poor confidence in insurance shopping

So here i am, hopefully about to buy a new home within the next month and as a stipulation of that purchase I need to organise insurance. My mortgage provider's quote felt very expensive so I decide to get some alternative quotes to compare against.

What an experience!

First I try the two big comparison sites. I manage to get to a list of quotes with one of them but I end up in an eternal loop of fatal errors on the other site and I abandon it all together. With the first site, many of the 'cheapest' quotes are from brands I've never heard of and maybe i'm exposing my shopper mentality here, but when I'm insuring the biggest investment of my life to date, I want someone reputable. So I make a note of a couple of the quotes from the bigger brands to take it to the next level.

Quick and generic is ok for investigation but not purchase
However, i'm not completely confident in the coverage of the quotation system of the comparison site. It's generic and quick, which is good to generate some leads but not enough for me to purchase from. I want to make sure all the extras I need are included and all the extras I don't need are not included.

Rather than repeat the exercise online I decide to call, so that at least I can talk to someone to understand my options.

Price difference between channels
My first big issue is the big price difference between channels.  I understand that online shopping is 'cheaper' because there are no wages to pay for customer service centres etc, but with insurance in particular, it makes me nervous that I have not entered or disclosed the right details or got the right level of cover and there is no way to really. Especially when you are getting completely different prices. I wished the internet would say (for example) total policy cost £200.00 per year plus 15% discount for online purchase is £170.00 per year. Then I have the confidence that I am comparing apples with apples when I look at the online and offline prices.

Single channel only
Then there are the insurers, Axa for example, who won't even let you speak to a customer service person. There is no sales contact number on their website at all! You apply online or go elsewhere. How can I check that all my needs are covered? Well I think I'll take my business elsewhere thanks.

Information we want first
Most insurers are getting better at this but there are a guilty few who still get this badly wrong. They start by asking for all your personal information first (online and offline), rather than the subject of the enquiry, which in my case is home insurance. I feel much more inclined to give my personal information once they have satisfied my need.

Ask only the relevant information
Why ask about details that are obviously related to a contents policy when I am only requesting buildings insurance? I already had to spend 15 minutes in a horrid holding pattern before speaking to someone please don't make this any longer than necessary!

Provide detailed feedback.
'I'm sorry we can't offer you insurance right now. Please try again next year'
??? I'm sorry what? What the heck does that mean? Is your site down? Did I do something wrong on the form? Do you have a problem with my property that no-one else does, if so any chance you could tell me about it before I shell out a fortune for the next 25 years? As for trying again 'next year'...erm no chance!

So i'm no nearer at the moment - happy to take recommendations for UK home insurance suppliers :-)

Remote-facilitated-user-testing in multiple global locations

This is brief story about how Webex became the answer to my complex user-testing problems.

I had an interesting XD situation recently which I thought I’d share in case you end up in a similar position. The client I am working with is based in the UK. Some of the users we wanted to test with are dispersed around the globe. What’s more we have an offshore development team working in India to build our product. So the issue was how to get rapid end-user feedback on the design concepts in development without blowing the entire development budget on travel. It was also essential to us that members of the development team experienced the user-testing first hand so that they could appreciate and learn about the users behaviours, mind-sets and mental models.

I have used a number of remote testing software packages previously such as Loop11 or Usabilla to get feedback on a user-interface in development. However most of these packages offer unfacilitated, or software-facilitated test options. While remote unfacilitated testing is great the downside is that there is no opportunity to explore the users perceptions or ask the probing questions that come as a direct result of observation of their reactions or behaviours. The kind of research that is pivotal in early stage UI development. Certainly none of them were offering the ability to have multiple people in multiple geo-dispersed location logged into a single session simultaneously.

I knew there must be a solution out there somewhere, either that or I’d stumbled across a potential new product idea that could make me wealthy. To my surprise the answer had been under my nose all the time in a product I had only really associated with business communications and hadn’t previously associated with user-testing. Webex! The business communication tool. It allowed me to do everything I needed including:

• Ability to support multiple users in different geo-locations simultaneously in one session
• Ability to stream webcam and audio contribution from multiple or limited participants in the session
• Ability to view the participants screen and interaction with the screens to be tested, while simultaneously viewing a webcam of their facial responses and listening to verbal cues.
• Ability to record both audio and video tracks from the session and access them or share them later.
• Ideally software-as-a-service, rather than client-side thin or thick applications that the user needs to install.

Webex had it all! What’s more it was easy to set up*, control during the session and because I was fortunate enough to have access to an existing corporate Webex account  there were no additional overheads or expensive subscriptions. Perfect!

