Monthly Archives: July 2008

Personalisation

Enough slagging off banks, let’s talk about some of the good things some of the NZ banks have been doing lately …

I see Kiwibank have launched an iPhone version of their online banking site.

Very cool.

I love it how they have stripped back the functionality to just the essential bits – check your balance, transfer money.  The only thing that’s possibly missing is making a payment.  As a result the interface is not cluttered with lots of unnecessary noise.

However, look closely at the screenshots and you’ll see an interface still dominated by lots of mostly meaningless numbers.

Is “38-9007-0581259-00″ your cheque account or your savings account?  Or your company account?  Or maybe your joint account for shared expenses?  You’ll have to either have a memory for long strings or (more likely) guess based on the balances.  But, good luck with that approach on the transfer screen – there are no balances displayed.

As far as innovations go I’m much more impressed with a small change that ASB recently made: you can now name your own accounts.

So simple.

You can choose names, like “Cheque” or “Savings”.  But, if you like, you can also call them whatever you want.  Use this to your advantage – I imagine it would be much harder to frivolously spend money from your savings account if it was called “Fiji Trip”, for example!

Little things…

Xero Bank Feeds

It’s great to see that all of the major NZ banks are now providing automated bank feeds for Xero customers.

When I was working at Xero the percentage of bank accounts that were setup to receive automated feeds was one of the metrics we watched closely and were actively trying to increase – the user experience when your bank transactions just appear ready for reconciliation each day is just SOOOO much better than having to manually upload them yourself.  So, I’m sure the team will be really excited to have all of these banks online now and will be working hard to convince customers to take advantage of this feature.

If you’re a Xero customer and you’re not using automated feeds, there is some more information about how to set these up in the help.

Reading the comments on that post it would seem that Westpac, the last cab off the rank and over a year or more behind some of their competitors, have decided to charge their customers $25 for the privilege of setting up each account on the feed.  If that’s true it’s a really dumb decision from them in my opinion.  Any excuse to clip the ticket, it would seem.

No surprise then that Westpac has been consistently last in recent customer satisfaction surveys, with around 30% of their own customers saying they were not satisfied with their overall relationship with the bank in the latest one.  Wow!  Despite this they recently announced a profit after tax for the six months ending 31 March 08 of $244 million (about $1.3 million per day), so Westpac customers can at least be reassured that their setup fees are contributing to a good cause I suppose.

If you’re a Xero customer and this fee is enough to convince you to switch banks, then it looks like BNZ would be a good choice as they are currently the only bank providing feed data for all types of accounts, including credit cards.

Related posts:

Affordance

Affordance is a simple but powerful idea.

I first came across is in Don Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things, but according to Wikipedia it’s much older than that.

At Webstock this year Liz Danzico defined it as: “providing uninscribed and detectable cues that loosely govern a set of actions or interactions”.

I would say: “make it obvious to me what I can or should do with things”.

The classic textbook example …

When you approach a swinging door how do you know which was the door opens? Do you push the door away from you? Or pull it toward you?

The “handle” that’s placed on the door should make this obvious.

Correct:

Picture: http://blogs.technet.com/ewan/

Incorrect:

Picture: http://www.iqcontent.com/blog

If you think about it the flat piece of metal with the word “push” commonly placed on doors is an odd design element. It has no real purpose other than to remove the doubt about the direction of the door, and perhaps to indicate where is an appropriate place for your hand to push. But, we’d struggle without them.

Some other examples from web design:

  • Links should look like links (i.e. normally blue and underlined)
  • Buttons should look like buttons (i.e. rectangular with a label, and probably with a subtle 3D effect to give the impression that you can press them in)
  • Scroll bars should look like scroll bars (i.e. to the far right of the page and, ideally, using standard controls from your operating system)
  • Tabs should looks like tabs (i.e. with the selected tab appearing to sit physically in front of the other tabs)

Notice a pattern here?

What other affordances make your life easier every day without you even noticing?

We still suck

Here is a refreshingly honest admission from Clusterstock:

“We’re in beta now, which means we still suck. We’re working hard, though, and we hope to get better fast.”

