Confusability

How Amazon lost a customer of 11 years

Since 1998 I have used amazon.co.uk and spent thouands of pounds with them.

I have always received a very good service and whilst their prices aren't always the cheapest, their range of stock and shopping experience has brought me back again and again.

This Christmas amazon have managed to ruin that relationship by putting cost cutting above customer service.

Early in December I ordered a set of books for my 5 year old son Gabriel and the deliver company City Link tried to deliver the books on Monday 14th Dec but no-one was in and they left a card. I re-arranged delivery for Friday 18th Dec as I had the day off work and would be in the house all day, City Link did not attempt a delivery on the 18th and I contacted the City Link customer care line and after waiting in a queue for 20 minutes I was told that they were very sorry they hadn't delivered my parcel and they would re-schedule their delivery for Monday 21st Dec. I also asked them to leave the parcel in our re-cycling box if no-one was at home.

At this point I also sent an e-mail to amazon asking them how I could ensure that future orders were delivered by Royal Mail and not City Link. The reason I asked this is because Royal Mail offer a service where they will re-direct your package to a local post office where you can pick it up at a time that suits you, where as city link only allow you to pick it up from their regional delivery centre which is half an hour away.

Here is an extract from the e-mail I received from amazon customer support:

"Please accept our sincere apologise for the issue you have experienced with City link.

We realise this incident reflects negatively upon Amazon.co.uk and the feedback that you have provided will be used in reviewing the service provided by City link. Thank you for taking the time to contact to us and to bring this to our attention.

We take full responsibility for the delivery of our goods from start to finish and take complaints of this nature very seriously. We replace any items lost or damaged during delivery at a cost to ourselves and monitor our carriers very closely.

For UK customers, our orders are delivered primarily by Royal Mail, HDNL and Citylink for Super Saver, First Class and Express Deliveries.

Our ordering system automatically assigns a carrier to your order when it is ready to dispatch. Therefore we are unable to confirm by which carrier your order will be dispatch.

At the moment, we are not able to promise you that your future orders will not be dispatched by this method. However, the issues that you have mentioned will be forwarded to the appropriate department for consideration. We truly value this kind of feedback, as it helps us continue to improve our website and provide a better service to our customers."

It seems that amazon cannot predict which delivery company will be used and cannot allow me to choose which company will be used. I would be happy to pay a bit extra to use Royal Mail in the same way that I am happy to pay a bit extra to get amazon to gift wrap orders. But is seems that the final step in the amazon user experience is left to a random choice made by a computer system.

After asking my wife to wait in all day on Monday 21st Dec I was very annoyed when I came home to find that City Link had not attempted to deliver the parcel. After checking the City Link tracking service I was surprised to see that they said that had attempted to deliver the parcel at 12:36 on Monday 21st Dec but the note on their website said "There was no one to receive the goods at the delivery point so a card was left." I knew that this statement was a lie as my wife had been in all day and City Link had not left a card. I would guess that they falsified this record so that they could evidence that the failure to deliver was not their fault and they would still get paid by amazon.

At this point I asked amazon to cancel my order as I would need to get another christmas present for Gabriel and it was clear that I could not trust City Link to deliver the one from Amazon.

This very bad experience has left me in a position where I will not use amazon again because of the chance that they will use City Link to try and deliver my parcel.

I am surprised that amazon will gamble with their repuation and risk losing valued customers just because they choose to use a delivery company that are unreliable, untrustworthy and incompetent.

I will now start to use Waterstones to order books online as they offer a service where I can pick my books up from their local store which is 100 times more reliable than hoping City Link will do their job properly.

Banksy in Bristol on Google Street View

Now that Google have extended street view to Bristol you can see some Banksy Artwork whilst you are virtually walking through Bristol.

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And here is the view from the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
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Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer

Gabriel, Heather and Clodagh have a festive sing song

Merry Christmas

I am still alive and will get back to blogging when the nappy stage is finished.

