Remember The Vault? It was the Web 1.0 version of a message board for reviewing companies. It seemed cool at the time — wow, look at all the messages talking about not-so-stellar management. But like all sites, it’s pretty much a shadow of it’s former self, mainly because it wasn’t very sticky.

Enter GlassDoor, the new entry into the “review your company” sweepstakes. It has a bunch of me too features, but the site is much easier to use (sooner or later they’ll have to add advertising), and there are a bunch of contextual searches.

The most intriguing feature is the salary ranges for each company. Boy, that’s going to make some companies uneasy.

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What if you are a really big company, have a good idea, and the implementation is so poor that no one wants to use it? This is what you get when you have an application like Simply Hired. The concept is simple — based on the zip code in your profile, it shows you five jobs that are matches.

The problem is that you really can’t do much with it — it lists only five jobs, there’s no search functionality, and there’s no indication of how to change the zip code or even what the search is based off of. It does launch to a search region, but it would be even better that someone could actually start a search within an application. And there is so little branding with this application you don’t know what it’s for after installing it.

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

• Usefulness: 1
• Usability: 2
• Fun Factor: 1
• Stability: 4
• Monetization Opportunities: 5

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Where’s The Search Box?

Hulu‘s a pretty good site — lots of video from companies that want some kind of control over the content, which is much more than YouTube is giving them. The site’s is version 1.0, so the interface feels a bit clunky. Most importantly, where’s the search box?

I made the screen capture small without a highlight for the primary reason that if you are on a content-heavy site, that search box better be easy to find. Like Google easy to find. Like YouTube easy to find. Like News.com easy to find.

Can you find it?

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Microsoft is testing a prototype of a social network built on SharePoint, and again, it won’t be the first. We’ve done a few (Paul Mitchell Connect, a few companies I can’t name of I’d have to shoot you ;) ), and SharePoint’s governance model lends itself very well to maintain such a network. Some of the issues of legality and privacy are actually limited within a corporate social network.

Looking forward to more companies going social!

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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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