ModalDialog

Ditch the Coupon Code

Jakob, you still have it. Great advice to ditch the discount coupon code field in purchase processes if you can. Not only is it [poor for people to remember it](http://www.useit.com/alertbox/short-term-memory.html) to enter, but it discourages people who don't have the code from buying because they feel like they are missing out. Better to send links with the discount embedded in it.

Westpac's Feedback Fail - Now with 81% guff

I offered Westpac some feedback on their process for temporarily blocking credit cards (note to self: don't leave them in restaurants). I think they heard me, but I'm not entirely sure because they spent so much more time covering themselves than talking about what I'd suggested.

The online form to offer feedback is OK. It's easily accessible from the site navigation. There's a few too many fields; a bit too much disclaimer. But you can get about suggesting.

After submitted you get an auto-response ping-back. Yawn.

But the kicker is the real response received the next day. It's below in its entirety. Look at the ratio of response to arse-covering guff.

Total email: 4,289 characters.
Actual response: 372 characters.
Quoted original feedback: 457 characters.

That's 81% that's all about them and nothing about me. If that was a real face-to-face conversation with someone in a branch, you'd would have already walked away.

Subject: 200907200096 - Credit Cards - Suggestion or comment from Collinson

Security advice: Before accessing emails or the internet, always update your virus, firewall and Operating System software. For more information on security, visit the Westpac homepage.

Dear Mr Collinson

Thank you for taking the time to send us your feedback.

We value your suggestion to allow an individual card to be blocked.

Unfortunately, at the moment, our system is limited to cancelling or temporarily blocking all cards linked to a single account number if any of the cards are compromised or lost.

Your feedback is greatly appreciated as it allows us the opportunity to address issues that are important to our customers. Please be assured Westpac will consider the suggestion you have provided.

Mr Collinson, we trust this information is of assistance. Should you have any further enquiries, please contact us by email or call Card Services on 1300 651 089 if you are calling from within Australia or on + 61 2 9374 7082 if calling from overseas (available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) and one of our Banking Representatives will be happy to assist you.

Yours sincerely

Wayne Liew
Banking Representative
Westpac Banking Corporation
Email: online@westpac.com.au

Please include your original email in your reply.

Any general advice included in our response has been prepared without taking into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Before acting on the advice, you should consider its appropriateness.

You should also consider our disclosure documents (http://www.westpac.com.au/internet/publish.nsf/Content/PB+FSR+downloads), which include Product Disclosure Statements (PDS) for some products. The PDS is relevant when deciding whether to acquire or hold a product.

Full details of up to date fees and charges, interest rates, terms and conditions, product information and any special offers are available from any Westpac branch in Australia.

All applications for credit are subject to Westpac's normal lending criteria.

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Any personal information you provided in your email has been used by us to provide a response.

In formulating our response, this personal information may be disclosed to other members of the Westpac Group (which means Westpac Banking Corporation and its related bodies corporate which include Westpac General Insurance Limited, Westpac Financial Services Limited), service providers who do things on our behalf (e.g. mailing house), or as allowed by law.

You can access the personal information we have collected, if we have retained it, by telephoning 132 032.

[THREAD ID:1-14E4TSY]

-----Original Message-----

Sent: 20/7/2009 01:03:48 PM
To: online@westpac.com.au
Subject: 200907200096 - Credit Cards - Suggestion or comment from Collinson

feedbackType : Suggestion or comment
feedbackDetails : I've got a credit card account with a Visa and AMEX
accessing the same account. I misplaced my Visa and got a temporary lock
on it. I wanted it to just lock the Visa because I still have my AMEX and
it would be very convenient for me to still be able to use that. But
instead the whole account is locked and my perfectly good AMEX in my
possession is temporarily useless to me.
enquiryType : Credit Cards
outcomeSought : Change of systems and processes to block credit
cards, not credit card accounts, so that if you have multiple cards
accessing an account, you can still use the cards in your possession.
userTitle : Mr
userTitleOther :
userFirstName : Brett
userSurname : Collinson
userEmail :
userConfirmEmail :
*

Please consider our environment before printing this email.

WARNING - This email and any attachments may be confidential. If received in error, please delete and inform us by return email. Because emails and attachments may be interfered with, may contain computer viruses or other defects and may not be successfully replicated on other systems, you must be cautious. Westpac cannot guarantee that what you receive is what we sent. If you have any doubts about the authenticity of an email by Westpac, please contact us immediately.

It is also important to check for viruses and defects before opening or using attachments. Westpac's liability is limited to resupplying any affected attachments.

This email and its attachments are not intended to constitute any form of financial advice or recommendation of, or an offer to buy or offer to sell, any security or other financial product. We recommend that you seek your own independent legal or financial advice before proceeding with any investment decision.

Westpac Institutional Bank is a division of Westpac Banking Corporation, a company registered in New South Wales in Australia under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth). Westpac is authorised and regulated in the United Kingdom by the Financial Services Authority and is registered at Cardiff in the United Kingdom as Branch No. BR 106. Westpac operates in the United States of America as a federally chartered branch, regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Westpac Banking Corporation ABN 33 007 457 141.

Innovation Culture

Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" about the changing times of the newspaper business is one of the best things I've read on innovation culture. (Thanks Daring Fireball for pointing it out.)