But in the meantime here is some festive cheer from Gabriel (aged 4) and Clodagh (aged 6 months)

Clodagh McEvoy

Our new daughter arrived on Saturday 7th June at 6.45pm.

Clodagh McEvoy weighed in at 9lbs 2 and a half oz's and mother and daughter are well.

Clodagh McEvoy (1 hour old)

She shares her birthday with Beau Brummell, Paul Gauguin, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Elizabeth Bowen, Jessica Tandy, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dean Martin, Nikki Giovanni, Paddy McAloon, Prince, Louise Erdrich

Rosenfeld Media - The Missing Sitemap

This morning I received my copy of "Web Form Design" from Rosenfeld Media less than 2 weeks after I ordered it, which isn't bad for a transatlantic delivery.

I have been checking the status of my order for the past week and I was getting rather annoyed by not being able to find a direct link to the "My Orders" page on the Rosenfeld Media site. I found that I had to go to the Rosenfeld Media site and pretend to order a book so that I could get to the link to the "My Orders" page. Whilt I was at work last week I also used the same convoluted navigation path to get to my digital download link for the book. If wonder if Rosenfeld Media are seeing a lot of abandoned shopping carts because of  people using this method of getting to their Rosenfeld orders page?

I had a couple of hours free today, so I decided to have a go at designing my ideal version of a Sitemap for Rosenfeld Media.

The natural navigation of the Rosenfeld Media sits is defined by the top navigation bar which lists the main sections as "ABOUT", "PUBLICATIONS", "PUBLISH WITH US", "EVENTS" and "UX ZEITGEITS".

I renamed and re-ordered these sections to be "Books", "About", "Publish With Us", "Events" and "UX Zeitgeist". Using mixed-case titles makes it easier to read the list of items and I prefer "Books" to "Publications" as it is a better description of what Rosenfeld Media actuallt sells. These top-level options still didn't solve my problem of getting to "My Orders", so I introduced a new top-level item of "Store" which left my top-level navigation items looking like this: "Books", "Store", "About", "Publish With Us", "Events" and "UX Zeitgeist".

I then turned my attention to the detail of the "Books" section of my sitemap. I didn't like the fact that "Web Form Design" appeared after "Mental Models" as I feel that the most recent book should appear at the top of the list. Once the books for sale have been listsed it does make sense to list the "books in progress" in the order that they are due to be published, This means that once "Search Analytics" is published it will move from number 3 in the list to number 1.

The "Published" and "Soon to be published" books are also differentiated by their "action phrase". The published books have a "Buy Now" action phrase, whilst the other books have a "Notify Me" action phrase.

I spent about an hour trying out different layouts for the book item link lists before settling on the version you can see online.

One of the difficult decisions was where to put the links to the Customer Forums to the two published books. It seemed to make send to put the individual links next to their respective book items, but after trying out a number of prototypes it made more sense to put these links in the "Store" section as they would not become really useful until you had actually ordered a book.

I then went through the sitemap and added links to RSS feeds where appropriate. Designing and producing this sitempa actually took about four hours and I spent as much time deciding what to leave out of the sitemap as to what to put into it.

Even if you don't think your site needs a sitemap you should always produce one just to make sure that your information architecture model makes sense. This exercise suggests that Rosenfeld Media should add a "Store" item to the top level of their navigation and it would be interesting to know why this hasn't made it into the design of the site.

Rosenfeld Media - The Missing Sitemap

If you like this you might also be interested in Simply Google.

Rosenfeld Media get sorted

The second publication from Rosenfeld Media has hit the shelves:

Web Forms: Filling in the Blanks

Luke Wroblewski's book will provide everything you wanted to know and more about designing effective and engaging Web forms that optimize these key customer interactions. Rosenfeld Media, 2008. Read More >

I ordered the book from the RM web site and manged to complete my order in about 60 seconds because I had set up an account when I bought Mental Models last month. The re-ordering process is very well designed but I got a bit confused when I reviewed my orders.

