Really poor customer service. So poor, I have to take to social media to get any proper attention.

A friend of mine received a phone bill from Rogers Communications, a cellular company in Canada. On it was $619 for international roaming charges — six days in Hong Kong and China which no one could explain. She was there for two months, and is very experienced international traveller.

She knows how to turn data roaming off.

What’s worse is the customer service received in response to this issue:

• Reported the issue originally on Jan 2.
• Called back several times.
• Still have not gotten an answer as of today, 20 days later.
• Was hung up on three times, twice today.
• Was told by the first customer service representative that iPhone applications can automatically turn on data roaming without the user knowing it. To someone who designs iPhone applications, and knows this is not the case.
• Was told by the second customer service representative that the roaming settings are easy to accidentally turn. You know, the settings that are three menus down on an iPhone.
• Had to call a customer service representative to remove automatic billing (there’s no option on the website). That is black hat UX, and not customer friendly.
• Their technical support department can’t see billing records, and vice versa, which is even worse from a business process prospective. Very customer unfriendly.
• Customers cannot walk into a Rogers store and resolve an issue easily. You know, like Verizon or AT&T.

20 days.

Several incorrect answers that less experienced people would have accepted.

Several customer service representatives giving incorrect information.

No resolution other than one representative offering to be put on a pre-paid plan of 80 dollars. That would have meant paying 80 dollars for phantom usage. She was running from Starbucks to Starbucks to get her email.

All this trouble for a customer who’s cellular phone contract is up for renewal. You know, a customer that’s been with them 10 years, and through all this doesn’t want to switch companies.

Will someone help? Please?

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Sure, she talks about HR and Recruiting, but Laurie Ruettiman is a great writer. You should follow her blog, because it’s great career advice, even if she doesn’t follow it herself.

Here’s one of her posts stolen, lock, stock and barrel. It’s a good read.

My best career advice from 2012. Summarized for your enjoyment.

• Don’t let a job define you.
• Don’t be too good for work.
• Your personal life and your professional life are different. Guard that.
• Don’t sulk when good things happen to other people.
• Mediocrity at work is okay.
• Money talks.
• You are responsible for your own engagement.
• Work is not your family.
• The best way to get a job is to have a job.
• For every one hour you spend on the internet, spend six in the real world.
• Don’t spread office gossip unless it’s true.
• People notice if you don’t wash your hands.
• Save your money and work less.
• It’s better to smell good than look good.
• Your boss doesn’t have it out for you. Your coworkers do.
• If you fear being fired, it’s too late.
• You are not George Carlin. Tamp down those jokes.
• If you wonder if that skirt is too short, it is.
• When someone asks how you’re doing, it is a formality. Don’t answer honestly.
• You can say no to team building, wellness programs and forced fun.

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First World Problems has got you covered.

Here’s the list:

• Safeway is a whole 10 minutes away, but I really need twinkies.
• My house’s mood lighting doesn’t match all of my moods.
• I need to use both of my hands to unplug my $400 cell phone
• Skateboards look cool, but using my legs is strenuous.
• I order too much stuff on Amazon and keep missing deliveries.
• I can’t be fucked to wait in line for the new iPhone 5.
• Shopping around for a shirt that fits me properly would mean I’d have to leave my couch.
• No matter how hard I try, I cannot find a way to share and discover amazing images!
• Excel Functions? I’m still looking for a technical co-founder.
• My social networking sites are too social.
• I just have too many social networks for me to keep track of.
• If I call a cab, I’d have to actually talk to someone, and yellow really clashes with my shoes.
• There are moments when I don’t know what celebrities all my friends are endorsing.
• Not all of my friends know what I think about everything all the time.
• I’m nostalgic for an era before I was born.
• I feel weird not looking at a monitor constantly.
• My friends owe me money, but cash is such a hassle.
• My iPhone alarm goes off right in the best part of my sexy dreams.
• Using keys to open the door to my house is really time consuming.
• Autocomplete doesn’t work for adding new contacts, but typing whole words takes effort.
• Everyone on Reddit is too mean to me.
• I want to blog, but I don’t want to type anything.
• I have $36.
• I need a number to validate my existence.
• I need entertainment, but deciding which link to click is difficult.
• I mentioned I liked conspiracies so now I’m on a treasure hunt across the internet.
• My watch doesn’t have a touchscreen.

First World Problems also has the answers.

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This is the Official UX Drinking Game Shindig for No Reason.

It’s free except for the booze.

This isn’t affiliated at all with anyone, but it’s an excuse to get together. Meet up with other designers and have a drink for all the reasons we need to drink.

Hosted by myself, curator of the UX Drinking Game. The first five attendees in San Francisco that show me they have downloaded the iPhone app will get a free drink. The back area will be reserved. This will probably be one of the last times it’s held in San Francisco — I’m moving to Seattle.

