14 Feb 2007 1327H

Yes, it’s IA learnings for VD

Is there a day without user experience learnings in information architecture, interaction design, or usability? Not when there’s money to be made, there’s not! Today we turn our attention to the very timely 1800Flowers.com (or “flahrs,” as I like to say) and FTD.com, which has some common user experience issues in its checkout section. Shall we review? Let’s!

This morning, because in certain respects I am one of these Type B people, I decided to send a Perfunctory VD Gift™ to my girlfriend in San Francisco. Of course, being Asian, Chinese New Year’s, White Day, and Black Day are also in my mind as well, but the task remains focused on today: Must. Send. Flahrs. Off we go to 1800Flowers since I have a discount code.

Val at 1800Flowers.com - 1

At first things seem promising! I am poking about, looking for things that can be sent today.

Val at 1800Flowers.com - 2

I look at Best Sellers, since . . . hey. The Wisdom of Crowds. Oooh, look. It says, AVAILABLE SAME DAY! That’s for me.

Val at 1800Flowers - 3

But even though this bouquet can be sent today, it now tells me it cannot. Three more searches later, I find nothing can be sent today. Pbbbbbbbt. 40 lashes with a wet noodle and they lose my business.

Val at 1800Flowers - 4

Also I don’t like how the recipients name is required in order to check the shipping costs and such. It’s all messed up.

A quick cursory glance at my client’s flowers business reveals nothing can be sent today, although the price seems right.

So we go to my pal (XX)’s shop, FTD.com. I have great respect for my friend’s skill as a developer, and I attended a usability training with some of his colleagues back in September, and they seemed quite affable. Let’s check them out!

Val at FTD.com - 0

Miraculously, I’m able to locate their same-day service right off the bat on the front page, which I could not do on the other sites, and they seem able to send my hastily assembled order today, which is great.

Val at FTD.com - 0point5

I like that they dump me off in the Best Sellers section. According to Barry Schwartz, I think in his Google lecture on YouTube, Greek diners operate in a similar way: they have a 20-page menu, in which they cook every animal known to man, in every possible way, but the little card of daily specials is what most people order from, and these also conveniently happen to be the items on which the restaurant makes the best margins.

But when I go through the checkout process, some things in the process stand out in not such a good way.

Val at FTD.com - 1

I’ll avoid the bears and balloons option; S. is not a bears and balloons person and chocolates give her a rash. And being a maximizer, I will settle for nothing but the best, so mystery bears, balloons, and chockys are out. But I perceive the form field here to be an affordance to allow me to type a message in. It cannot be edited, which makes me furrow my eyebrows in confusion. I then check the next dropdown to see what is offered.

Val at FTD.com - 2

Ack. Many of these cards are redundant and some of them are not relevant. Actually, when I saw the “To the one who hold my heart” (sic) card, I automatically went into “軟硬天師教英文” Chinglish mode and busted out a “情人! 妳hold我個heart啦!” Oh well. At least they’re consistent, as we’ll soon see.

Val at FTD.com - 3

“To the one who hold my heart” must be pulled from a database field. Then I see that the link below the dropdown menu also allows me to view and select a greeting card. This link, which should be a button in fact, should replace the dropdown menu which is pretty useless. I am initially alarmed to find these are not Hallmark greeting cards, but the moment soon passes. I’d like to see actually only the relevant Love or Valentine’s Day Cards, thanks. Actually they all look pretty darn awful in comparison, so I bail and continue.

Val at FTD.com - 4

Then I’m dumped into the Delivery Info section. Fortunately, the rest of this is pretty straight forward, but the page is ugly, even for a perfunctory form, noticeably lacks visual hierarchy and could be very much improved.

Val at FTD.com - 000

Epilogue. This email I received is from FTD.com is ridiculous. Had to login with my email and password just to get at the account info, which was pretty unhelpful. I’ve a good mind to call up XX to complain to him, or maybe even try to get him to introduce us the right people to do some consulting for them.

As of 1715H Western Time, S. has her flahrs. There was a fulfillment hiccup since she was in class and the delivery guy, whose English was not good, kept ringing her since she wasn’t home, and when she was able to answer he was unable to articulate the problem. But the guy had the foresight to leave them with a nice neighbor (this is important), so she was able to get her stuff. We are victorious over VD. Many others however are quite angry. And, all I can say is, it’s the busiest day of the year. Bad fulfillment can ruin an otherwise flawless online user experience.

At FTD.com, I was just happy that they could fulfill same day and at a relatively low “penalty,” so, these are relatively minor issues and not show stoppers, not being able to complete a checkout or not being able to find something, like 1800Flowers.com. When I attended Krug’s seminar in September, and some of the FTD.com folks were there, I’d thought that some of these things could have been fixed by now, but perhaps not, but big organizations are like that: there is always something else to fix and because teams are large with many levels of reporting, they can’t move very quickly, and there are people with egos and titles in the way. As someone who works for a competitor, I suppose I can’t complain really but, as a customer, I have expectations that I’d like to have fulfilled. Generally the floor is pretty low for those expectations, since, as we have learned, we’ll grab onto pretty much anything easy that meets a basic level of functionality: the scent of information.

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