To my surprise, United Airlines is working with on the airline ticket issue. They understood my frustration, and want to resolve it because it is something that falls through the cracks. What they don’t know is this trip is for my friend’s 40th birthday. The irony of this is that my friend’s name is so rare, I don’t see how anyone can claim that we’re changing it to someone else.

If this goes through, I will tell everyone I know about the wonderful customer experience I had with United Airlines. Now they are going to work with Air Canada to change this. At least I didn’t spend $5,000 for a ticket like someone else did on Delta.

Companies don’t reach out to customers enough, and it even happens in the line of work that I do — we promise the customer X and the customer receives Y. It’s truly becoming a world where companies are taking the tact of “this is what you are going to get.” Seth Godin has a post on this regarding voice systems titled, “Should you fire the voice mail guy?” I now deal with them all the time when booking travel, and always have issues with them because I have a slight speech impedement.

Customers desperately want a great customer experience, so much so that word of mouth sites are very successful (i.e. Yelp).

Another story I relayed to a client: there have been studies done that when dealing with a website, the last thing people want to do is pick up the phone (or, can you spot a phone number anywhere on eBay or Amazon for customer service). They don’t want to send an email. What they really want to do is find an answer right then.

Additionally, people forget that internal customers are just as important as external customers. Read on over at Signal vs. Noise. When running an intranet, the less people bug you for a document and the more they can find on their own, not only does it make them happier with their job satisfaction, it saves the company or organization money and makes the more productive.

Case in point: When I was a product manager at Escrow.com, we added reams of frequently asked questions, rewrote every single email so it was easy to understand, and guess what? Not only did customer touches drop 33 percent (customer touches defined as an email or phone call into the call center), but walk-up business to the site went up 25 percent per month, to the point where Escrow.com is now a profitable business.

Happy customers mean more customers. More customers mean more happy customers. You know what I mean?

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On one of the mailing lists I read, this post came across:

I would like to hear experience and suggestions on how to work with non-creative management and/or clients, and how to design without requirement document, and how to work with someone who don’t know or don’t want to follow creative process due to time and budget restraint or lack of understanding of the importance of  following the process.

Good question. Usually, I say “run”. One of the readers referred to this post, which is really good.

They list questions you should ask as such:

1. Will I or my team be allowed to bring our best work to the final result?
2. Is the client prepared to engage in the project appropriately?
3. Is the client prepared to begin this project?
4. Is the client prepared to invest trust in my or my team's ideas?
5. Am I or is my team prepared to fulfill or exceed the project requirements?

If you can’t get to those five with the client, it’s not going to be a fun project.

Usually the clients like this fall into two camps:

• Clients with money
• Clients without a lot of money, or don’t want to spend money

The clients with money track is easier, because at least you can educate them and get paid for your time. I’ve worked in environments where the client just wanted to build something, anything, and didn’t really have a concrete idea of what they were building.

It’s difficult because at some point there has to be an established finish line, but that doesn’t happen overnight. But if they are willing to pay for it, you can eventually narrow down the requirements to where all parties are happy if the client allows themselves to be managed.

The reality? In this situation, a bad client is sometimes better than a good client for the pocketbook, because the project is guaranteed to go over budget because the requirements aren’t defined well or in a buildable fashion, or the project isn’t scoped correctly. The other reality is that working with that client will damage all relationships, and that client will never be a good reference.

The clients without money? Don’t even bother. Those clients are more difficult, because they don’t want to pay for anything — requirements, wireframes, design. They usually figure the developer should be able to do all those roles, and whatever doesn’t fall under development should be a pre-sales exercise in their mind.

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Edit: See this post. United’s going out of their way to help me out. Thank you.

I just recently booked a flight for a friend of mine on Expedia. Simple flight, Vancouver to San Francisco, but she’s Taiwanese, so I didn’t enter in her legal (Chinese) name, just her Canadianized name.

I tried to change the name a few days later, the change basically being adding an additional 8 characters. Big mistake. So now I’m going round and round with Expedia and United Airlines trying to get her name changed on the ticket so she doesn’t get hassled.

Further complicating it is that United Airlines is subcontracting one of the flights to Air Canada.

Of course, it’s not going to matter that there’s a documented case of a name correction on a blog. Other airlines charge a huge fee.

Note that there are no instructions on Expedia or United’s site that read “Ya know, you really should make sure that you enter in their name exactly as it is on the passport, because the airlines are going to screw you over in the name of 9/11 (security risks, yo).” Their response was “uh, didn’t you read the fine print?”

No one reads the fine print.

Thank you Expedia for trying to resolve this, but I’m getting frustrated with the “no, you have to call them” volleyball game the airlines and travel sites play.

One of the painful lessons about booking trips online is once you’ve booked it, you’ve pretty much spent that money because of some arcane language that reads no matter what, you can’t do a chargeback with your credit card and the airlines.

That one’s going to cost me $400 probably in the end. If I do have to spend that money, you can bet I’m not going to spend it with Expedia and United.

However, there’s a post over at Signal vs. Noise that has people talking about good service experiences. Great topic. I listed my Virgin America experience.

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I travel a bit for a work and for goofing off, and hate paying too much for airline travel. I also want my choice of times and flights.