San Francisco, California

Hosted by UsabilityCounts
Tony Nik’s
1534 Stockton Street
San Francisco, California
Facebook | Map

Dallas, Texas

Los Angeles, California

Hosted by NatalieSun
Copa d’Oro
217 Broadway
Santa Monica, CA 90401
Facebook | Map

Washington, DC

Hosted by DUQE
Details coming soon.

Facebook

London, England

Hosted by WorldOfKnight
The Rake
14a Winchester Walk
Borough Market SE1 9AG, United Kingdom
Facebook | Map

Tel Aviv, Israel

Hosted by TomerSharon
Google Israel
98 Yigal Alon
Tel Aviv, Israel
EventBrite | Map

Other cities coming soon. Shoot me a note if you’re interested in hosting in your town.

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This is a cool little site for UX Professionals — UXmas is a joint effort from the teams at Thirst Studios & UX Mastery, with delightful illustrations provided by Supereight Studio. One of the best of first three days is about credit cards — most sites collect too much credit card information, and that increases friction. Here’s the tip:

Credit card type can be deduced from the card number.

That’s right. If you know the credit card number, you can work out whether it is a MasterCard, Visa, American Express etc etc.

Thanks go to the international standard ISO/IEC 7812, which defines the structure of numbers on identification cards, including credit cards (read more in the officialdocumentation). The first six digits of a card number are the issuer identifier number (IIN), which identifies the organisation that issued the card.

For the purposes of online payment, you currently mostly only need to use the first two digits to work out what type of credit card the user has, as follows:

• Visa: first digit is “4”
• MasterCard: first digits is a “5” and second digit is “1”, “2”, “3”, “4” or “5”.
• American Express: first digit is a “3” and second digit is “4” or “7”.
• Diners Club: first digit is a “3” and second digit is “6” or “8”.
• Japan Credit Bureau (JCB): first digit is a “3” and second digit is a “5”.
• Discover: card number begins with “6011” or “65”.

What does all this mean for our online form?

You don’t need to ask the user what type of card they are using.

Read on…

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Super video.

Three of the top 12 reasons why a project fails:

• Poorly defined requirements
• Poor communication between customers, developers and users
• Stakeholder politics

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Infographic from Rasmussen College

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Users don’t distinguish between hardware and software. They just want devices that work:

Jony Ive–the man behind the iMac, the iPhone, and the iPad hardware–will be taking a brand new role as head of human interface design alongside his existing role as leader of industrial design. He will run hardware and software. Apparently, after hinting to The Telegraph earlier this year that he was upset with the skeuomorphic designs of Apple’s software, Ive made a powerplay within the company.

…

It’s particularly relevant for Apple when you consider what looks to be a pretty inevitable future, a world where desktop software and mobile software seamlessly complement each other. The style is minimal. Buttons may not even exist. Control by touch, mouse, voice, gesture–it makes no matter. All that’s important is the information you wield as naturally as possible wherever you want to see it.

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You can’t make this stuff up. This is awesome. From Google’s website:

Doodler

This position is based in Mountain View, CA.

The area: Product

One of the many reasons Google consistently brings innovative, world-changing products to market is because of the collaborative work we do in Product Management. With eyes focused squarely on the future, our team works closely with creative and prolific engineers to help design and develop technologies that improve access to the world’s information. We’re responsible for guiding products throughout the execution cycle, focusing specifically on analyzing, positioning, packaging, promoting and tailoring our solutions to all the markets where Google does business.

The role: Doodler

As a Doodler, you will join the small creative team responsible for the Google homepage logos (google.com/doodles) that surprise and delight hundreds of millions of users worldwide. You will work at the intersection of art and technology individually and collaboratively with artists, engineers, and other Googlers to lead the creative vision for high impact illustrations, animations, games, and more.

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Social media shouldn’t be a substitute for interaction with, you know, real people around you. One of the good things about social media is you can keep tabs on friends around the world (one of the groups I’m a part of has a 24 hour interaction cycle), but we forget how it’s important to shop local, meet local and have physical interaction.

I’m guilty of it, outside of being in a walkable neighborhood. But I make it a point to have drinks, brunch and other interactions with friends that are local, and explore where I live.

Ryan Carson points this out in a great article:

I believe we have a problem. A lot of the people I know or meet have substituted online community for neighborhood community.

1. We chat to our ‘friends’ on Facebook but we don’t know the people next door.
2. We read Tweets from someone we’ve never met, but can’t remember the last time we chatted to the family across the street.
3. We frantically clear our inbox but fail to sit on our porch so we have can have serendipitous chats with people walking by

Knowing and relying on your physical neighbors is essential to a healthy and happy life.

…

We’ve all got to choose our local communities and invest in building them. When we die, we won’t wish we had a few more friends on Facebook, but we all will wish we shared a few more laughs with our neighbors over a beer or coffee.

Get out from behind Twitter and Facebook and meet your neighbors, yo.