*The easy to set up part comes with the advice of enquiring with your users in advance of the session about their operating system and internet connectivity. If your users are on a fairly standard OS with ‘decent’ connectivity then there should be no set up required. However, as according to Murphy’s Law, we didn’t check in advance and our first participant was using Linux and had low connectivity and the combination meant we had to abandon that particular session! Doh!

It's a matter of balance

There are lessons to be learnt everyday! One of the big struggles that experience design folks have is ensuring to balance the needs of the business with the needs of the customer. To do this we look at both the business and the customer goals and expose the conflicts early so that we can create a balanced solution. When we don't take time to do this it results in a biased solution that favours either the customer or the business.

It's my mum's birthday in two days. My goal is to send her a birthday card. I have the card all written and I head to the post office on my way to work. I thought they opened at 8am (it's the run up to Christmas after all) but i find that they only open at 9am. But never fear a stamp vending machine is near! The post office has a stamp vending machine at the entrance, so I can buy stamps. Hurrah! I now have a card that is written, addressed and stamped. I look around but alas! There is no post box any where in sight! So the post office accomplished their goal of making money but is the customer happy? No! My goal is incomplete and I've either got to go out of my way to complete my goal and be late for work or else the card will not be delivered on time! Surely a post box at a post office isn't too much to ask?  

Poor cross-channel retail experience

Sorry if I seem to be picking on retail experiences recently - but big brands are all around us telling us how wonderful they are yet the actual customer experience tells a different story. Only today I had to use the internet on my iPhone to help a retail sales assistant who almost failed to make a sale because of the lack of consistency and synchronicity between the web-channel and the internal point-of-sale system in the retail channel.

• I went onto argos.com and reserved a couple of products for collection at my local store
• I arrive in store and queue at the till
• I give them my reservation number and they call up my reserved order on their system and I confirm those are the items I want. So far, so good.
• The sales assistant tells me the total amount and asks me for payment, at which point I make a query as the total  is £10 more than the internet had told me.
• We locate the problem product which is a pair of headphones. They were advertised on the web as a special promotion but the promotion didn't show on the in store point-of-sale system.
• The  sales assistant goes to on another terminal (presumably because she didn't want to have to close down the point-of-sale instance she was looking at) to pull up the Argos website. It fails to load. Instead there was an Internet Explorer error saying 'out of memory'
• She goes back to the POS system and checks the details again and tells me there was a promotion on the product but it ended 2 weeks ago.
• I told her that the price was current less than thirty minutes prior when I was on their website
• She goes back to the terminal where she was trying to access the internet and gets the same error
• "I'm sorry" she apologies "I'm having a problem with our systems and I can't verify the price for you."
• She calls for a manager. Given I am short of time in the time I wait for a manager to appear I manage to pull out my iPhone and launch the Argos site and show her the product at the correct price. Using the same phone, I show her the email that Argos sent to me to confirm my reserved items and corresponding offer price...
• She apologised and overrode the price on the POS system and promptly went on a break      

When your business model is built on direct sales and you are actively supporting both a retail and a digital channel it’s essential that the two are synchronised, or if you choose to make them independent make it clear to the customers and manage their expectations.

Goals Versus Features and the Minimum Desirable Product

I was debating with a technical colleague yesterday about the best way to divide up the design and development effort for a website. It’s a guy I trust, like and respect and up until this point we’ve been fairly well aligned in our thinking and approach. Something was niggling me about the debate. I was sure that we were talking about same thing. but it was in the language that described our separate points of view where we seemed to differ. I jumped across the table (literally) to get to the white board to draw a picture and there was a moment of epiphany when we realised that we were talking about the same thing but using different words to describe it. It emphasised a few things for me:
Visual thinking is essential method of communicating. It’s only of the only ways to get a shared understanding across teams of difficult concepts. You need a thousand words to describe a picture, but a quick stick figure or shapes and we solved the problem in a tenth of the time that we had spent wrangling with words.

