An extraordinary user experience this was not – bin battles

This is what I arrived home to yesterday ::

My driveway. My bin. My heart hurts. Sob.

Not that interesting?

Wrong – very. I could write an essay on how interesting this is – but for fear of losing followers before I have any, Ill keep it brief.

Here is a perfect example of an exceptionally shockingly bad experience.

The ‘job’ is to empty the bins, but actually that’s not the job.

As a user – I may fill my bin with my crap and other people may see their role is to clear it away but it’s not. Their role is to clear it away in utter ‘silence’. To clear it away as if by magic, to indeed be the fairy who comes along and gives me back an empty bin to one again fill.

But instead I cam back to a bin parked in the middle of my driveway, which resulted in me parking in the street as I was in a hurry to get into my house. My parking in the street effectively blocking the road for the bin van to get through when it was trying to escape my estate later. Once home I then had some bits and pieces of work to do which I couldn’t quite concentrate on as the ‘beeeep-beeep—bloody-beeeeep’ of the bin van reversing and the horrendous clattering of it shifting all of 10 metres a time up the streets in the surrounds of the estate and the noise of the rubbish pouring from the bins continued to bellow on for at least an hour. At least it wasn’t at their usual un-godly hour of 7am on a Saturday I suppose.

Clearly the bin men/women of my area have not quite grasped the concept of an extraordinary experience. Is it too much to ask that you appreciate the impact your task has on the rest of my world? Why? Why? Why? Would you leave my bin in the middle of my (and my neighbours for that matter) driveway!

Get some respect man – wasn’t it Martin Luther King who said

“If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music … Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

And while you’re on – turn your sodding reverse alert beeper off when you’re rolling along the road at 5mph – you’re not going fast enough for me to require any warning – I could walk quicker!!

There’s always a woman named Margret

The problem – who are your users and what do they do?

The solution – Margret is a clerk, she has 2 kids and a husband named John. She is 42.

This is not the solution, nor is it is useful to us as we handcraft the next best thing and lead the way in innovation and quite frankly be brilliant in what we do. Nope, Margret is not the answer. And neither are her children Emily (11) and Jack (14, an aspiring footballer) and her dog Badger (7, a sheepdog cross) and the family cat Tom (named after some hot Doctor in the TV show Casualty, much to John’s disgust (a point he has laboured over for the length of time he’s been her ‘better half’, i.e. the past 20 years)).

And neither is the fact that ‘Margret must review files’ of any use to us either. What’s she reviewing them for? Typos or the fact that certain criteria may mean they could be eligible for a $1million pay out?

So if this is of no use to us, then what is and how can we ensure that what we craft truly is user-centric or whatever else cliches or spin we might want put put on good olde fashioned, understanding the customers needs or ‘personas’.

So lets assume that designing for Margret the clerk isn’t going to cut it, what is then.

Well how about actually we do design for Margret, but we just take a different look at Margret’s world.

Ok. She’s a clerk, so she’s fairly computer literate, will complete simple tasks, and a lot of them. Typing won’t be an overhwelming problem for her, so make the comment boxes as big as you like, however its likely that much of her job will be based on things which have been set up for her to simply ‘complete’, she’s not about to start to design her own reports, forms and datasets, but if you give her a few criteria she’ll be able to run one.

Our user is in a crowded office with fairly old equipment – not the latest tech and has a lot of work to do in a day – some of which is often slowed down by the limitations of her technology. She has a computer at home, the family PC, which is far more up to date than that which she uses at work, however iPhones and anything beyond your basic mobile device is left to the kids. She is not spending her life on the likes of Facebook and Twitter of an evening or thinking about work – once home she is out of ‘office mode’.

So why then does Margret need our system?

Her day is too busy – or feels it, so she needs it to help her to be more efficient and to make sure she can get out of the office and be on the road as soon as possible to be completely frank. The kids, the dog and the husband are all waiting for her.

She needs our system because the one she uses now takes so long that it often falls over just before loading her a report, her boss does not appreciate this and she’s often left feeling stressed due to these inadequacies yet helpless to do anything about it. She needs our system because there isn’t enough room in the office for all the paper files she often ends up having to deal with. She needs our system because she takes pride in what she does, however there are so many manual tasks for her to complete at the minute she is barely able to deliver the basics let alone add any value without having to work additional hours, which her family situation simply doesn’t allow for. She needs our system because she feels she is falling behind with technology as she’s so used to working with an old system and feels entirely out of touch with some of the things her children talk about and are able to do with the PC they have at home. She needs our system as her kids will be off to Uni in a few years time and by that point she doesn’t want to be going backwards and instead may be looking to take on more demanding tasks. However she feels trapped at the minute by the mountains of paper pushing at the misconception that she’s more than happy working on the mundane because these days its all she gets chance to do.

She does not need our system to only run on 21″ mega monitors or a laptop. Neither does it need to allow her to ‘share’ her every interaction with the world and be accessible from home. She does not need it to ‘time her out’ if she’s in the middle of setting up a report and indeed she’s likely to dip in and out of the system often throughout the day, so the sign in process should be seamless. She does not need it to follow the latest interaction patterns necessarily but would appreciate simple instructions on use. And whilst we’re on there she appreciates the odd bit of feedback and would prefer to have the confidence that she’s not about to break something – so a few prompts of ‘are you sure’ now and again wouldn’t go a miss …

And we’ve not even mentioned one task which Margret has to do.

So whats the point then? Well the point isn’t that so called ‘BS Personas’ are useless, moreover that they are only useful if you consider then next dimension or the impact of the fluff.

Want to find out more about ‘BS personas’ ? More here in a talk by Jill Christ (lynda.com) and Stephanie Carter (boltpeters) which they delivered at SXSW Interactive 2012:

Slides

Audio