Archive for August, 2009
Does exactly what it says on the tin; just the posts that relate to the above...
Bob on the main stage
When Bob asked for a day off, we thought he just wanted to enjoy a long Bank Holiday weekend. He did mention that his band was playing a gig, but did we expect to see him on the front page of the BBC site, being touted as a headline act at the Leeds/Reading Music Festival?
We do hope he has a good weekend, but we sincerely hope his Sex Isn’t On Fire.
P..p..p..pick up a penguin
It was my niece’s birthday recently. My brother and I were gigging with our band in Wales the day before… of course, we had both forgotten to arrange a present and it was fast approaching 6pm on a Saturday! Rattling our male brains, we concluded that the perfect present (achievable within 24 hours via an iPhone) would be to adopt a King Penguin, somewhere in the far reaches of the Falkland Islands.
After a few Google searches, we found the right solution… a penguin called ‘Sparkle’ that could be sponsored for a year, with our lucky niece receiving email confirmation with interesting facts the next day (perfect) and a welcome pack, with fact sheet, cuddly toy, certificate etc. following by post in the week.
Now then… both myself and my bro work in the digital industry and we really struggled to work out what the heck was going on when we tried to use the site… and that’s before we tried to pay for ‘Sparkle’ (more on this later). It would appear that the custodians of the website have never, ever heard of usability with the main offences being contradictory information / instructions and ridiculous requests for data capture that would surely put most people off… unless they were in the back of beyond in the Welsh mountains, at 7pm on a Saturday, about to go on stage to play a gig. We persevered.
After about thirty minutes of guess work, hair pulling and good fortune, we were ready to purchase. Well… this purchase process was absolute testament to why, under no circumstances, should users feel like they have left your site when making an online payment. After a while, we ended up giving in and decided on completing the next day; this was mainly owing to the fact that it had got so late that we were called onto stage to start the gig… we were superb by the way!
The next day (our niece’s actual birthday), we awoke with a heavy head, regrouped, had a cup of tea and a sausage butty (with red sauce) and recommenced our battle. Eventually, we completed the transaction in the tranny van, somewhere on the M69 nearing Leicester. Although we were guessing that we had, as we didn’t have any confirmation from the website or through email… just a third party payment site thanking us for our payment; not even what the payment was for!
We did start to get worried when our neice didn’t receive the King Penguin email for a further week! Luckily, we hadn’t been scammed and it all turned out well in the end; however, we had sufficient time to go to the Falklands, kidnap ‘Sparkle’ and bring her back to Somerset for her to live happily ever after in our niece’s pond.
Now, I decided not to mention the site in question, but come on people… it’s not rocket science to realise that investing in the right framework at the start of your project, will pay dividends in the long-term; it’s simply short-sighted to do things half-cock and expect a good return on investment.
The moral of the story: put time, thought, effort and the appropriate budget into the usability of your website, especially with e-commerce.
The real moral of the story: be better Uncles and plan ahead!