As Colum McAndrew from The RoboColum(n) writes about how one’s customer service can let an entire industry down, I am once again baffled by the almost synthetic separation between the User Experience and Technical Communications (tech writing) fields. There is a clear and strong connection between these two user-oriented disciplines. I find it mind boggling that there is no strategic cooperation or coordination between members, professionals and thinkers from both communities

Thanks, ASME, for the cool image.

The UX folks often assume that a user’s need for assistance is proof of poor UXmanship, because the perfect UI design will be so intuitive, the user has known how to use it before he even knew the product existed. I have seen dozens of web applications that have a tiny, typo-riddled knowledge base that makes users feel bad about so much as needing to use it. 

The tech comm professionals, on the other hand, regard UX as one of those stages in product planning and that has little to do with them. After all, they are the ones who get called in when the product is complete and ready for launching. 

These two fields are both means to mediate the product/ service to the user in the best way possible. As previously mentioned, customer service is an inherent part of user experience. When designing an application one should assume that no matter how intuitive you think your design is, you need to cover all your bases, in terms of clarity and usability. If you don’t - it will cost you users. That there is a form of technical communication.

And so, if the allegory still needs clarification - these two disciplines circle around each other during different stages of the same cycle and constantly, tragically, never meet. Just like in the title’s namesake. Let’s see if we can break that spell.

It’s my father’s birthday this week and the sibling clan decided to go ahead and buy him a tablet. We ended up agreeing on Asus NEXUS 7, and moved on to debate the purchasing location. It would have to be a chain, so that he can easily return it, if he so chooses. 

We found ourselves comparing customer service experiences and reading reviews on different chains. So that if our father decides to return his new toy, the experience will be as smooth and as agreeable as possible. 

It gradually became clear that we needed to embed the potential future customer service/ support in the gift considerations. The gift was no longer comprised of merely the tablet specs - accessibility, service awareness and technical support were part of the user experience consideration. 

Hat tip to The Vinyl Anachronist for the call to arms against bad customer service. For the cartoon, too. 

This may sound trivial to anyone who has been exposed to the concept of online Peer Review, but if you think about it - it isn’t. In an age where no piece of hardware is built to last for more than 2 years and software versions are in a constant state of motion - we depend on support and customer service as a regular part of the usability, rather than for those rare occasions when something breaks.  

The operative meaning of this is that we choose support mechanisms and customer service providers as part of the product, as opposed to buying only the product, assuming everything will be hunky dory and defaulting to which ever support service was in the right place at the right time. Human pre-planning and tactical thinking at its finest. 

Image borrowed from article in the Bean Soup Times

And so, a smart service provider will make sure to include good support reviews in the user experience he is selling. The sale doesn’t end with the customer taking a nylon-wrapped box home —or, in online terms: the sale doesn’t end with the conversion— any good salesperson will tell you the only way to make sure your customer is a returning one, is to be there for the assembling/ implementation, adjustment period and general rants from the folks who need their hand held all throughout.

If the guide is going to be mind-numbingly long and tedious and you can’t afford not to read it - might as well make it a comic book. This is hilarious (applying this medium to this guide genre. Not so much the tale of drugs an woe told wherein). It has everything - the enticing story, the human images that make it easier for the Visual-Spatial Learners to keep track and of course, the bouncy comics rhythm to keep one from despairing, dropping out of law school and proceeding to a life of crime and unfulfillment. 

thecriminallawyer:

In case you folks aren’t following him yet, check out Rian van der Merwe at Elzea - he writes about user experience from various perspectives -technical, design, philosophical- and is insightful and sensitive in all of them. I am especially fond of the Start Here page on his blog. It is merely a collection of links to selected blog posts, but includes a note of welcome to new comers and acts as an orientation page. Makes you wonder why all the websites on the interwebz don’t have those. 

This past week LinkedIn added a tooltip to the status update bar. This is in fact the second stage in the Twitterization of LinkedIn i.e. the ability to directly tag/ connect to/ mention someone by adding a @ to their username. 

The introduction of this new feature was done in the actual status update bar a week ago. There is an inherent assumption that the average LinkedIn user is familiar with the Twitter mechanism, reflected in the offhanded terminology “type a @”, “to mention”. This is an interesting choice, targeting LinkedIn power users and professional networkers -Twitter is still conceived as that boutique social network, not yet as common and trivial as Facebook.

I can’t help but wonder whether this assumption disproved itself and low usage rates indicated a lack of understanding that ultimately drove the product manager to further illustrate uses of the feature. 

I have another theory, though: the Mention feature was initially planned as a two-stage implementation. I like this theory better because in it the LinkedIn folks are a clever bunch who let their users get comfortable with a new feature before following up with elaborations and screenshots. There is a gradual element in this that caters both to the adventurous technophobes and to the hesitant  skeptics. 

“Feeling smart is not so much about having knowledge, as it is about feeling like you are in command of a subject.”

             Mark Baker,The Web Leaves You Smarter But Feeling Dumber

Mark Baker from the technical communications blog Every Page is Page One brings some interesting insights on the insecurities that come with being faced by the overwhelming vastness of information out there, on the web. He rightly refers to the Socratic Paradox, the father of all acknowledgements of limitation of the human mind.

Today’s user (as opposed to the Ancient Greek user who had to endure much journeying and trials for some Oracle luvin’) is much more humble in regard to what we know we don’t know. The  experience of learning new stuff has become a standard part of our everyday routine. So much so, that at least in theory, we should be able to let our cognitive guards down more easily in order to let new information in. In practice - I have to wonder if that is really the case and whether the human mind-muscles really are that flexible.

Check out the 280daily journal service - document your day-to-day in up to 280 characters. If you subscribe to the document-your-life-to-bits doctrine, this should be right up your alley: the character limitation restricts the text to concise, laconic sentences, thus containing the experience and making sure the writing doesn’t become a chore you avoid or procrastinate about. I am always in awe of the constraints man thinks up for himself in order to remain a functioning member of society. Consider alarm clocks, for instance. But I digress. 

I like the handwritten pointers on the home page. Designed to reflect supposed afterthought, the little free-handed arrows give the feeling these were added in response to user feedback. Why is that cool? Because it adds another layer to the human touch - we don’t think we’re perfect but we sure listen to our users. 

As a data-geek, the one thing I’m curious about is how the data segmentation works, once you’ve accumulated a stack of journal entries. I would think that at some point, journal writers will want to be able to segment and search on their entries as raw data rather than the popular key-word search ability.