Month: July 2014

Make password recovery easy! 5 ways Spirit Airlines could improve their experience

Gearmark26 Comments

Forget your password?

It may is fairly basic functionality on most sites and apps that require membership, but it is one of the most important features available. We all have dozens of passwords that we need to remember daily – many are variations upon one or two. And its hard to remember which one you used where. Most people forget their passwords at one time or another. I constantly forget. This feature is my best friend.

I flew on Spirit Airlines Sunday. And because of the nature of Spirit, I really wanted to check-in online Saturday night and avoid a number of fees. However, I forgot my account password.

I thought: Have no fear, password assistance is here!

Spirit_login_sm

So I clicked on the “Forget your password?” link, entered my email address, and then got a pop up window/layer thing I needed to click again — a two-step process. Why would anyone do this? Jef Raskin would turn over in his grave to see this. So unnecessary.

Spirit_reset_password_sm

Did you see the message on the screen – Wait up to 30 minutes for an email?

Up to 30 minutes to change your password?

A question to the developers: why could it take that long to generate such an email?

Anyway, I got frustrated and called support to see if I could maybe make some headway there with my password issues. I only called to get a recording and hear that it could take up to an hour for the email.

An hour? Seriously?

So I stopped trying to get a new password on Saturday night, and therefore stopped trying to check into my flight for Sunday. I figured I would try again on Sunday morning when my patience was refreshed.

Sunday morning I got a bunch of emails from Spirit to change my password, none of those passwords worked, so I tried the “Forgot your password” 2-step business and I got an email in 3 minutes this time. Awesome!

I used the password and got to a screen where I could enter a new password – awesome!

Logoin-newpassword-sm

I tried entering an all text password (there are no password rules or any indicator that the password needs to be secure), and unfortunately, I had a typo in one of my entered passwords. This is where the infinite loop started and I got massively confused. I saw this screen as my error message:

Password-error-sm

How did I get here from where I was? A mystery!

So I used the password that I knew got me to the next screen and tried again. And again. And again. I went in this infinite loop, until I tried a password that come to find out was what I used previously and then got this:

Passwords-oldnewdifferent-sm

ACK!

This is no longer security – this is just pure madness! Give me instructions for what makes a good password and stop making me guess already!

I finally got out of the infinite loop and could carry on with my life. I doubt that account will be dusted off and used any time soon after this experience.

5 lessons from Spirit’s site:

  • A user should receive a password retrieval email in 5 minutes or less. There is no excuse for a system to take 30 minutes to auto-generate an email.
  • Provide password guidance. Sites that don’t do this frustrate their users and they will go away. There is no harm in including an error message or a line of instruction to let the user know what is expected. A rule is a rule – and we all want to uphold good security. But when you don’t tell us, it becomes a game of trial and error – and no one has time for that.
  • Put error messages on the screen where the error is. (I know, basic, but need to say it.) Error messages should be near the error, otherwise, the user will get confused and not understand what he did wrong.
  • Infinite loop scenarios are discouraging and confusing. Guide the user to complete the task. The system’s structure shouldn’t be first priority. Users are giving you money to use a product/service – their needs should be first. Systems don’t pay the bills (last I checked, they created them.).
  • Pressing the return/enter key should have the same function as selecting the submit button on a form. (Another basic principle.) This is pretty standard, but for those of us still on keyboards, we don’t switch between taps/mouse clicks and the keyboard unless needed. An enter key should do the trick if a user is filling out a form (tab between fields and enter/return to submit the form). The desktop system isn’t dead yet – and won’t be for a while – so designing purely for taps and mobile isn’t a wise choice.
Make password recovery easy! 5 ways Spirit Airlines could improve their experience

See you at Agile 2014!

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I have been kinda quiet this week because I have been finalizing my presentation for next week. Time flies! It's hard to believe that it is almost July 28th for the conference to begin.

Now that I have finally gotten my presentation to where I think it needs to be, I can start to get excited about Wednesday afternoon. I hope to see you there! 

Here's the session info: Go From a Nebulous Vision to Iteration 1 in 3 Steps

And for more information, here's my blog post about the idea: Before kicking off an Agile project, there needs to be a vision

See you at Agile 2014!