Nice!

But, I still think it’s a bit silly to say a website is “beta”.

For a start, unless you’re customers are software developers it’s unlikely they even know what that means.

And, more importantly, it is a mistake (albeit a very common one) to think you’ll ever be finished building your site.

I wonder if the team at Clusterstock can really imagine a time in the future when they will no longer be working hard and hoping to get better?

God bless Pixar

As I write our three and a half year old (the “and a half” is important when you’re three, remember, much less so when you’re thirty-two!) is sitting across the aisle from me, and has spent the last two hours being totally entertained by Air New Zealand’s Pixar movie selection.

Magic!

This time yesterday we were all in a semi-submersible boat at the Great Barrier Reef, sitting dry but underwater with the amazing coral and marine life just a few centimetres on the other side of the window.  The guide pointed out some clown fish he spotted…

“There is Nemo and a couple of his mates”

He was quickly corrected by Mr. 3.5 at the top of his voice…

“Noooooo.  Nemo lives in a pink house!”

Oops.  And I thought he never really paid attention.

First things first

Some things …

  • You can’t out train a crappy diet.
  • You can’t out save poor spending habits.
  • You can’t out work disorganisation.
  • You can’t out impress a bad reputation.

It’s amazing how often we fail to get first things first.

I’m hoping you can think of other examples to add to this list?

PS I’m sure you can think of somebody who is the exception to each of these statements, at least for a while, so maybe it’s only true in the long run, or maybe in each case it should be “it’s bloody difficult to…” rather than “you can’t…”?

Push The Button

Photo: http://flickr.com/photos/unseelie/766346338/

How many steps does it take to get a change live on your website?

Ideally it should be a one click process.

Otherwise, when the pressure is on (i.e. when there is a bug on the site that you quickly need to fix) you’re sure to forget some critical step and make an even bigger hole for yourself.

What we called “the deployment process” changed a lot during my time at Trade Me.

In the very early days we just copied ASP scripts directly onto the production server. We only got away with this because there were not many people writing code and there were not many people using the site.

Later, as we moved to having multiple web servers which each required a copy of the code, we created a simple Windows application which copied the files from our local directory onto each of the web servers and would also execute selected SQL scripts against the production database. This was much better, but still relied on the developer doing the push to have the correct files on their local machine.

As the site got bigger there were some new complications. For a start there were more people involved. The teams responsible for testing and for maintaining the database and servers got increasingly nervous about developers having the ability to push code at any time. The code base got bigger, making it more difficult to keep in sync. The number of people using the site increased massively, making it less and less practical to just put code changes multiple times during the day. And, we also moved to using ASP.NET, which added the complication of having a build step in the process.

To address some of these issues we developed a new tool we called the “Release Manager” which hooked into source control and allowed us to package up changes so that they could be pushed to test or to production with one click (using simple NAnt scripts under the covers). This removed a lot of the complexity and stress from the process.

I’m sure it has continued to evolve since I left – if anybody from Trade Me is reading it would be interesting to hear about how you do it now.

Towards the end of my time there the test team, who had final sign-off on each release (twice per day at that point), got into the habit of queuing up ‘Push The Button’ by the Sugarbabes on the MP3 player when they were ready for changes to be deployed to production. Every time I hear that song now my pulse increases slightly at the prospect of some site changes going live!

I always thought it would be fun to wire up a proper red button to trigger the deployment, but never got the time …

If you’re interested, I wrote a little more about the tools and processes we used (as at April ’07) here:

Questions from Tim Haines, Part II

How do you manage deployment?

Ten years, or less

Peter Norvig, who I’ve written about here before, has a number of really interesting articles on his site.

Here’s one that stands out:

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

I like this:

“There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.”

It’s a short article and well worth a read.

While I’m referencing this, there is also a great quote in the appendix:

“When asked ‘what operating system should I use, Windows, Unix, or Mac?’, my answer is usually: ‘use whatever your friends use.’ The advantage you get from learning from your friends will offset any intrinsic difference between [operating systems]“

Nice – I think I’ll use that.