SUDUKO ate my brain (AKA the case of the mysterious beeping sound)

The other day my husband and I had a angst ridden experience trying to chase down the source of a very high beep. It seemed to be emanating from nowhere. The middle of the room. Out of thin air. If you put your head under the desk, the sound got quiter. The sound wasn’t present outside the room. The sound was not in the closet. It was mystifying. We unplugged everything. It was a total deconstruction. We had to take the most ‘electronic’ room in our house. The room with the most batteries and items with batteries and cleanse it of batteries to find the source of the noise. This was no small task. It’s an office, there are many batteries.

And yet the sound continued. We grew confused. How could this be, we thought we had removed EVERYTHING. we had not obviously. and then i saw it. it was under a basket that contained papers and some cd’s. it was beeping. a high pitched sound that could eventually drive someone mad if the source had not been located.

Suduko! it really ate our brains that night. The whole night did not go as planned after that. Everything was turned upside down after the stress and confusion of trying to locate a high pitched ‘my battery is dying sound’. You can imagine the relief when the sound was eradicated. My husband and I laughed til we almost cried. We recovered, but not without an altered opinion of the device/game Suduko. That’s a really good thing to test with consumers. That freaked us out and it was impossible to tell it was the game. Our world just gets more interesting and confusing. Another great example, Suduko.

Last Updated Daily Call….

The Tivo’s have safely landed. That is to say, the Tivo adventure my husband and I embarked on over a week ago has come to a happy ending. After two different trips to our friends house so Tivo could make all the right phone calls and the span of over a week’s time, the Tivo’s are in their locations and working effectively. We got two of them and they actually talk to one another. It’s great now that they are all hooked up but the process of getting here was pretty grim. The friend’s house that we took the Tivo’s to told us stories of their co-workers that had not gotten as far as we had and just returned the Tivo’s thinking they were broken.

They were broken. We worked our way through that and now they are happily connected to the Internet (not a land line!).

So, to sum it up.

We bought two tivo’s to replace our cable DVR’s (which sucked and we paid rent to have them every month)
They have USB so should have no problem connecting to the home network-
OH WAIT, gotta make a land line call before anything else works, don’t have a land line? just go over to a friend’s house
oh, ok. so now you want me to impose on my friends because your product lacks some significant features—ok……
so we go to friend’s house not once, but twice–apparently it has to make 2 phones calls from the land line, the second of which is about 1 1/2 hours long.
after the second visit to said friend’s we leave the second Tivo there to complete it’s second call
product add-on, we need special equipment to get the Tivo’s onto the home network, first we buy generic and those don’t work, we are stuck with them as returning them would cost us a ‘re-shelving fee’ so it’s not worth it—-SO we had to purchase the Tivo branded products to get the Tivo’s on the home network

The Tivo’s made their calls. They are on the home networks. Tivo’s go.
But man, that was a lot of work. They should really fix this problem. Soon.

I know this is one of those things my friend Mahtab call’s ‘problems of the upper middle class‘. I really have no right to complain about anything. My life is good. But I feel I need to let my product experience with Tivo be known. This is the participation age after all.

Tivo No Go?

Let me just preface this post with a little history.

I’ve had Tivo in my life for a long time. My husband and I got our first Tivo in 1999. We loved it soooo much that I sold my car and carpooled with husband for 3 months so we could save up and give one to everyone in our family.

In recent years we’d been sucked into the DirectTV Tivo’s. Last fall we bought one that was HD. The only one. Being an early adopter has it’s perils. We found out that DirectTV was coming out with it’s own DVR and the Tivo model would not be supported. This made us upset. We had just bought it. Also, it never worked with our VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phone so the software kept degrading. So, since DirectTV had made us unhappy campers as customers, we got cable. If you read my previous post, you can see how that’s working out….

Anyway, on to today. So with cable we had DVRs from the cable company. After Tivo, these DVRs were not such a good experience. They had awful interfaces for finding programs to record and a killer feature, if the show wasn’t on for a couple of weeks, it just forgot about it! So we had to remember to remind our DVR to record programs we liked. Nothing like having electronic equipment with memory issues.

So we went down to basic cable and returned their DVRs. We needed to replace the barely passable cable company DVRs (happily). We were so excited, we were finally going to have Tivo again.

So we went to Best Buy and got Tivo. Everything was happy, happy until we got home and tried to connect it. You have to set it up with a phone connection. Not just any phone connection, but a land line. It has full capability to connect to the Internet, but you can’t set it up that way. You have to freakin call.

I just kept thinking. So, this is a company that makes products for early adopters. Don’t most early adopters have VOIP? Don’t at least some of them? And what about people that just have cell phones.

So we actually had to sit in our living room and brainstorm how we were going to get our Tivo set up. Because once it’s set up, we can use the internet for updates. So, we went through our list of friends to figure out who had a land line. Less than half of our friends do. We did find a good friend with a land line and we’ll go get it set up tomorrow, but WTF is up with that?

So for now, Tivo no go.

