I was tempted to title this post Why Apple Sucks, but I guess that wouldn’t be original at all. What more my point isn’t really about Apple itself but about specific behaviors which I recently experienced.

OK, you’ve heard stories about Genius Bars and how they’re great idea not only in terms of customer satisfaction but also in terms of building revenue from cross-selling. I did too. So what’s the point?

Apple support isn’t just Genius Bars. They also have support team. You know, folks who answer your emails whenever you’re forced to use contact form. And they suck. So far every answer we got from them could be classified as F You message.

“No, you can’t pay us the safe way. F You. No, we can’t change the data on the invoice to whatever you’ve submitted in the form. F You. No, we don’t care if email is accepted as credible invoice in your country. F You.”

Don’t take that as Apple rant. I really can’t think of any big company which has great customer service. By the way, please point one in comment if you know any. This isn’t without a reason. It is so because great customer service just doesn’t scale up.

If you’re Google or Amazon or eBay you can’t have some real person being an account manager or customer support specialist for every single user which happen to use the site/product. You don’t want people to skip official support channel bothering directly your customer support forces. You want to isolate customers from knowledgeable guys or they won’t have time to do the real work.

What can you do if you really care then?

Keep your promises

If you promise something more than typical F-You-level service, work hard to fulfill your promise. If you promise me best customer service in the whole internet I expect you will go an extra mile for me. It’s not enough that you sign your F You email with the real name instead of “Best regards, Support Team.”

Make it quick

You want it or not you will be forced to send out a lot of F You answers. The least you can do is you can send out those messages as soon as possible. Don’t make them waiting. If your team can’t deal with load of inquiries hire more people or buy/build a piece of software to automate the process. After all, F You message received from bot works exactly as well as one sent by human.

Say you’re sorry

All these problems are because of procedures you have to follow, I know. The world is about procedures. But show you share my pain. Even if you don’t. Actually I know you don’t but I don’t care. Some compassion still helps a little bit.

Answer, for god’s sake

If I wrote to you it means a couple of things. One, I’m your user. Two, I care enough to take some effort to find your contact form and submit an issue. This puts me ahead of majority of your users who would just silently walk away facing similar situation. The absolute minimum is F You email as a response. Of course I expect more, but if you do less I’m out. You’ve just lost a customer. One from the top half. By the way that’s exactly how Technorati lost me as their user.

Get passionate people to work in support

One of the best experiences I got in terms of customer support was when people from product team commented under my rants about their products. They had Google Alerts set to check what people write about the product. And they took effort to answer even though it wasn’t really official support issue.

Have any other ideas how to build decent customer support team? Please share in comments.

Release early, release often they said. What a great idea I thought. You get an early feedback, you check whether the direction you’re heading to is good and you can quickly adjust your course. And then you repeat. At least that’s the theory.

An advice I have for many of you today is slightly different. Release later.

Yes, you’ve heard me. Later. Actually quite the opposite to release early. Haven’t I just mentioned I thought it was a great idea? Um… Yes, I have. Am I trying to confuse you? No, I’m not. So… what the hell am I talking about?

I’m talking about a few apps I have an occasion to work with recently. All of them have few common things:

• They all are web-based. No surprise, eh?

• They all follow release early, release often principle.

• If I had to write a review for each it’ll look like “A piece of crap. Keep away from that shit at all cost.” It would even suit Twitter when it comes to review length.

The main problem is they were all released too early. Somewhere in pre-alpha stage. You know, barely anything works and half of crucial features are not even there.

What’s the problem you ask? Well, when eager crowd sees someone (author) is all “can’t wait to show you my app (My App actually), you should feel bad you haven’t checked it yet” and then they see something which makes them cry in a minute they’re walking away and they aren’t coming back.

Or, if they’re like me, they dig deeper just to find the app is not only barely tested and far from completeness but it also have strange foundation architecture-wise and/or functional-wise. I guess “strange” isn’t an epithet I’d like to hear related to the base of my software. If your earliest users are up to this point they just won’t come back for anything else but writing a rant about this crappy app they’ve seen the other day.

