As I was making Sunday morning crepes, I found bits of straw in my package of President's Choice Organics whole wheat flour.

When we brought back the item to the store, they told us to call the company and they might be able to do something for us. I just wanted to return the bag for a new one. So today, after waiting 20 minutes on the phone, we were told to bring back the bag to the store and get an exchange or store credit. Apparently it is happening quite a bit with this product and the manufacturer is getting a new sifting machine.

Regardless, it is a total of an hour wasted for us that we will never be able to get back.

It's all about the user experience. 

As practitioners, we live, eat and breath user experience. We look at it from every perspective through our daily routine.

My daughter has gone in to Tim Hortons (Canadian coffee/donut restaurant chain) and received a free Timbit (donut hole) on occasion. The retail cost to them is $0.16. This is a fairly inexpensive item to give my daughter a greater user experience, and makes me more likely to return to that establishment to continue giving them my business. Simple marketing strategy. some people do not get it.

Read this article from CTV news: http://tinyurl.com/5nj48d

Every month I do a report for our corporate Web program at Trapeze Group. One of the things that makes up part of my report is going through Web requests via form and email. Our info@ email is the mailbox that acts as a first point of contact, and it also receives the most spam. One of the things I’ve noticed is the enormous volume of resumes we get from India. None of them have any intention of working here, instead they would tele-work from India. We do have a careers@, but they don’t use it. I’m led to believe someone has some sort of email spamming device that sends to a list of info@ emails. How do I know this? In the email, the non-generic words are set to a different font face and size a-la “fill in the blank”.

It’s also interesting to see how “reverse engineering” is featured in is cover letter. Not a good fit for us.

Did I mention this one particular candidate I’m referring to was interested in Human Factors? Maybe if he made a kick-butt Saag Paneer, I’d give him a chance.

An email on one of the listserves came up with the following:

Someone came on to a large scale project in mid stream. It was built in Java and used some open source pieces. The usability is poor, and the audience is made up of users with minimal computing experience. A large effort and significant investment has been made by existing stakeholders, and  it would be difficult to pitch it all out and start again.

What to do?

My response was:

You need to get quick wins that are small. There is no chance you’ll get it all, but make sure you document the crap out of everything for the next version. Just because you don’t do it in this one, does not mean you can’t introduce it in successive iterations. If we made perfect software, we would not make any money on maintenance. It will be a challenge, but make sure you can document use cases where the design can be problematic. You can approach it by suggesting that you know that significant changes can’t be made at this time, but there are the risks and consequences, and should be revisited on the next release. They can even promote an enhanced UX for the next release.

The team leaders will not feel that you are condescending, they will feel you are contributing to the project and demonstrating a will to improve and commit to making the project a success.

What a great application. I’ve always felt uninspired by sites like Facebook and MySpace. I don’t want to put up pictures of “questionables” for everyone to see, and I don’t particularly like the voyeurism associated with it. I’m not saying these are bad, they are simply not for me. So when I discovered Crowdvine, I was rather pleased - here is a great concept that serves a particular niche just about perfectly. It generates buzz and you get to interact with others in your industry in a totally different way. The conference tool works well and I’m going to investigate it further. There are many examples out there; I discovered it through the IA Summit Website.

Good Job!