Why we may want to return to the corner store, or Stop Stalking and Start Relationship Building

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We reminisce about our childhoods and the corner store. The owners knew you and your parents. They knew your favorite candy, soda, sandwich – whatever you liked to snack on. They didn’t give you a hard time about anything – well, unless you did something to upset the store owners (not like I would know…I was a little goody-two-shoes). And you didn’t need to always buy anything – sometimes they just liked it when you stopped in to say “hi.” There was a balance between shopping, buying and relationship building.

(Unlocking the Mysteries of Your Customer Relationships at HBR addresses raises this point as well).

The town where I grew up had a small grocery store, Angelo’s. It was a small chain store, but the charm of it was that the employees talked to the customers. I remember my mom talking to the Store Manager, Assistant Store Manager, Cashiers and stock boys all the time. I remember being very sad when the Assistant Store Manager, Joanie, left – I was only a little kid, but I used to admire everything about her. And yes, she even worked her way up from being a cashier to a manager – and was getting her own store to manage.

As time marched on, supermarkets and big stores just weren’t the same. Being a customer meant you were an anonymous being in the store only with the purpose to buy something. Rarely did anyone there know who you are, never mind your parents. I don’t think some of the people working in the stores cared to know you. But you got a great price and there was a lot more variety to choose from, so what could you really complain about, right?

Let’s start with lousy service.

When a store – or any company – encourages its employees not to get to know its customers, a silent, transparent yet very thick wall is built. This wall creates an us/them relationship between company and customers. The company provides “things” to the customers and the customers provide money to the company.

But how do you know what “things” the customers really want if you don’t talk to them? 

The only narrative, the only thing in the whole universe that truly matters is the product we build for our users.

—The Problem with Founders, TechCrunch

For a store, the product isn’t a tangible item – it’s the experience of buying that item. Some shoppers want to find what they are looking for right away. Others want a discovery process – where they find something “by accident” or they are introduced to something new. Some want to get a great deal. Some want to find the best quality. Some want a story. Some are simply researching what’s out there to buy. Some like the experience of shopping – with no intention of buying. And the list goes on…

With online shopping, we want the best of both worlds. We want the anonymity to explore a store without someone helping us, but we want built in guidance to lead us to what we want. We want tools to search inventory. We want sites to recommend what we may want. We want email notifications to tell us about sales, bargains, and inventory updates.

We want the online store to know us based on the data we enter into the browser, but not know us THAT well. We don’t want to feel like someone is following us. We don’t want them to remember sensitive information.

Basically, we want to avoid being stalked. And just looking to “convert” a customer as a lead or a sale without building that relationship is stalking.

There is a boundary between friendly, relationship building behavior and stalker, in the same way there is a boundary between making recommendations and showing new items “just because” and only looking to “convert” someone to purchase. We miss the charm of the corner store, where the owners knew that balance and lived it. We almost need to go back to those stores, watch what happens, and find a way to recreate that experience – or rebuild it from our memories. We don’t need to always be selling; sometimes we need to just get to know our customers.

Why we may want to return to the corner store, or Stop Stalking and Start Relationship Building

Informal research: Does anyone use Yahoo anymore? (Or has Google simply won?)

Gearmark2 Comments

I'm being serious – does anyone use Yahoo anymore? I just read how Melissa Meyer is disappointed in her company's ad revenue. But I don't know anyone who really goes to Yahoo – except to get sports stats. Even 2 years ago, all signs pointed to its death. 

So I'd like to do some casual/informal research:

  • Do you use Yahoo? Why?
  • If you aren't a fan of Yahoo, what made you switch?
  • Do you use Google? Why? 

Feel free to provide your responses in the comments section.

Thanks! I look forward to the conversation!

Informal research: Does anyone use Yahoo anymore? (Or has Google simply won?)

Apple and IBM – a partnership to benefit the users!

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This morning I woke up to TechCrunch's article about this partnership between Apple and IBM.

Personally, I think this is fantastic! It's about time that Apple will officially be brought into the workplace. People have been unofficially bringing Apple into the workplace for years through BYOD. They were the outlaw/bandit technologies. In some places, there would be an option for people to choose to work with a Mac or a PC; but those working with a Mac were either developers or creatives. Business people have a hard time adopting them for work. 