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Don’t necessarily agree with all of this, but it is food for thought.

Provided by OnlineClasses.org.

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Jason runs a blog that (I kid you not) is called The Art of Ass-Kicking. Great blog.

He is one of the founders of Ridejoy, a ride-sharing site. Great idea. This article is a full case-study on how they designed their mobile application, soup to nuts.

Every UX Designer should read it. The list below are the lessons learned.

I’ll end with some lessons I’ve learned from designing this app:

• Prototype. Test. Prototype. Test. Our team spent hours debating user needs and hypothetical solutions. Testing a quick prototype, whether it is click-through wireframes or a quick build, with real users (who are not part of the team) helped us make decisions faster. And we made a great example for lilyhair.com website for this design.
• Play out the interaction models. We tried out a few navigation models. Tabs? Side-bar? Dashboard? We sketched out each model, pinned them up, and discussed which one was the best for the Ridejoy experience. We had to play out the scenarios fully to truly understand how they would work.
• You just gotta ship. As a designer who wants to perfect the details, I had a hard time with this. I don’t know if people are going to understand how to autopilot their offers. I think we can improve our “no upcoming rides” screen. The feeling of wanting to fix “one more thing” will always be there so recognizing that and shipping anyway is an important thing to do.

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Filmed at the Ignite Lean Startup event at Parisoma Lofts in San Francisco, May 2011.

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You knew it was coming.

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This is the new myspace. Any questions?

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As Jon Fox said, spread the gospel.

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The process of getting a great user experience job that you love isn’t as hard as you would think — you just have to tell your story.

The Usability Counts UX Resume and Portfolio Bootcamp will happen November 13, 2012 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in San Francisco, California. The event covers all aspects of getting that UX job you love:

• Presenting a great resume
• How to properly present your experience
• Crafting a portfolio that tells your story

Also covered are questions to ask and what to look for, so you can find the right culture for your skills and career.

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Great article. So true.

When your car breaks down, you take it to a mechanic. You need a new roof, you call a roofer. Yet, for some reason a lot of people think they can design their own website.

Your website is your #1 marketing tool. Don’t ruin it by designing it yourself. And don’t hire the cheapest provider or your cousin. The site will suck. Can’t afford it? It’s a matter of priorities. You can always find a way to pay for things that are truly important to you.

We live in the era of design. Good design sells, bad design doesn’t. There’s lots of research out there saying that people trust beautiful websites more. Heck, people trust beautiful everything more. Beautiful people make more money, are more successful and and just have it better. We like pretty cars, houses and clothes. The same goes for websites.

Read on…

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A lot of UX Designers are fooling themselves when they claim they are UX Designers.

They don’t have a process.

They don’t do testing.

They don’t do research.

They just jump straight into wireframes.

They jump straight into Photoshop mocks.

They produce shiny deliverables, not effective communication tools.

Sometimes, our environments don’t allow us to do it (i.e. the agency that has billable time for wireframes, but not for ethnographic research). Sometimes, we just don’t do it because we have so many other things to do (i.e. product development where we are working with 10 developers, and have 200 pages to wireframe). Sometimes, we don’t do it just because.

The passion is there to create great products, but it disappears when you need to gather all those details that are needed to create great products.

We have so many excuses, but not many answers.

A designer wrote a great post about this. This is an excerpt. Read on.

Just because I can imagine great user experiences doesn’t make my designs right.

Ah, where do I start? User experience, the ultimate goal. What all designers strive for. It’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot – but that ultimately is the problem. This user experience all lives in my head – and I haven’t really spent time with actual users on what *their* experiences will be like. I’m not the user, nor will I ever be one. While it’s great for coming up with ideas, my ideas still need to be tested against other people’s perspectives, and I haven’t done that.

If I blame the project or the place I work, maybe the fault is in my ability to convince or advocate for user-centeredness. Even without the support, I should still be doing guerilla testing but I admit giving way to an internal culture.

So I’ve done very little user testing. Or upfront research. Or even surveys or interviews. Or just asking people at their desks. Plus, it’s worse that I know how to do this stuff and still don’t do it.

…

But somehow, it’s not enough. Nor will it ever be. And where I’m aiming to go, unicorns and one-size-fits-all don’t seem to make sense. Maybe someday, I’ll find something I can identify with. But for now, I don’t think I can quite call myself a UX designer, because it’s getting harder to identify what I do as wholly UX. For what it’s worth, I am doing bits within UX – but I can’t claim fame to all of it.

Problem is, I’m not sure what I am anymore, or what I should be focusing on. After some thought, I think I align most with “interaction design” than any of the other disciplines (UX is not a discipline). My title as “information architect” bears some truth – I do practice IA at work (which designer that deals with information doesn’t?) but the extent to which I practice IA doesn’t give me confidence to call myself one.

Are you a real UX designer? Read on.

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