Enter Kayak. One of the best examples of Web 2.0 design, it’s simple, offers my options to change my search on the fly, and it’s fast. I love the site. I don’t know how they make their money, because sometimes I book somewhere else, but whatever they are doing, keep it up.

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Where I’ve Been is a simple application that allows the user to enter all the places they’ve been — Beirut, Stanton, Paris — into the application and compare places with friends. When you search for cities that you’ve been, it searches for the city and returns surrounding cities to all. You can compare where you have been with friends, see statistics across the network, and there are a lot of opportunities for cross content display.

The interface is slick, very well thought out and an excellent use of Flash. The search algorithms need some work (I always love to enter St. Louis and see what the result is), but some of the surrounding cities as a result are fun. The usability of the map is off the charts; it was easy to find cities, and the response times were great.

Great app for advertising, but they really need to add targeting for the advertising (i.e. Miami advertisements for people that have been to Florida, etc.).

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 1
• Usability: 5
• Fun Factor: 5
• Stability: 5
• Monetization Opportunities: 4

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Search Panels Should Be Designed With Economy

In the upper left corner, there’s a huge search panel that contains all kinds of ways of filtering for car listings. While I’m all for showing as many options as possible. This area could be reduced by at least 50 percent by adding drop down menus and AJAX-style selection to get the user where they want to go. Some of the contextual navigation (finding a dealer, finding a car) could be mixed in differently.

Designing Above The Fold

Kelley Blue Book is an advertising-driven site, so the value isn’t only their ratings for cars, but driving users to the editorial content on the site. Most of the interesting content is buried low on the home page, and because most users are going to the site for finding a used car price range, they will never see the article content. I would actually suggest that searching for a car price might be placed below some editorial content (but screen centric) to see how it tests in A-B testing.

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Sure you can customize it — a really good list of the top 100 SharePoint sites.

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From David Coerchon:

• Not delivering
• Involving himself in the customer’s company internal issues
• Not listening
• Thinking the project might last forever
• Not thinking to learn for the next project
• Thinking it’s over when he leaves the customer

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Every idea isn’t a million dollar idea, and here’s what I mean:

I’ve worked for a number of companies that wanted to grow their concept so there was billions in revenue, thousands of employees. Growing an idea to that size is not only a once in a lifetime experience, the idea has to be so good that millions of people have to buy into it. Google, sure. Microsoft, they’re involved in 90 percent of a market or something like that. Apple, why not — they produce products that sell in the millions.

Companies like Stamps.com (where I worked)? No. When I worked there, we were aiming for the stars, but the actual (read: profitable) market for it was in the $20 to $30 million dollar range. They did layoffs, refocused their management, and swung for a double instead of a home run.

Guess what — they’ve been profitable enough over the past few quarters to net $2 to $5 million a quarter. Not huge, but considering the last quarter was a 33 percent more revenue then expenses, it’s working.

Sometimes we buy into that with the clients, and what we really should be telling them that doubles are okay, as long as they are focused with their ideas.

BaseCamp has a great article about how they are hittin’ for doubles by finding the natural size of their company around a solid product that is good, but not a home run idea and fills a very specific niche. That takes a lot of courage. Good luck to them.

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Absolutely useless, but I just had to do it.

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MyHeritage Celebrity Look-alikes is another one of those rating applications, this along the lines of selecting one of your photos and then matching it to a celebrity in their database. After you have selected the celebrity, other users get to vote on a scale of one to ten how close you resemble that celebrity.

It’s a basic application: just another form of Hot or Not, substituting a look alike to how hot you are. The only real option is to keep viewing people. The application also has a few nifty features, like morphing your photo into a celeb and then posting it to your profile.

Their. database is pretty large — it seems to contain over 1,000 images to select from — and the face recognization technology they have built into Flash is pretty good, and the usability of the application is also very well done because it has all the little details that many of the MySpace applications are missing, like hover over effects and indication of state. A nice feature would be selecting from a list of a friends and doing a separated by birth joke.

If they actually built advertising into this, there could be some advertising opportunities, and this application does link to a paid service, creating your online family tree so there has been some thought put into this.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 1
• Usability:5
• Fun Factor: 3
• Stability: 4
• Monetization Opportunities: 3

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I joined a gym, and did it online. I like the 24 Hour Fitness site because I was able to join online and not deal with any pesky salespeople trying to sell me a plan I didn’t want, and it was a fairly easy process to join. I need notice a couple of items I would change if I were in charge of their website:

Personalization

I came in as a member, and those links showed up. They should be replaced with links that are appropriate to me as an audience. Off that page, I would also make getting to the online store more obvious.

Non-Standard Credit Card And Information Forms

This is the join form, but this also appears in the credit card form — the form required you to enter your month (May, November, September) instead of selecting it from a drop down menu or entering a number. It might seem clever, but every other form of this type I’ve seen has been entering a date as numbers and not as a text item.

You have to really do things people expect, and this is outside the lines. If 80 percent of the forms out there require thing, there better be a really good reason to do it different, and there really isn’t a good reason to do it different here. I wonder: did they do any usability testing?

One note: If you are designing forms for an international audience, the format of the date for most countries is day, month, and year.

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