My order for Menta Models in April showed as having a status of "Pending Shipment". I actually received the book a few days after I ordered it (very quick for a trans-atlantic order). If Rosenfeld Media thought that my order was "Pending Shipment" I would have expected them to chase the order by now. I expect that RM either ignore this status or it is incorrectly shown on the web site. Either way it would be helpful if the correct status was shown.

After I ordered Web Forms Design  I  looked at my digital purchase screen to find the link to my electronic version and was surprised to see both of my book purchases appearing under "Recent Digital Purchases" and "Historical Digital Purchases". However when I got the screenshot the next day the books only appeared in "Historical Digital Purchases". I suggest that RM drop the Recent/Historical sections and just show my digital purchases sorted with most recent at the top. It just doesn't feel right to see my most recent purchase at the bottom of my list.

However, as this is only the second book that RM have published they have got plenty of time to improve their "bookshelf" functionality as it won't really start to annoy me until I have bought my 5th or 6th RM book.

Anyway, that's enough of my complaining. I will wait for the postman to deliver my paper copy of the "soon to be definitive" book on web forms design.

"Luke Wroblewski has done the entire world a great favor by writing this book. Online forms are ubiquitous and ubiquitously annoying but they don't have to be. Wroblewski shows Web designers how to present forms that gather necessary information without unnecessarily badgering and annoying visitors. With deft explanations and clear examples, he presents a clear case for better Web forms and how to achieve them. This book will help you every day."
—Alan Cooper, Chairman, Cooper; author, The Inmates are Running the Asylum

Usability Review of a VCR with HCI Rap on YouTube

Usability Review of a VCR

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Knuth's advice for young people

Donald Knuth - Computer Scientist - Peoples Archive

If somebody said what advice would I give to a young person, they always ask that funny kind of a question. And I think one of the things that I would, that would sort of come first to me is this idea of, don't just believe that because something is trendy, that it's good. I'd probably go the other extreme where if something, if I find too many people adopting a certain idea I'd probably think it's wrong or if, you know, if my work had become too popular I'd probably think I'd have to change. That's of course ridiculous but I see the other side of it too often where people will do something against their own gut instincts because they think the community wants them to do it that way, so people will work on a certain subject even though they aren't terribly interested in it because they think that they'll get more prestige by working on it. I think you get more prestige by doing good science than by doing popular science because if you go with what you really think is important then it's a higher chance that it really is important in the long run and it's the long run which has the most benefit to the world. So usually when I'm writing a book or publishing a book it's different from books that have been done before because I feel there's a need for such a book, not because there was somebody saying please write such a book, you know, or that other people have already done that kind of thing. So follow your own instincts it seems to me is better than follow the herd. My friend Peter Wegner told me in the '60s that I should, for "The Art of Computer Programming" I shouldn't write the whole series first, I should first write a reader's digest of it and then expand on the parts afterwards. That would probably work for him better than me, much better, but I work in a completely different way. I have to see something to the point where I've surrounded it and totally understood it before I can write about it with any confidence and so that's the way I work, I don't want to write about a high level thing unless I've fully understood a low level thing. Other people have completely different strengths I know but for me, you know, I wrote a book about a few verses of the Bible, once I understood those verses and sort of everything I could find in the library about a small part of the Bible, all of a sudden I had firm pegs on which I could hang other knowledge about it. But if I went through my whole life only on, without any in depth knowledge of any part then it all seems to be flimsy and to me doesn't given me some satisfaction. The classic phrase is that liberal education is to learn something about everything and everything about something and I like this idea about learning everything about an area before you feel, if you don't know something real solid then you never have enough confidence. A lot of times I'll have to read through a lot of material just in order to write one sentence somehow because my sentence will then have, I'll choose words that make it more convincing than if I, if I really don't have the knowledge it'll somehow come out implicitly in my writing. These are little sort-of-vague thoughts that I have when reflecting over some of the directions that distinguish what I've done from what I've seen other people doing.