A Big AHA

I’ve always struggled with the fact that the work I do seems a bit ‘touchy-feely’ to business folks. But today I learned about some secret sauce that makes it quantifiable. There are actually methods and models to prove that a good Customer Experience has a significant effect on the bottom line. It can be about profit and doing things that delight customers. That has always just been a gut instinct but now I’ve got numbers and proof to back me up.

way cool.

A Brain That Is Full

Thinking about your profession in a setting with many other practicioners can be an exhilarating activity. I’m amongst my peers this weekend at the IA Summit. I’ve seen many talks, participated in workshops, discussions, and activities. Yesterday I lost my voice and today I continued to have coughing fits, but I’ve powered through.

The biggest thing that seems to be on people’s mind is the future. I think I’m lucky to be in that kind of profession. There are many things I don’t agree with but I do welcome the opportunity to have those kinds of discussions. You always learn more from someone when there is a difference of opinion.

Some people here are saying that the title of Information Architect will go away. I’m not sure why they feel it is necessary to declare that. Maybe they just want to be first so they can say, ‘you heard it here.’ I think people like that are actually completely missing the point.

The web is an integral part of our lives. More now than ever before. There will always be complexity humans will find themselves interacting with. Since I work for the company that believes the network is the computer, I agree with those that believe information architecture is beyond a ‘web page’. These kinds of problems are out there and they need people to solve them. Call me whatever you like, my work will continue to evolve and I will continue to ‘Design’ for people.

Big thoughts for the weekend….

You can’t define what we ‘do’
You can’t control what ‘they’ do

Once you accept the above and remember that humans are messy, things become a lot more interesting and a lot less stressful.

The Long Tail On My Blog

You’ve been hearing about Northwest Airlines quite a bit in the news lately. Just like all the other major airlines, they are on the brink of bankruptcy. I told you about my in-laws. I booked flights for them using my frequent flyer miles and somehow they got upgraded to first class. I pondered if this had to do with my ‘Northwest Airlines’ sucks blog post.

I’ve been thinking about this post and how it’s a great example of the Long Tail. I put that post out there a long time ago. Recently I’ve seen a bunch of traffic. I guess there must be a whole lot of people searching on the google keywords ‘Northwest Airlines Sucks’. My blog comes up third when you search that set of words. The post initially got hardly any attention. It was out there and once in a blue moon someone with another bummer of a story posted a comment. Well the last month or so has been much more active. I’m up to 69 responses as of now. I know that’s not a ton, but think about the fact that I put this blog out here, I told approximately 3 or 4 people it was here. Give it some time and the right topic and people gather, they comment, they share.

Now I have a confession to make. I took a Northwest Airlines flight today. I had to. Remember, hub city. I had to get from home to Vancouver, Canada, to San Fransisco and back home in a week’s time. If I went the Northwest way it meant a total of four flights. The next best routing with all other airlines (this was booked through my work travel agent, so there were plenty of choices…) was 7 flights. I kid you not. Well, this was a case in which Northwest was the clear winner. I was not about to take 7 flights (and spend way more money) to avoid Northwest. I simply had no choice. This is what happens when you live in a hub city. The strange thing about the flight today was that everyone working on the plane seemed pretty happy. I even overheard a conversation about vacation getting cut for flight attendants, still happy.

So even though plenty of people think it sucks. It seems like they aren’t the only ones that suck.

Update on It’s Best to Be Patient……

The car saga continued the next day. I was very excited to go out to my new car and get in and drive the next day. I got in the car and the emergency brake…..was STUCK. Of course in a rental car there are no manuals in the cars as to how the parts of the cars actually work. (being a user experience practicioner let me tell you-cars are the worst for usability….so a manual is essential in some cases)

Nice.

So I had to call roadside assistance again. They were pretty upset about the fact that the tow truck driver put the emergency brake on when parked on a flat surface. They wanted to know what tow company it was. I said I had no idea, just please help me. In the end I just had to pull really really hard to get the brake off, luckily the roadside assistance guy was patient. Even though most of the horrible user experience was due to the tow truck driver, I’m going to name names now. It was Budget Car Rental. And really they aren’t even cheaper. I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t book with them again.

It’s Best To Be Patient When You Feel You Are Being Tested

I have another story for you. The weirdest things happen to me. Things that I don’t imagine happen to many other people.

I’m currently traveling for work. I picked up my car from the rental place and everything seemed fine. It was odd that they gave me a big ass RED Monte Carlo, but you just need to go with the flow in these situations.

Everything was going along just fine. Then following an after work shopping trip to the fabulous Nordstrom’s Rack I needed some sustenance. I went to a quick serve restaurant so I could get back to my hotel and relax. When I parked the car, the key would not come out of the ignition. I tried everything I could think of. The car was in park. The dials were where they needed to be. There was no reason I could discern that was making this happen. I started to rack my brain at this point. How would I be able to leave the car? If I left it unlocked it could be stolen because the keys were in it. I couldn’t think of a way to lock it. My brain was turning this problem over and over and I kept jiggling the key in place to see what I could do. At one point the key FOB (the part of the key with buttons you push to lock the car, unlock the car, sound the alarm, etc.) came off the key chain. As I sat there with the key FOB in my hand, a lightbulb went on in my head. I can use the key FOB to lock and unlock the car. DUH, problem solved. YEA!

