directly at hugo.ian@wanadoo.fr.
I don't have a HQ address and you have to be online to read this so
you shouldn't need a telephone number.
