Archive for December, 2008

Good design as a customer service tool

My wife and I recently got iPhones after our previous cell phone plan expired. Apple does a really good job of managing the user experience of the purchase, from being able to make an appointment to buy and setup your phone, all the way through purchasing and setting it up.

What I got the other day was the other half of that alliance, which was the bill from AT&T for the phone service and setup. Here is where the process broke down. The world is filled with stories of unreadable phone bills and “Brazil-like” service and billing snafus, but mine is a simple one. The design of the bill.

It’s not that there was anything out of place on the bill, it’s just that it was hard to understand and to follow, and when you can’t follow the process for how they came up with the charges, it makes the total that you have to pay on the bill a little hard to swallow. I was just about to call customer service, when I had a better idea. I would break out a spreadsheet and total up the charges myself to see where my confusion was.

Since there are two phones on the bill, there are of course, two of everything. Add to this AT&T charging us for the service of our previous billing period (November) as well as charging us for our current billing period (December). There are one-time charges for each of us to setup each phone, as well as data plan and text message charges for each phone in each billing period. One more thing and that’s the taxes and fees and you have everything just about covered. This sounds like a lot of individual charges and you can just imagine people staring in bewilderment at their bill when they get it.

Once I got all the charges in my spreadsheet it was easy for me to quickly see that my bill was not really any different than I thought it would be when I bought the phone. What I realized the bill suffered from, was to much detail and not enough summary. While I don’t think there is anything the phone company can do about the detail part of the bill, I’m sure there are all sorts of regulations about the size of the font for each service charge, they can help customers better understand their charges by adding a few lines of summary for each phone.

Currently they have a by phone total for the whole bill, my suggestion would be that they add a summary line total for each phone for each month and a summary line for each months bill. Another nice break out would be a summary line total for “One-Time” setup charges, to make sure the customer knows that these will not be part of future bills. Bonus points for showing an average amount of future bills based on previous totals.

Some simple little lines to better illustrate how the bill is divided up can, save a whole lot of customer service time and headache. Especially when customers are watching their wallets. Not everyone is willing to breakout their Excel spreadsheets to figure out their phone bill.

Posted by Tom Risse | Filed in Uncategorized | No Comments »

The death of the mouse has been greatly exagerated

I was listening to the radio recently when the commentator cited an analyst report that said that the mouse, which was invented some 30 years ago, would be fazed out in the next 3-5 years. And with videos like this one from Jeff Han at the Ted conference it seems like its just around the corner. But after shopping for a new mouse the other day at Best Buy, I’m not so sure.

If you ever watched a parent or grandparent use a current computer, you will realize that even after 20 years of ubiquitous use around the computer industry, there are lots of users who still have a problem with how the mouse / cursor paradigm works. Imagine trying to instill a new multi-touch pattern on current and future software and how it impacts the people who use it.

Aside from the years of work people have put into the mouse paradigm, if you have any idea of how computer operating systems are made, you have a good idea how hard this would be to do inside of 10 years, much less to do it in 3-5 years. Remember that it just took 6 years for the largest manufacturer of OSs,  Microsoft, to change its operating system from Windows XP to Windows Vista.

I have no doubt that the touch-screen idea will take off at some point especially thanks to products like Apple’s iPhone, but if you’ve ever used the keyboard on the iPhone you have a good idea how far the implementation has to go before it becomes the dominate way in which we interact with computers.

Everyone wants to be Tom Cruise in Minority Report, but I think we will have to wait a little longer.

Posted by Tom Risse | Filed in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Small Utilities – The right tool for the right job.

The phrase “The right tool for the right job” applies to software as well as working on projects around the house. If you’ve ever tried to take a nail out with pliers instead of the back end of a good hammer or tried to open a can with a knife instead of a can opener you can appreciate this.

I had to do some quick video edits recently and I was hard pressed to find something built into the Windows Media Player that made this as simple as “Save As”. The kind of edits I’m talking about are just as simple as saving out a portion of the time code as a separate movie.

If you look around for a little bit you will find a Windows utility called Windows Media Encoder which includes Media Encoder, File Editor, Profile Editor and Stream Editor. The File Editor portion of this is exactly the tool I was looking for. A really simple tool to save out portions of a WMV file.

The question that came to mind after I used the tool was,  Why isn’t this part of the Windows Media install?

Posted by Tom Risse | Filed in Uncategorized | No Comments »