The elegant Twitter Server down message
New age web messages
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
Indiaplaza sucks
Taking forward the idea of online services communicating with the user in a better way also helps in bringing transparency. No service is perfect. Softwares act grumpy. Things go wrong all the time. But let the user know about it and promise to help him out as soon as possible. That’s good customer care.
A friend once told me this funda of a visitor being restless when he is new to the place and takes a taxi to an address unknown to him. He will feel comfortable if the driver keeps all the windows open and let the passenger have a look around the places. On the contrary if it is all closed the passenger will be restless and having doubts all the way even if the driver is taking him in the right direction.
My miseries with Fabmart.com (Fabmall.com) dates back to the early 2000s. I had to always call them up after a long wait after the order. Once it went on to a very bad story of an expensive order of mine not coming to me for almost two months. After a lot of calls and emails exchanges when I finally got the thing it was not the one which I had ordered for. Then I had to call them again to take it back and give my money back. Some how after a lot of painful back and forth, I got it done and that was the end of me using Fabmart.com.
Years after Fabmart got rechristened themselves to Indiaplaza.in and have come up with a new face and new selling techniques like competent pricing etc. I decided to give them a second chance coz I had to redeem a gift certificate a friend gave me. They normally say that their delivery time is 3 days but they continue to hold high their culture of being late. And that too after two or three calls. I tried two more times later to buy books but the second time it turned out to be too expensive.
I had ordered for this book and after them not showing up for two weeks I called them as usual. They told me that the book will be delivered in two days. The website showed my order status as “Ready to ship”. After waiting for three days I called them again and came to know that they don’t have the book in stock. I was told that my money will be reverted back and it’s more than a month now after the order. Nothing has happened. I called them a week ago and again two days back to know the status and both times they told me that their system was down and it will take some more time for my money to come back.
First of all it’s so bad that they didn’t know that they don’t have the book in stock. I had to call them to find this out and that’s when they might have also realized. I don’t know otherwise how the order status ever got changed to “ready to ship”. Then their system (or whatever) failure; how could they expect me to wait till I get my money back without having to hear a word from them?
Ideally Indiaplaza should have called (or mailed) me in three days after my order and let me know that they were out of stock. Then if they had also been unlucky to encounter a system failure they should have again told me about the problem and I would have been good enough to understand it. That’s what I mean by the user being comfortable if things are transparent.
I don’t know if I will ever get my money back but needless to say they have lost me as a customer. I strongly recommend against using indiaplaza's services. It sucks big time. Or may be they need a real computer system in place which will help them to manage the orders, stock and to track the whole process.
Oh btw Cleartrip customer care rocks. I have two good experiences.
A friend once told me this funda of a visitor being restless when he is new to the place and takes a taxi to an address unknown to him. He will feel comfortable if the driver keeps all the windows open and let the passenger have a look around the places. On the contrary if it is all closed the passenger will be restless and having doubts all the way even if the driver is taking him in the right direction.
My miseries with Fabmart.com (Fabmall.com) dates back to the early 2000s. I had to always call them up after a long wait after the order. Once it went on to a very bad story of an expensive order of mine not coming to me for almost two months. After a lot of calls and emails exchanges when I finally got the thing it was not the one which I had ordered for. Then I had to call them again to take it back and give my money back. Some how after a lot of painful back and forth, I got it done and that was the end of me using Fabmart.com.Years after Fabmart got rechristened themselves to Indiaplaza.in and have come up with a new face and new selling techniques like competent pricing etc. I decided to give them a second chance coz I had to redeem a gift certificate a friend gave me. They normally say that their delivery time is 3 days but they continue to hold high their culture of being late. And that too after two or three calls. I tried two more times later to buy books but the second time it turned out to be too expensive.
I had ordered for this book and after them not showing up for two weeks I called them as usual. They told me that the book will be delivered in two days. The website showed my order status as “Ready to ship”. After waiting for three days I called them again and came to know that they don’t have the book in stock. I was told that my money will be reverted back and it’s more than a month now after the order. Nothing has happened. I called them a week ago and again two days back to know the status and both times they told me that their system was down and it will take some more time for my money to come back.
First of all it’s so bad that they didn’t know that they don’t have the book in stock. I had to call them to find this out and that’s when they might have also realized. I don’t know otherwise how the order status ever got changed to “ready to ship”. Then their system (or whatever) failure; how could they expect me to wait till I get my money back without having to hear a word from them?
