Monthly Archives: October 2010

User Experience Should Always Be Paramount

User Experience Should Always Be Paramount

The confusing machine at the gate

There’s no life situation in which user experience is not paramount. And it is the user who defines the experience, not the engineer. As a particularly low-tech example, take the parking lot I parked in at lunch.

For four decades, this parking lot has been free. It’s in front of a popular Phoenix luxury shopping mall, Biltmore Fashion Park. Last year, for some ungodly reason, the mall ownership decided it had to begin charging for parking in the street front lot, perhaps to keep the people out who just hang out in the Paradise Bakery or the Mojo Yogurt and don’t shop in the fancy-pants stores.

So they put in a gate, and a kiosk, and a system by which when you enter the lot you have to take a yellow token and have it validated for two free hours of parking  by the store or restaurant you visit .

Now I’m no stranger to parking garages, and this is a common practice. But you can make it easy for the user, or you can make it deadly. The best garage I’ve experienced lately is in San Francisco, near Moscone Center. You take a ticket, and you pay before you return to your car. There are banks of payment kiosks, all yellow,  showing you where to pay and telling you how to pay.  They are hard to miss, or misperceive.

In theory, it’s the same system as the little yellow tokens at Biltmore Fasion Park. Except you must have the little yellow token validated by the merchant, and people aren’t used to carrying around little yellow tokens. They ARE used to carrying around parking tickets to have them validated. It will take time for the mall, which caters to winter visitors, tourists, and older locals, to get used to this drill. Most people try desperately to avoid it.

To complicate things further, in order to install the gate in the lot at Biltmore, the property management had to change the traffic patterns dramatically, so there is only one way to get out of the lot. The directions are not clearly marked. Non-intuitive one way traffic arrows on the pavement lead to dead ends.  As a result, while I was there  three or four cars were circling the lot looking for the one road to the exit, and another three or four were lined up at the exit trying to figure out the system with the little yellow token.  At lunch time, it was a real jam, and everyone kept ringing the bell for the attendant.

I asked the attendant whether she was getting enough user feedback to advise her superiors to make changes in the system to make it more user friendly and friction free. She looked at me as though I were a child: “there’s nothing wrong with the system, it’s just that people don’t read the signs.” Right. That’s like the engineer saying “Read the F**king Manual” about a piece of  software. It ain’t gonna happen, and besides, WE are the customer. We are paying. We deserve at least a decent customer experience.

I didn’t bother going into it with her further.  Clearly, although the Apple store is in this mall, she had never been there.  She didn’t understand that it is possible to produce intuitive system in which manuals and signs are not needed, because the system or design plays off common knowledge or the user’s previous experience, and there is a shared understanding. Think iPad.

Other things that could be fixed:

The single sign showing the exit is posted under a tree, and is very difficult to find.

A kiosk outside the lot confuses people about whether to pay there, or in their cars at the exit.

The design of the entire operation is not friendly.

The attendant, who is naturally annoyed at having to run out repeatedly from elsewhere in the center, always betrays her annoyance and clearly thinks the confusion in the customer’s shortcoming.

At some point, Biltmore Fashion Park will examine its traffic and decide its sales are off. Have them call me when that happens. And give that attendant some uppers in the mean time.




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Sarah Palin and the Phoenix Tea Party Rally

Sarah Palin and the Phoenix Tea Party Rally

Needless to say, today was my first Tea Party Rally. I decided to go with a few friends, because we wanted to see if Sarah Palin was anything like what we had heard or read.

The Rally, which took place outside the State Capitol at noon, was in some ways predictable, and in some ways totally unexpected. Here are some observations.

1) The crowd was smaller than I expected. I was able to get very close to Sarah Palin and take some very good pictures of her and Trig, who was with her. Trig had a rash on his face.

2)She’s very, very pretty.

3)She had American flags  painted on her toenails.

4) She has enormous performance energy. She’s like an older version of a cheerleader, almost a caricature of what I had seen on TV. And she has damned good makeup.

5)The crowd to see her was adoring, but much smaller than I expected, and not that “into her.” In other words, they were happy to see her, but they didn’t mob her.  Before she spoke, I was able to get quite close to her, and I handed the man next to me, who was much taller, my iPhone and he took the picture you see. I don’t think she’s the next American Idol.

6) There were five or six expensive busses parked at the Capitol, wrapped with Tea Party messaging. You can see them on my Facebook photo album. I am not sure they bespoke a grass roots movement, and I think many of the people in the Arizona State Capitol crowd were from out of town. Or maybe just from outlying areas of the Valley.  Sheriff Joe welcomed the out of towners.

7) Although there were some people with children (and dogs), the audience was overwhelmingly 55-70, and almost entirely white.  Well, entirely white from my perspective, although I can’t claim to have seen everybody.

8) There were lots of vendors selling Tea Party swag — t-shirts, books, buttons, CDs. I think they expected more of a turnout.

9) This was clearly a “Get Out the Vote” Rally, with everyone saying “we are only days away from taking back our country.” The Arizona part of it was represented by Sen. Russell Pearce and Sheriff Joe, who were most concerned with the issues of illegal immigration, and seemed outraged that a sitting President would sue one of his own states over this issue.

Sheriff Joe began his speech with a tribute to Juan Williams and tied that in to the free speech movement and Obama’s attempt to limit free speech.

The whole thing felt weird to me: as if the “lamestream media”  had blown something fairly small and trivial up into something more important to the cable channels than it was in real life. You wouldn’t believe how many cameras were there to cover such a small rally. I’ve seen more people on the Capitol lawn supporting a bond election:-) Because I know Arizona is so conservative, I expected more support for this rally.

So far, I’ve tried to report this rather than make judgments that are political. I went to see it because the Tea Party is a phenomenon in American politics, and because I don’t like to comment on things I haven’t experienced.

But now I have a hypothesis I’d like to advance:

I think the pollsters might be very wrong about the upcoming election. And that’s because they are polling the people I saw at this rally — the people with land lines. I wonder how many of the pollsters are polling younger people, or working people with cell phones.

The people I saw today were the fearful middle-aged white people who have been outsourced, laid off, and “victimized” by diversity. They looked as if they had been outrun by the pace of change, in every area of their lives. They were familiar: like Rotarians.  They clearly want things to go back to the past — one man came riding a horse, and those Minute Men were there. Everyone talked about bringing it back to how it used to be and taking it back. Everyone prayed and talked about Christ, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sang the National Anthem. It was the old days of baseball games and hot dogs, horses and guns, and the Greatest Generation. I didn’t hear anything about taxes; in fact I heard very little political content, except from the local guys.

I was probably the only geek in the place. And that says it all.




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