The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
Reading the Question
Wednesday - September 24, 2008 01:19 PM in
by Peter Leppik
There's not doing any usability testing, and then there's the occasional situation where you wonder, "Did the guy who designed this ever even try to use it himself?"
Today's example, from the Daily WTF, is a screenshot from what looks like an ATM or similar transaction kiosk. The screen asks, "DEBIT OR CREDIT?"
The buttons are labeled YES, NO, HELP, CANCEL, CLEAR, ENTER, and the digits 0-9.
I've also seen surveys with questions like:
How satisfied were you with your experience?
- Yes
- No
The unfortunate thing about embarrassing situations like these is that they are immediately obvious as soon as anyone looks at it with fresh eyes. When you see something like this in a production situation, it means that nobody did even the most rudimentary testing or proofreading.
I'm no saint in this regard: I've written plenty of head-scratching draft survey questions. Usually it's someone else who catches the problem (and fortunately, so far, before the survey is finalized). It can be easy to develop a blind spot to your own mistakes, so eve if you don't do any usability testing, at least ask your buddy to take a look. It can save a lot of embarrassment.
| | |