England And A New Blog

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.