Ideally Indiaplaza should have called (or mailed) me in three days after my order and let me know that they were out of stock. Then if they had also been unlucky to encounter a system failure they should have again told me about the problem and I would have been good enough to understand it. That’s what I mean by the user being comfortable if things are transparent.
I don’t know if I will ever get my money back but needless to say they have lost me as a customer. I strongly recommend against using indiaplaza's services. It sucks big time. Or may be they need a real computer system in place which will help them to manage the orders, stock and to track the whole process.
Oh btw Cleartrip customer care rocks. I have two good experiences.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Oops i forgot to attach the file!!!
I'm sure that there might have been quite a lot of instances when you said that after hitting the "Send Mail" button on your email client. Or when you realise your mistake when you get a reply saying "I think you forgot to attach the file".
Here is a mint cool suggested feature on all email clients which will intelligently sense your intention of attaching a file and reminds you to do it if you forget; conceptualised by Sowmya Karmalli of Aditi Technologies. Their usability blog has become my favourite play (battle) ground now a days.
Here is a mint cool suggested feature on all email clients which will intelligently sense your intention of attaching a file and reminds you to do it if you forget; conceptualised by Sowmya Karmalli of Aditi Technologies. Their usability blog has become my favourite play (battle) ground now a days.
Friday, September 14, 2007
New age web messages
The new age web sites/applications (the so called web 2.0) have all evolved for good and one of the many things which have changed for good is the copy writing for error message or in that case any message. I think it’s the advent of blogging which made the web world change the attitude towards its communication to users. They chose to speak the human language as the new web considers the users as an integral part of their growth. Most of the services go live and is thrown open to users before being steady and the developers fine tune the performance according to the user’s feedback. There are more instances of the services being down every now and then but what I have noticed is that, the users have become calm. And its only coz the users are made to know what exactly is the reason behind the downtime. It’s all about transparency. You let your users know what’s happening with you and they will be ready to help you out if you are in need. The better you explain the more they understand.
Even old websites used to give out simple and understandable messages before but they used to be very formal. Now the language has become more informal and more personal and it works. It helps to keep the situation light and in control. And it also shows how much you care for the users.
I think it all started with Gmail. A message which says “Hooray no spam here” was a big surprise for me at first. Even though I liked it, I used to wonder why they kept it like that. Then when I started seeing messages like “Grr something went wrong with the connection, try sending the mail again” I started feeling comfortable rather than getting irritated. I liked the way Gmail spoke my language.
Cleartrip is one of my favorite sites and their message copy is outstandingly human. Once their site was not loading and I got this
And once my flight booking failed to go through
Oh this message from Squirl, once when i tried to upload an image actually made me laugh
But of course the weird ones just refuse to go away. I got this message when I tried to disconnect my internet connection.
I think it’s high time all of us understood the importance of good and more human copy writing in application development. It’s just a simple attitude change from our side which is needed to achieve a better user experience. Recently a developer friend of mine and I were browsing through Google reader and suddenly we saw the message “Grr something has gone wrong”. He said
Even old websites used to give out simple and understandable messages before but they used to be very formal. Now the language has become more informal and more personal and it works. It helps to keep the situation light and in control. And it also shows how much you care for the users.
I think it all started with Gmail. A message which says “Hooray no spam here” was a big surprise for me at first. Even though I liked it, I used to wonder why they kept it like that. Then when I started seeing messages like “Grr something went wrong with the connection, try sending the mail again” I started feeling comfortable rather than getting irritated. I liked the way Gmail spoke my language.
Cleartrip is one of my favorite sites and their message copy is outstandingly human. Once their site was not loading and I got this
And once my flight booking failed to go through
Oh this message from Squirl, once when i tried to upload an image actually made me laugh
But of course the weird ones just refuse to go away. I got this message when I tried to disconnect my internet connection.
I think it’s high time all of us understood the importance of good and more human copy writing in application development. It’s just a simple attitude change from our side which is needed to achieve a better user experience. Recently a developer friend of mine and I were browsing through Google reader and suddenly we saw the message “Grr something has gone wrong”. He said
Hmm if I put Grr into my error message I will be told to take it out immediately saying its not good. But if google says the same, its great communication.
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