Hold your horses then. Find someone who will give you their honest opinion about the app being ready or not ready to ship. If it isn’t don’t take release early principle as an excuse. It won’t do any good. Usually releasing too early is even worse than releasing too late.

Localization is a good thing. Giving people possibility to use an application in their own language is even better. I know it. My native language is Polish which is known by much less than 1% of people around the world so it’s never even a secondary language for application developed anywhere abroad. Fortunately I can live in this big scary IT world since I can deal with English if I try hard enough.

However there are a lot of people who can’t or they just prefer to use the application which talks with the same language they used to say “mama” for the first time in their life. That’s why this whole localization thing is considered as important from time to time.

And we come to the problem what to do once you have your localized GUI ready. Basically you don’t just want to have just another branch of resources to maintain, do you? You want to show your users a masterpiece you’ve created while working on localized version.

So you automatically turn on localized version for each IP you identify as the one incoming from the country using this specific language.

And this is plain stupid.

Remember the story of Blogger when I was trying to publish a blog post while being in Austria? They automatically switched the language which I definitely didn’t want them to do. Now I know Google Analytics has Polish GUI. How? They automatically switched it. Twice. Without even asking me whether I wanted it or not.

Actually I didn’t. Why? Well, if you ask me what the hell “wskaznik odrzucen” is I can’t say anything more than you even though I know Polish pretty well. I just prefer to stick with English terms I’ve already used to.

Once I saw localized labels (which I didn’t understand) I instantly found settings just to find out the language is already set to US English. What the hell? Finally I got my English version back. Unfortunately last time Analytics greeted me once more with my native language. Hey, does anybody messed with my Analytics settings? Nope, I’ve just checked – the language is still set to US English. So… what the hell?

This reminds me a story why there’s no Fiat, which is one of the biggest Europe car manufacturers, in the US. They started with poor quality cars so the company name quickly became an acronym for Fix It Again Tony and finally they abandoned US market deciding the bad opinions are unfixable. Most likely it won’t happen again with Google but sometimes they try so very hard to repeat Fiat way.

A much better choice is to display a message “Hey, now we have brand new English version of our app. If you want to use it click OK, otherwise click cancel.” I can even live with seeing the message a couple of times before finally it baggers off as far as no one is going to automatically change languages of my apps. This is by the way the option which was chosen by Facebook when they were inviting Polish version of their site. I stuck with English one but somehow staying with the old option didn’t forced me to write a rant about that, which is a good thing I guess.

What are differences between modern web application and good old thick client we used back than before internet bubble came?

One is responsiveness. Web applications generally suck when it comes to rapid response to user’s actions. Just today my friend told me how fast a time tracking app has become when he installed recently released Google Chrome add-on for Internet Explorer. If it wasn’t a web app he wouldn’t touch the application with that level of responsiveness. Not even with a stick.

What else? My call is usability. Web is still mouse-focused while most of old school thick clients are, or at least should be, keyboard-focused. The early web was all about navigating with mouse but that’s the old truth: keyboard is faster. The web should just mimic keyboard-driven navigation from thick clients, shouldn’t it?

Well, no. Not so fast. The problem is every web page works within some thick client – a web browser. Now, you can’t just use all these Alt+something or Ctrl+something since you don’t know which version of which browser your user launched.

Yes, Ctrl+O opens a file and Ctrl+S saves a file pretty much everywhere. But you don’t really know what Alt+N does in my Firefox and in my Internet Explorer. And as far as shortcut isn’t intercepted by the browser it will be passed to a web application. Unfortunately you can’t know when it is and when it isn’t.

The answer? I wish I had one which works every time but that’s not true. One great approach is the one used by Google Reader. They use characters and Shift+characters as their shortcuts. This doesn’t interfere with Alt+something or Ctrl+something used by browsers. Unfortunately this doesn’t work whenever you have a lot of text to be filled by the user since then you use letters and big letters to fill the text.