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

One of the key aspects of an innovation culture that it highlights is the important role experimentation plays. Innovative companies try stuff. They aren't sure everything is going to work. Some things will fail. But as the article points out (as it looks back to the invention of print as another moment of historical change and innovation):

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. ... That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Those quotes are juicy. The whole article is worthwhile.

Two related asides:

• At MX09, Margaret Gould Stewart talked about Google's culture and that you rarely hear people at Google use the "I" word. Innovation is just business as usual. And as this article mentioned, if your company has an "Innovation Department", you probably have a serious problem.

• Experimentation is linked to curiosity. And as the New York Times points out, it's curiosity that's behind Amazon's Jeff Bezos spending a week working on the floor of their distribution warehouse.

My Non-linear Design Process

I think we like to pretend design process is linear and deterministic. It's easier to sell that way. And perhaps if you zoom back far enough it is. Some of the time.

But there's always seems to be more going on. Like the instincts you follow very early on about design details you're not meant to be thinking about for another 3 phases. That gut feel for what's going to make this app kick-arse that emerged even before you fully understood the business problem at hand.

Finally, someone's articulated this. And it rings true to me.

When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you're lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can't really explain that part; it's like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it's a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I'm not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust so that by this point you're inclined to take my advice. I don't have any clue how you'd go about proving that my advice is any good except that other people — at least the ones I've told you about — have taken my advice in the past and prospered. In other words, could you just sort of, you know...trust me?

The full article is well worth a read (spotted in this post on Bokardo).

Relatives as Friends

I'm a big fan of relative dates - such as displaying today's date at "Today", yesterday as "Yesterday" and the rest of the dates for the last 7 days by their names, such as "Monday". Not always. But most of the time if you really think about how people will use and contextualise raw dates to understand them, that's what they are doing in their heads. So why get them to do it, when it's nice and easy for us to do it for them.

And that's the broader principle here. Work out what someone will actually do with the information to make sense of it, and do that for them. Another example is disclosing your age on your resume. Most people will put their date of birth. I don't care if you were born on 16 January 1971. I'm interested that you are 38.

Shorter durations matter too. My current gripe with the iPhone Twitter client Tweetie is that is displays tweet dates as "Wed 2/4 8:37 AM", when "a moment ago" is so humane.

So bravo to Weather Underground for being relatives to weather (originally posted by 37signals. Makes so much sense.

PS: Printing a web page with relative dates can be a gotcha. If you are printing to file away (some people do), and then you go back to it 2 months later, "Today" is actually going to cause more work than "4 Feb 09". But you can have your cake and eat it too. In the HTML, have both the relative and absolute date. Toggle them via CSS with display and print stylesheets. Magic.

REX Flight Booking - Cancel to Proceed

REX's online flight booking form is probably the worst I've used. At every turn it surprises with a new way to have a poor experience.

My favourite is this dialog that comes up to confirm you don't want flight insurance. Mind you, you've already explicitly said you don't, but they are just checking. And to continue with your booking and confirm that you don't, you have to press Cancel. Yes, Cancel.

More Real Talk from Hulu

Hulu impressed with how they handled a stuff-up where they pulled episodes of a TV series without giving their users enough notice. Straight talk. Full responsibility. Sensible correction.

They've weaved straight, reasonable talk into their site dialogs too. Writing that sounds like it's coming from someone you'd want to spend time with. You get the message below when you try to access their content from outside the US. It's a great piece of copywriting. I particularly like how they make it personal with "Given the international background of the Hulu team, we have both a professional and personal interest in bringing Hulu to a global audience." I believe you.

Limited Characters in a Textbox

We've faced or experienced this challenge before. We have a textbox and there's a limited number of characters that can be entered.

Basic solution: put a little text hint next to the field (eg. "up to 500 characters") and stop accepting characters once you get to max.

Better: Do the javascript countdown, so you know when you are getting close.

But, best: I love how Twitterific handles it on the iPhone. As you come near the limit, the countdown character count turns a warning colour. But once you hit the limit, you can keep typing. You can't submit it and it's clear you have gone over the edge, but it allows you to review the whole of the intended message to edit it down to the character limit. Better than the back-and-forth of deleting a few characters, adding some more, delete some more, add, delete...

Contact Hours & Timezones

It's a great practice to spell out contact hours on a company website and expectations for when someone can contact you and how long the normal turnaround is for a response.

But timezones are often overlooked. Or if they are acknowledge, it's just a qualifier (eg. 9am - 5pm AEST) and the person reading it has to do the work to translate it into their local time.

Iconfactory, makers of the Twitter client Twitterific, do a great job at being helpful with their contact times - showing the local time and if the office is currently open or closed.

Having Fun & Being Reasonable

Fog Creek launched the Mac version of their remote support software Copilot. In the blog announcement, Joel Spolsky does 2 great things with the copy: 1) have fun with "cheap" and 2) explain the discount/special offer ("free on weekends") in terms that make his company seem reasonable and nice.

"Today, the Copilot team released the Macintosh version of the OneClick feature, so all the Copilot goodness is available on Windows or Mac, or both (you can control Windows computers from Macs and vice versa). And it’s cheap, by which I mean, inexpensive—I don’t mean that you can just buy it two drinks and take it back to your apartment and expect to be taking a bubble bath with it—most people get the $19.95 unlimited plan; it’s even free on weekends when we have lots of unused bandwidth."