I had one of the best web user experiences I have ever had the other day. Enough that I feel obligated to post about it.
I was purchasing a Flip camera via Amazon. Amazon in general is a great shopping experience. The cart the recommendation, the reviews. It ties everything together in a great package. So I was kind of flustered while ordering and I forgot to change my shipping address. I was getting it shipped overnight and I needed to change it quick. So I got to my order and there was a edit your order link.
After I click it gives me options a contact and an urgent contact. I needed this changed quick so I go to urgent and it says phone. So I click expecting to have a phone number to call where I will have to sit though 30 voice prompts. I was wrong, it asked for my phone number and within 3 seconds my phone was ringing. It was a computer but I was told I was already in the queue and within approx 30 seconds I was on with a live human being. No enter 3 for this and whatnot. Straight to a real person because they knew I needed a really person fast.
That in an of itself was great. Now I tell them my issue and they say the item has already begun the shipping process. Bare in mind I only purchased this item approx 2 minutes ago at this point (talk about well oiled machine). So they sent the item back or origin, they reset my order and told me to refresh the order page and there was now a link that said “change order info”.
This is an amazing experience, in the day and age of people dreading most customer service interactions Amazon took the time to care about me and address me in a timely manner and I was left feeling great and now I am selling them to you as a genuinely satisfied customer.
So now to the hook, imagine a student in the recruiting process getting this kind of VIP preferential treatment. They give us their info and have a personalized call made to them in a short timely manner. In my experience of universities I have dealt with the recruiting process is a very confusing and poorly planned process for many students. I will follow up shortly with more experiences I have seen lately.
Remember the students are now in the power position in ever step of the process so we need to treat them like royalty, user experience is a huge deal and can leave a positive or negative impression of your organization.
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I had a running “Friday Design Inspiration” series that I would post here on the site and due to the fact that I am ridiculously busy with consulting and other things I am going to change it up a bit. Rather than the Friday highlight posts I will just update whenever I find something.
Signal vs noise is been something I have been thinking about a lot lately. The web with the transformation of web 2.0 has become a attention economy. The strive for the 15 mins of web fame. I have started to reach a point of information overload in the last few weeks. We all sub RSS feeds, have twitter and various other sources of info. But I have always overdone it. Here are a few tips I got in an article on Social Media Explorer:
Kind of funny since I do the first two and have been looking into the third.
Twitter
I have been trying to cut back. I follow 275 which I cut from approx 500. It was a struggle to follow that flow of information. I used to try to backtrack each time I hit my computer but I no longer do.
There are some twitter users that have near 20,000 posts, I have to assume there is a good deal of noise in there. There are others who just follow thousands of people with the hope that people follow them back. There are people with nothing useful to say, bands I don’t care about, businesses that are just blowing there own horn. Oh yeah I know of a site like this, it’s called MySpace and it sucks. So I am making an attempt to cut it down to my influencers/inspiration and people I talk to on a regular basis. I know this is something others have done, Nate Ritter cut a ton of users in his mass exodus.
RSS Feeds
I currently follow 377 feeds which was cut from near 600 at some point. My criteria for post I read now is short, bulleted and skim-able if I find it interesting I then read it. There were way to make sites that I follow that produces near 30 posts a day. I can’t keep up. An example of this are sites like Mashable and TechCrunch. Push came to shove I choose TechCrunch. I have been looking into some kind of a filtering tools such as AideRss or Yahoo Pipes as I mentioned above to clean out the crap. I even saw someone write the other day about using FriendFeed as their feed reader which seemed interesting.
Now I know there are people that read far more stuff than me. But my questions is how and why? So many blogs out there now just repost stories from other sites. I mean whatever big story TechCrunch runs will be inevitably be repost hundreds of times. Now I don’t want to act as though I have not be guilty of this nor will I not do it again in the future. Just something to think about in both your personal professional life.
I suppose the goal is not to become one of these, so think before you publish that next post…
In a post on Technorati’s blog they talked about plans to force WP at the cost of unlisting. I actually had to check the date on the article to see if it was an April Fools joke but alas it was not. No word from Wordpress regarding this.
They are making this move do to vulnerable code in earlier versions that is very open to spam. If you have questions about installing WordPress or maintaining a WordPress installation, please refer to the WordPress Documentation or the WordPress Forums.
If you would like help please feel free to ask I would be glad to help or if you would like me to simply make the upgrade for you I would be glad to do it for a small fee.
This seems like a terrible way of approaching this problem on Technorati’s. But it is always good to keep your software up-to-date.
I have been a user of twitter since the very beginning and I think it is an amazing social site. But you may ask what good does that do me. Can I change the world? Can I make money? Can I learn? Well I can personally answer yes to all those.
Change the world
I had an idea to make a twitter bot called @makechange. A pretty simple idea, you send a direct message to @makechange with ideas to change the world. So I paired up with developer and twitter world changer @nateritter. Who you may have heard of as the person who provided up to the minute coverage of the San Diego fires via Twitter. We talked on IM for 10 minutes and he coded the bot for me. He wrote a great post and drew some napkins sketches that visualize my idea. The code for the bot is also provided. Now this may not cure world hunger or solve global warning, but it’s something and it creates community around the idea using twitter.
Make money
Done, I have been scouting freelance work via Twitter. I sat in on a talk about doing getting freelance work and I have finally started making an effort to seek out work and not only have it come to me. You would be amazed how many people ask “Anyone know a designer / developer / insert talent” on twitter. Also I have hooked up with some people that seem to always know somebody needing work done.
Learn more
I still use my feed reader on a daily basis but Twitter has become a human filtered source of great knowledge. I follow people from all different fields of work and knowledge and I’m turned on to interesting stuff everyday. So you might ask, what do I really learn that I can apply to work. I have a large developing network for people in my field in twitter when I have a questions I simply pose the question and answers pour in. It’s quick it’s simple. As I mentioned when I was quoted in the newspaper the other day, “I like that I can follow and get in the mind of people that inspire me”. I follow people that are some of the top minds in the web and other fields. I get their day in day out thought stream, things they wouldn’t write blog posts about but I get this knowledge via twitter.
This is a call for feedback. I want to pool resources for how we can tackle the problem of adoption of new media. This can be social media, web in general, video or whatever.
Do you struggle to convince people why something may be better served on the web only to be told of we will just do print?
Do you hear RSS is pointless because nobody uses it.
Do you have people telling you we can’t do social media because someone might say something bad?
Tell me your story what did they say, how did you rebut how did you educate them. How did you work to convince them?
If you don’t want to comment send your comment in email mherzberger [at] gmail [dot] com. I want to work up a post of this and summarize peoples problems and solutions.
