Details Are Necessary Before Claiming Something is Wrong With a Web Site

This really grinds my gears. Every 3-4 weeks, I’ll get an urgent email or call. The escalation chain goes something like this:

Consumer writes to Customer Service.
> Customer Service Rep forwards to Customer Service Supervisor.
>> Customer Service Supervisor forwards to Associate Marketing Manager.
>>> Associate Marketing Manager forwards to Marketing Manager.
>>>> Marketing Manager forwards to agency Account Manager.
>>>>> Agency Account Manager forwards to me.

Along the way, each person tacks on a message about how urgent this is, get back to me right away, yada yada yada.

By the time I see it, the email thread is fairly lengthy. When I scroll down to the original message, it typically says something like this:

“Your web site doesn’t work.”

[sigh…] I take application bugs seriously, but it never occurs to anyone that this is not enough information to make a guess as to what the problem was. So I’ll spend a half hour reviewing the site, testing functionality and forms, and looking at our Web Analytics to see if there were any traffic spikes or periods of no data that might indicate there was a problem with the Web hosting. 100% of the time I find nothing wrong. So I say nothing wrong could be identified by the information we have.

Of course clients want to hear that something was wrong because “the customer is always right.”

Then I have to reeducate everyone again that the user did not report any details that could help identify what the problem might be. It could be any number of things:

• User didn’t say what he was tying to specifically do.
• Maybe the user is not waiting for a Flash movie to play.
• User may be on slow dial-up connection, not broadband. Or possibly sharing Internet connection on a network that is congested due to heavy use by other users.
• User might be using outdated operating system and browser version we are not currently supporting. (e.g. Windows 98 and IE 5)
• User may be using a computer that is very old/slow, loaded with many applications or malware that freezes from Flash, video or other functionality.
• The user may be impatient and clicking everything and causing the browser/computer to freeze.
• We don’t know if user only tried once. If user tries again, it might be fine.
• Maybe the site is blocked by the military/school/company/organization that the user is accessing the Internet through.

Having someone say the Web site doesn’t work is too vague to confirm if it is a Web hosting issue, programming issue, database issue, hardware issue, software issue or user issue.

It is critical to try to educate the Customer Support team to ask more detailed questions when they get obscure comments. The following is the minimum amount of information we need to recreate and identify problems:

• What type of computer being used: brand, processor specs, memory (e.g. Dell Latitude D610 Intel Pentium M processor 1.86GHz, 2 GB RAM)
• What Operating System (e.g. Windows XP Professional)
• What type of Internet connection (i.e. DSL, Cable, T1, Dial-up)
• What Web browser and version (e.g. Apple Safari 2.0.4, Firefox 2.0.0.4, Internet Explorer 7)
• Specifically what day and time (including time zone) did the user try to access the Web site?
• What specifically did the user try to do?
• What happened as a result of the user’s actions?

Also, design contact forms to capture useful information. Clients tend to ignore this, but as a result, we waste a lot of time down the road troubleshooting vague claims.

The user was kind enough to report a problem. But without details, it’s unlikely any problem can be identified.

Please let me know if you found this useful.
Thanks.
-Roland

Apple Safari Web Browser For Windows - Will You Support It?

In case you hadn’t heard, Apple announced last week at their developers conference that they’ve made available a beta version of the next Safari Web browser. What’s significant is that they are releasing Safari 3 for both Mac and Windows Operating Systems.

It’s an interesting turnaround in the market. Microsoft maintains about 85% market share of the browser market. Mozilla Organization’s Firefox browser is responsible for eroding Internet Explorer’s share and has about 10% share of Windows users in just two years. Other browsers such as Opera maintain single digit percentages. Two years ago Microsoft stopped supporting Internet Explorer for Mac OS X. Now Apple is trying to gain another foot hold on Windows desktops, presumably since they had great success at getting a Windows version of iTunes installed there.

What does this means to you?

Have you thought about the extra labor it might cause on your end to support yet another combination of operating system and Web browser?

Making HTML and other browser technologies work consistently across the different flavors of Windows and Mac OS X and many browsers is very time consuming.

When sending out contracts (transaction documents, statements of work), please be very careful about defining what operating systems and Web browsers you intend to develop and test for.

If you make vague and broad statements, it could expose you to many more labor hours than expected to account for consistent user experiences.

Finally, always check your Web Analytics to identify what type of OS/browser combinations the majority of your Web site visitors account for. Never assume you or your client knows what that majority of your audience is using.

Good luck!
-Roland

Please Take This Poll About Your Favorite Types of Mobile Web Sites

I started publishing the Mobile Chaos directory over seven months ago. Like many sites, it was born out of personal frustration and necessity for links to high quality content that is designed for small device screens (aka “mobile friendly”).

During this time, I’ve had thousands of page views and over 500 unique users, primarily from North America, then Europe.

According to my statistics, links to news, travel and weather tend to be the most popular. I’d appreciate if you take this quick poll to tell me what type of content is most important to you.

If you haven’t already, please bookmark “http://Mobile.Chaos365.com” in your mobile phone / wireless PDA.

Thank you!
-Roland

Resources for Your Twitter/Jaiku Habit

Okay, I’ve become addicted to Twitter and Jaiku. I like Twitter for the simplicity and the breadth of friends I have. I like Jaiku for the feed aggregation. Plus, I enjoy the convenience of publishing my presence from the desktop or my smart phone.

Here are some helpful resources to fuel your addiction (guess that makes me an enabler) …

• “Refuse to choose!” is the motto for TwitKu. I learned about this from BerniesWorld. You can use TwitKu to monitor your Twitter and Jaiku accounts via a single Web page. Very convenient since there’s no software to install. They even have a mobile-friendly browser version.
• There are a variety of add-ons for the Firefox Web Browser worth looking at. I like Twitbin.
• Twitterrific is a desktop application for Mac OS X users that allows you to monitor and respond to your friends in a very elegant user interface. This is a must have for Mac owners.
• Tweetr is a desktop application for either Windows or Mac users, similar to Twitterrific.
• EmailTwitter allows you to send and receive by email on your phone, helping you avoid incurring SMS charges.

Related Links…

• Use Twitter, Tumblr and Jaiku To Build Your Personal Brand.
• Mashable has a comprehensive list of 19 Cool Jaiku Tools.
• Lifehack.org has a good post called 5 Ways to Use Twitter for Good (Not Evil).
• If your curious about extreme Twitters, check out the top 100 according to Twitterholic.

I hope you find this useful.

Please let me know what your favorite application is: