Making easy things easy, hard things possible

It is always the balance between guiding users to where you want them to go and providing them with enough navigation to let them go where they want to go. I won't pretend to be an expert on this subject by any means. Beyond working my way through a few books, like Don't Make Me Think and the distant memory of university lectures on the subject I am as much a bluffer as the next code monkey.

I was reminded of the importance of giving the user a friendly, usable interface to navigate though a few weeks back when I had to phone the TV licencing people after they picked up on a delivery of a USB receiver at my work. Neither number in their threatening-as-ever letter or any option in the 3 or 4 level deep telephone menu actually came close to the "I don't need a licence now stop harassing me" area I required. It was a complete dead end - even the guy I eventually got through to didn't know how to navigate their maze. It may not be where the evil TV licencing (I'm hoping to start my own mini google bomb :-) ) people wanted me to go, but preventing me from getting to the option I wanted did not help either of us.

When I worked for lastminute, we could tell a piece of functionality wasn't quite cutting it for the users because they would tell us; they provided nice website feedback along the lines of "I want to kill the person who wrote this". Wahanda is a bit smaller, so we spend more time checking how the site is used rather than waiting for people to tell us how bad it is.

We recently rewrote our therapist profile registration and editing form (I can't show you an example until you register :-) ), along with the profile view after it became clear from the incomplete profile data we were receiving that it wasn't obvious to people how to provide data in the way we hoped they would. It still could improve of course, but immediately the quality of the new profiles we saw being created showed that we were at least blocking a few less people.

Sharing your transaction information for your protection

A month or so back I caved in to the pressure from my beloved and bought a USB TV receiver from amazon.co.uk. She had a deprived childhood it seems, and has never seen certain things, like 'Escape to victory' that others have spent time watching on several, several occasions.

(Un)fortunately, the reception where we live is very bad without doing a Rod Hull (poor man) and clambering on to the roof of our 4 storey building. The device was placed in a drawer and forgotten about... until a letter arrived at my work address (the delivery address) - a licence demand from the evil TV Licencing people asking why they had no record of the office address on their system.

I do my best to rise above the threatening format of the TVL letters but was surprised that amazon shared my transaction information with a third party. Looking through their privacy documents, I found this bit of blurb

We release account and other personal information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law; enforce or apply our Conditions of Use and other agreements; or protect the rights, property or safety of Amazon.co.uk, our users or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for fraud protection and credit risk reduction.

I suppose notifying the TVL of my purchase might go under 'protecting the rights of others'. However, it doesn't exactly instill in me that warm fuzzy feeling of knowing my information is safe in amazon's hands.

Still, it might be worth it, if only to have that once in a lifetime chance to observe the mystical TV detector van in the wild