The need for common language when working on a team. Visual communication can facilitate shared understanding and once you have this it’s the next essential step is to establish a common language so that we know when we have the discussion in the future that we are talking about the same thing. This doesn’t need to be anything more robust that having a sheet of flip-chart paper which lists frequently confused terms or domain-specific language and calling out the definition. It will save a lot of people from feeling dumb or ignorant, especially those who don’t like to assume but don’t want to ask.
So in this instance the terms that were causing the confusion was Epics, Goals and Features. Each of these can be described as the high level units of business or user value that can comprise of lots of lower level detail (aka user stories/requirements). What we were violently agreeing about was that design is difficult at the micro level without first considering the macro level and the context of use.  However he was talking about features and I was talking about goals (and goal-driven design and development). They did boil down to the same abstract concept but the difference lies in the perceived value that each delivers and therefore the ability to prioritise what gets delivered in what order. The business could probably prioritise ‘features’ based on the level of return on their investment multiplied by time and effort to develop. However we need to ask what value do users attach to features because there’s little point in building features that are not going to be used by the end customer no matter how much the business thinks it might be used. There’s a statistic which came from a report produced by the Standish group which says ‘45% of features built are never used’ – which is an awful lot of time and effort wasted. So we want to make sure that we are building the right thing for the right people.
The way we solve this is not by thinking about features per se, but by thinking about goals. A mobile phone has features: it has a camera feature, a text feature, a web connectivity feature etc.

Customers/users however have goals that they want to achieve using the device or application. Customers want to take a picture to capture the moment and share it with family and friends. If we focus purely on the feature we can get hung up on making that feature great and foget the context of use, we can also limit our design thinking. Do we really need infinite mega pixels, a Carl Zeiss lens and photo-retouching that compares with industry heavyweight applications like Adobe Photoshop when actually we’re on a phone contract with a limited data package and we’re sending the image to Great Aunty Beris who has the most basic handset with a small and poor resolution display? Probably not.
By focussing on the goals that the user wants to achieve we can feel much more confident that we are building the right thing. It also means that we are in a much better position to consider the ‘minimum viable product’ and get it out quickly to market. To do this we take the user goal and ask ‘what is the minimum that we could deliver in the shortest period that would allow the user to achieve their goal?’ Granted not everyone is a fan of the minimum viable product but once we have this as a baseline we can then ask, is this enough to engage and delight our customers? If it is, great! We can get down to the business of development and get it out there quickly. If however the minimum viable product is not quite enough then we simply ask ‘what is the minimum that we could deliver in the shortest period that would allow the user to achieve their goal and engage and delight them?’ and we build delight into our minimum viable product.

24/7 web

Weird, i've had some interesting experiences lately when trying to go about my usual internet business. Finding that I can't get on sites that i would expect to be available 24/7...

This is from my supermarket, Tesco. I wanted to do my shopping online but they were a bit too busy, so instead shut the door in my face with this completely off-brand message. I did wait for it to be less busy, but i might think twice if it happened again.

A least Twitter was slightly more polite and on-brand about not being able to let me in and offers a live status view.

I would have thought that mega-brands like these would be able to flexibly scale for capacity?

Thinking of changing banks

HSBC have brought out these new security online security devices. It generates a random number which you use to log in and verify transactions. It makes everything a lot harder. A lot harder. But hey, it’s protecting everyone so I thought I could put up with it. So while there is truth in the fact that customers will put up with a certain amount of pain in exchange for some perception of value, when there is more pain than necessary it’s time to move on.
I needed to reimburse a a friend.

1. Go to internet banking and click logon
2. Enter Internet Banking number (12 characters/numbers allocated by the bank that I cannot remember and have to write down)
3. Enter answer to security question
4. Turn on secure key
5. Enter secure key PIN
6. Generate secure number
7. Enter secure number on screen
8. Go to main banking page
9. Select account
10. Click on pay a friend
11. Enter payee details (name, sort code, account number, payment amount, payment description, transaction date)
12. Turn on secure key
13. Enter secure key PIN
14. Press yellow button on secure key to get a dash
15. Enter last 4 digits of payees account number
16. Press yellow button on secure key to generate transaction number
17.  Enter transaction number on webform
18. Click continue
19. Go to new page and get error message because I put an apostrophe in payment description field
20. Go back to transaction form
21. Remove apostrophe
22. Turn on secure key
23. Enter secure key PIN
24. Press yellow button on secure key to get a dash
25. Enter last 4 digits of payees account number
26. Press yellow button on secure key to generate transaction number
27.  Enter transaction number on webform
28. Click continue
29. Confirm payment
30. Payment confirmed

Seriously? It would have been quicker and more satisfying to jump in the car and go to my friend’s house and pay her the £11!

Apart from the fact that the process is too damn long, what was really painful was the error experience. NOWHERE on that form did it say that you could not use special characters, not even in the pop-up help. That would have been the polite thing to do. The other helpful thing to do would have been some client-side validation that checked for special characters BEFORE I submitted the form. How hard can it be?
Off to find a new bank.