I find this ironic because I remember when an office would have BOTH Macs and PCs and there would be races on complex calculations in Excel to see which computer system would win (hint: Mac always did). The Mac was always the superior computer – even for the business team.

Apple is like the pretty girl at a party – no one expects her to be smart, good at math or science, and actually be able to hold a conversation. Unfortunately in our society, the qualities of being efficient and effective doesn't include beauty. Or fun. Or entertainment. 

More irony –  to run entertainment "products" and projects you need some seriously hard core systems due to the extremely large file sizes and the need for granular processing (at the pixel level). Audio and video files are massive! Dreamworks buys high-end HP servers to support their animations, which have amazing levels of detail. Detailed photographs require amazing pixel level control to mirror what happens on traditional film – and it requires amazing amounts of computer power to process that. Art/entertainment is really big IT business…but some conservative IT professionals sadly just don't see it.

Consumers are behaving differently than in the past. 10 years ago, people used the devices they were assigned at work. Today, they see how these devices are easy to use and bring them to work to use their. The division between work and personal life is fast deteriorating. Technology needs to helping people do more in their lives so they can enjoy living rather than only optimize the workplace. Apple and IBM seem to have caught on to that. And hey – if you can't beat 'em (I think the whole BYOD movement has demonstrated that), join 'em.

Little known fact – Apple was in the enterprise market with their servers (they recently pulled to the small business market). Again, the speed of the Apple OS makes it superior, but there were some key components missing – they fixed the multi-user management, but integrating with other proprietary systems proved challenging. Apple's OS is REALLY Unix – it is from NeXT (and I know most hard core Unix fans believe that they had a superior system). This is why Apple's OS performs so much better than Windows. But this proprietary nature of Apple made it hard to be enterprise class.

Windows run on any type of PC, just like Microsoft server software. And Bill Gates gave away a lot of enterprise software for free to get customers "hooked." As a strategy to get marketshare, Microsoft SQL was given away for free when it first came out. It worked! I remember a number of IT directors telling me that we wouldn't use the better Oracle database for a project because the Microsoft license was free. Sure, they got stuck with a Microsoft database, but at the time, $30K vs free was an easy decision. 

Today, more IT decisions are being made from users than it is from the directors making the decisions. Why this partnership between Apple and IBM makes sense.

In some ways, we all should have seen this partnership coming. IBM got out of the hardware business, but it is still working with businesses, so what was it going to sell to them? I doubt Dell products. 

Apple will get further into the enterprise business, and IBM showed that it is listening to its customers with this BYOD problem. Sure, some companies will have a hard time accepting iPhones, iPad and Macs in a workplace, in the same way that some labs can't accept the pretty girl finding a cure for cancer. But the companies' employees will be thrilled that they can use 1 device – not one at home and one at work – do their job anywhere.

We will have more blurred lines between work and leisure, but more opportunities for living.

Apple and IBM – a partnership to benefit the users!

Let your mind use devices

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This morning I was reading about Emotiv – they are using brain waves to make devices take action. Someone could wear a headset and "will" a car, wheelchair or a number of other items to move forward. No levers, no knobs. It's thought waves interpreted by software that enables an inanimate object to take action.

There are a number of uses for this listed on TechCrunch and at the Emotiv site. It could be used in video games, to help paraplegics and the disabled, to help individuals who have seizures to relax and focus. Those uses would be industry game changers. However, there are some uses of this technology I personally find a little devious such as market research and interrogations. It's just invasive. And those uses are based on the notion of people not telling the truth and making this into some type of lie-detector test. That's not using technology to enhance society.

However, what if there was a way to use brain waves to use your mobile phone? Maybe you enter a security code using your own brain waves – some emotional response combination? What if you could do that for your bank account? Talk about a security feature!

This still has a way to go before it is mainstream, but will there still be room for gestures and voice technology? I think those will always be available. The challenge with brain waves is that it could be misused and become an intrusive technology in the "wrong hands." Personally, I would prefer to use gestures and voice commands when interacting with a device. I wouldn't want a device to have access to all of my thoughts and feelings (especially with all of this NSA/Snowden business going on). However, for those who cannot use their voice or hands – this is a great solution to give them the life they deserve. Maybe it will develop so those who cannot communicate today (mute, speech impediment, etc.) could do so tomorrow? What a great advancement! 

Let your mind use devices