Another option? Leave shortcuts alone but make standard tab-pedaling as intuitive as possible.

Any other ideas how to solve the problem?

On a side note: a little hiatus here was connected with deployment of my private project. In other words: finally we have moved. There are glitches all over the place but the first service pack (term copyrighted by Szymon) is scheduled for the next year.

Some time ago I saw seen this cliché in one of restaurants: “If it isn’t exceptional it isn’t good enough.” Besides I liked the phrase I didn’t believed guys from restaurant followed it. Actually I didn’t believe any company is able to function that way when it came to customer service.

Except it happens and I can’t deny it.

The other day I wanted to get car insurance. The problem was I wasn’t able to reach any insurance broker in my hometown during their working hours. Actually I couldn’t reach them during any reasonable hours since I was on the long way home and with no teleportation module in my vehicle I couldn’t make it before 10pm. On the other hand I didn’t want to leave the car with no insurance, just to sleep well.

I found only one broker who was willing to wait until evening for me. When I was finally there I was ready to sign pretty anything just to get the thing out of my head and get home. Actually the initial offer was pretty crappy but still I was ready to sign damn papers. The broker however wasn’t happy and she sought further until she was able to cut 30% off the price. It took her an hour of work. A late-evening hour. When we finally shook our hands it was 5 minutes past midnight.

It was just an extra mile she went for me. Or rather it was as much as an extra mile she went for me. What more, as far as I know this market, she’d make more money (bigger provision) if she sold me more expensive insurance. And she wouldn’t waste an extra hour.

On the other hand now I don’t consider anyone else to sell me car insurance in the future. She completely won me.

If you’re ready to deliver exceptional customer service you’ll win many long-term relationships like that. Don’t say about it – do it. Don’t consider your service as exceptional when you’re in common situation (then your service is common). You can really show you rock when something unexpected happens. Something like weird customer such as myself.

By the way if look for car insurance broker in Krakow I know a great person. Feel free to contact me for details.

At the moment my Firefox uses more than 250MB of RAM. Today’s peak was at 470MB. Simultaneously Internet Explorer (we use Share Point and Share Point in Firefox sucks) eats more than 150MB and with each tab I open it grabs another 25MB.

What the hell? What these applications do with all the memory? Some kind of temporary public distributed storage where they compute how to rule the world or something?

If I restart both browsers and they reopen all tabs Firefox needs less than 120MB and Internet Explorer needs less than 100MB of RAM. What did they use the rest for before restart? I guess I already asked but what the hell?

Believe me browsers aren’t only applications which suck in terms of memory usage. TweetDeck? 90MB reserved instantly after starting. And that’s for an application which pretty much works as RSS reader. MS Outlook? 80MB to 100MB after few whiles. Live Messenger? 60MB just after start just to log me in and display contact list. Wow. Or should I ask what the hell?

Developers of each of these applications don’t give a damn about memory they use on client machines. They allocate loads of memory whether they need it or not. Thus they should be punished.

As a punishment they should work on crappy machines in terms of available RAM (and arguably processor power). This way they would suffer each time they had to check anything in working application. Developers are pretty smart beast. They’d get the thing.

“So slow. Oh so slow. Why a swap file is used so extensively? Hm, my machine run out of RAM, that’s why. Maybe the app is allocating too much memory? Maybe I should do some refactoring to show them what The Real Hacker can do when he’s pissed off because of his too slow PC…”

I don’t advise developers should get 1024×576 displays which would make minimal screen resolutions fine in virtually every application. I’m not sadist. Not to that level at least. Let them have their fancy 22’ screens (or whatever they get these days). However exchanging their machines to some old crap would make users’ world nicer since developers would share our pain in the ass. It’s so humane, isn’t it?

When they learn to care about memory usage they can get back their super-duper PCs back which is a carrot complementary for a stick.

I installed Visual Studio recently. Not that I plan to get back to programming but I needed a client for Team Foundation Server and web client unfortunately doesn’t support all needed functions.