So I thought.

I got to the hotel and I was able to lock the car. I drove the car to work today and tried to remove the key but since it didn’t work, I thought I would try my tactic from the previous evening. I just locked the car again.

After work, I went to dinner with co-workers and when one of my co-workers drove me back to the Monte Carolo, it was lucky that she stayed until I got in the car.

I hit the button to unlock the car and nothing happened. The key FOB no longer worked. The battery was dead and there was now no way to get into the car. Thank goodness Elaine was still there. She brought me back to my hotel and we arranged a pick up in the morning. Her sage advice to me was to make the car rental company solve this problem. I quickly realized she was right and went up to my room to give them a call and a problem to solve. If you think about it, this is the place where the company has the opportunity to hook me for life as a customer or make me avoid choosing them in the future. How would they help? After all they gave me a defective product. I was willing to just get by with the defect. But the defect turned into defunct. I couldn’t do anything with the product anymore. I needed a replacement.

They did get me a new car, making me wait for 3 hours. I’m only 20 minutes away from the car rental location. When the driver finally got to me with the new car, he had no idea what was going on. He had to call me twice for directions on his way to bring me the car. The rental company had not told him anything. Not how to get here, not where the car was, not why I didn’t have a key. Nothing. This resulted in a total of four calls from the tow truck driver who delivered the car (including a call that came after he had delivered the car–I thought we were done and I could get some sleep). I’m not mentioning the company name as I think it’s enough that they won’t be getting my business in the future. I just wonder sometimes what lesson I need to learn that continues to present me with these oddly challenging situations.

I feel I rose to this challenge and am hoping my new rental car will start ok in the morning . I know it’s not a big challenge like a horrible disease or the death of a child or anything like that, but in the end it’s the little things that tear us apart. I feel lucky to really just find it amusing. (and good blog material)

Corporate America, Behave !

If you are something public, everyone can find out when you do things that may not be in the consumers best interest. This is a good way for all of us to force accountability back on the corporations of the world. The people have a voice now, this is very important that they can now very efficiently share with everyone else interested in the same type of products, services, etc. We are watching and can make things better as a collective. My husband likes to say, “In the age of the Internet, everyone’s a secret shopper.” Everyone can be that one post on the Internet that could ruin a PR manager’s day.

I site this example. There was an occurence at a Staples store and it turned into a long and complicated story. One person thought they had an unfair experience and they were able to get a company to respond. The company has responded and even been given the opportunity to defend themselves which they have taken.

This kind of opportunity for discourse is a beautiful thing.

Yay Internet.

A Disappointing Customer Experience

As part of my new healthy lifestyle I’ve been eating at Quizno’s the sub restaurant. The unfortunate thing is that I’m limited to 3 sandwiches based on my desire to know the nutritional information in my food and make choices based on knowledge. I have visited the web site several times over the past year and a half. I have requested nutritional information each of these times. I waited for a couple months between each inquiry and sadly nobody ever responded. It’s not just one email that got lost, I’m talking about several emails over a period longer than a year. I finally decided on Monday that this was just not acceptable anymore. So I called 411 for the phone number for corporate HQ. I knew where it was because of information on the web site so I was able to request the right state and city. The web site did not contain the phone number just the address. 411 gave me the number for a store in Denver which is where it is located. I didn’t want a store number I wanted corporate but I figured out I had been connected to a store and I asked them for the corporate number.

I got through to the corporate office. This is where it all started to go wrong. The first person I talked to was the receptionist. She didn’t even try to answer my question or get me to someone that could. She kept saying it’s on the web site like some sort of trained parrot monkey. Finally after some reluctance she transferred me to customer service.

Customer Service must not be the name of the department based on how the call went from there. The customer service rep was telling me the information was on the web site. I explained that only three sandwiches were detailed on the web site. She said that was all they had and then mentioned something very vague about ‘our nutritionists’. The way she said this made me feel as if she didn’t actually have any nutritionists. “When we have more information it will be posted on the web site” she said.

I asked if there was a timeline for this information. “No” she said.

I then explained to her that I wouldn’t even be calling if someone had responded to one of my many emails over the past year. She was quiet. More silence came out of the other end of the phone and I continued, “I guess I won’t be able to shop at your store until you get more information….”

Without really waiting for me to finish, she said, “I’m sorry about that” in a very sarcastic tone and then she hung up.
She did not care about my business or my interest in further information about her companies products.

I guess she didn’t think about the fact that I might tell others of the ‘stellar’ (sarcasm) customer service from Quizno’s but what do you expect from a company that uses a creepy baby that hits on hot babes in its commercials.

All I’m asking for is the ability to be informed. I deserve to know what I’m eating. Every single product on the grocery store shelf has to tell me. Starbuck’s tells me for gawd’s sake. Quiznon’s biggest competitor, Subway tells you EVERYTHING. Get over yourself Quizno’s and give me the data!