It's not that I hate technology. I love it. It does wonderful things. It makes my life easier. It makes products cheaper or more affordable. It allows new products. It facilitates new ways of doing things.
But there's always a price. Take cars for example. They're great things. They let me get to different places fast and easy. I like cars! And then there's the dark side... They pollute the environment. Some idiots think they can drive after half a bottle of whiskey. Other idiots think they can catch up with friends on their mobile phones while driving (which is actually more dangerous than driving with a blood alcohol level at the legal limit). Etc. etc. etc.
Technology exacts its price as well. The easier it is to use, the easier it is to abuse. But even when there are large barriers to using technology, there is still a lot of misuse.
Jakob Nielsen is widely considered the foremost expert on web site usability. He's been writing about it and doing consulting on it for years. He's not some secret that people don't know about. If I were to hire a web design firm, and they hadn't heard about them, I'd run away real quick like. But even with usability studies from people like Jakob being easily available, there are still a suprising number of large corporate web sites that “just don't get it”.
I recently went online to get a relatively small task done. Nothing complex. Real simple. Was I able to do it? Nope. Was I able to get any useful information on how to do it? Nope. Did I get any kind of online resolution? Nope. Did I get any kind of answer. Yep. Pick up the telephone and go offline.
That's a real poor answer.
What did I need to do and where did I go to do it?
Well, I needed to print some business cards and then have them sent by courier. Simple. Place an order and upload a file. Unfortunately I wasn't able to locate any product information beyond “print” and as such, couldn't place an order. Generally, if I'm going to place an order for something online, I want to know what it is. But then, maybe that's just me...
I don't really feel like naming them, but they are a fortune 500 (number 70 in 2005), and had revenues of almost USD $30 billion and profits of about USD $1.5 billion in 2005. They do both stationery (printing, etc.) and courier services.
So how do they get things so wrong? It's not just them. Here's a fun task for you to try out:
Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept it...
So, it's vacation time. You've managed to get a solid month off and figure you'd like to fly somewhere exotic. (Pretty cool so far, eh?) You're not really that concerned with where to go as there are a million beautiful places in the world, and any of them would be fine. You just need to relax a bit.
Two weeks or so should be about good. Anytime during your month long vacation is good too. Heck! While you're at it. You might just want to not fly back to your home, and instead fly somewhere across the country to rent a car and drive about half-way back where you can then get another flight home. Say you've decided on a city to fly back from, but not a date. That can be open ended. (Ooooh... Getting tricky now...)
Nah... Scratch that last part. You're going to fly to your dream location, then fly back. But you're still going to need to rent a car while you're there.
But darn it. You've got a limited budget. Better shop around and find out some prices.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
Two of your major costs will be airfare and your car rental. (Hotels too, but let's not complicate this any more than is necessary.) You need to balance those two costs. While one may be more expensive during a two week period, the other may be cheaper. You want to find the cheapest sum of those two costs. Your basic tasks then are:
- Go online to a major airline web site and find the best price for a two week period inside of 1 your 1 month vacation for 3 different destinations.
- Go to a major car rental company web site and find the best price for a two week period inside of your 1 month vacation for 3 different destinations.
Really. Try it. Here's a simple example;
Possible destinations:
- Acapulco, Mexico
- Hawaii, USA
- Boracay, Philippines
Well, you don't need a car in Boracay, but whatever... Take it as a freebie :)
The simple fact is that you'll need to do several hundred searches to get the “mission information”. You can't just get a price list. So at the end of the day, if you actually DO try to get that information, you'll have wasted your entire month of vacation trying to figure out the answer! Ummm... Does this not seem insane to anybody?
Finding prices (or product information) for a printing job, flight tickets, or car rental is far beyond being a trivial task online. But these are just a few simple examples, and there are many other areas where technology is used to complicate what should otherwise be simple things.
It's not the problem of the technology; it's the problem of bad design. This is especially apparent in North American web sites that require multiple steps to find a piece of information.
On the other hand, these same tasks are completely trivial on a Korean web site. I can get flight information and prices and car rental information in a couple clicks. The impossible mission would be done in less than 10 minutes.
What does this tell me? Well, as I can't say anything about North American airline or car rental sites without resorting to all manner of profanity (I've got a few very creative ones in mind...), I suppose that I can say that Korean web application design is far superior in terms of usability.
Now I still can't actually reserve movie tickets online at a Korean web site, but that's another story...
Cheers,
Renegade