I must admit guys from Visual Studio check whether display resolution is suitable to for the application. A plus for them. During installation I got the message:

“Visual Studio 2008 is designed for a minimum resolution of 800 x 600. Although Visual Studio operates at a lower resolution, you should set your display resolution to 800 x 600 before running Setup.”

800 x 600? Um, wrong. Rather 1024 x 576. Can’t set it the way you want. The funny thing is they check display resolution but they come up with wrong conclusions. A minus.

Anyway so far I see no problem with not sufficient vertical resolution while working with Visual Studio. I guess the only potential problem is within horizontal resolution since there would appear horizontal scrollbar (which always sucks) or something. A big plus.

Overall my impression is positive. Actually Microsoft (except of Live Messenger) does pretty good job when it comes to minimal application resolution.

A typical scenario: you have your top-notch application used by greatest users under the sun, but somehow they still have problems with the software. To limit your effort with answering all those inquiries you try to build a place where some experienced users would help others or at least your answers would be accessible by anybody, not just a person who asked the question.

You start a forum for your product.

Great. The real question appears after several months:

Is your forum still alive?

Recently I was advised to take a deeper look at an application (mercifully I won’t give here the name). I opened the webpage went through product description and found official product forum. I thought I’d learn what users thought about the app. Unfortunately the last post was half-year old.

Sorry. That doesn’t work. You could put there a big “Abandoned” banner with exactly the same effect. The forum is dead. And what you do when something is dead? You bury it. You don’t keep the stiff in your living room where everybody can see him.

If your forum isn’t alive just close it. The effect of ghost forum is opposite to what you’d expect. And think twice before starting a forum for the product. Do you have enough users to make it a crowded place? Do your users care enough to help you to keep a momentum? If not the chances are good you’ll be closing it soon.

The rule by the way doesn’t apply to product forums only.

I’ve written about upgrades a number of times yet you couldn’t have expected I’d omit the subject in usability issues series.

Every upgrade is a tricky thing. If you work on desktop application you have to deal with a number of environments and a number of different setups of your product. You also have to find a way to deliver your upgrade to the end-user machine and encourage people to actually execute the process.

If you have web-based application the thing is easier but still you can screw it. User no longer control when upgrade is happening and you can interrupt people in the middle of the most important task they’ve ever been exercising with your app. If you screw something you don’t know about that until your forums become totally hot with discussion about brand new issues you invited with the new version. Rollback is really a pain in the ass since now you have users who already use new features and they won’t be happy if you remove them rolling the version back.

Anyway, no one said upgrades are a piece of cake. Most of the issues mentioned above are about quality of your upgrades but there’s one thing which you should remember about when you build your upgrades strategy. The most annoying thing for the user is when much effort is needed to update the software. Users either don’t do upgrades at all or become disheartened. Make it as seamless as possible. Your users will be grateful.

Whole usability issues series.

Imagine you’re a user. You get a piece of brand new software. You want it on your notebook. What kind of installation process you’d expect?

None. You want to do nothing and application should work. OK, you can type something like www.google.com, but that’s all.

And for desktop application? Not much more really. Just click big install button and see “installation complete” message.

How different the reality is. My friend tried lately go through initial setup of Windows XP on his new toy. Tens of updates, hundreds megabytes in downloaded files and numerous restarts. At the very moment I’m respawning my Windows machine as well and I share his frustration.

Don’t go that way. Make your installer as simple as possible. If you necessarily need user to accept license, show it and let the rest be made automatically. Put somewhere “advanced installation” button for geeks who want to know where each byte on their hard disk is placed, but make the standard path in the simplest possible way. At least 9 times out of 10 simple track will be chosen.

If your app is web-based you’re even more fortunate. Avoid forcing users to receive their emails if it’s not necessary to use the service. If it’s not possible make the process (you already know) as simple as you can. Let people play with your application, not with its setup process.

Installation is a necessary pain in the ass for user who wants to use the application. This time it’s not about chasing the rabbit but about catching it.

Whole usability issues series.