Notes from a wireframe world

Regular readers of this blog will know that I love my blackberry, So next week when I fly off to France (yes I was in the US less than a month ago, it all go in this jet set life I lead :) for a Christmas holiday, I want to take my life err phone with me.

My phone company (Orange) enable roaming on pay-as-you go phone as standard, but because I’m on a contract I have to ring up and get it enabled, and may have to pay a deposit. So I duly rang up.

All was well until just before I got put through to an operator, The last thing the automated system said was “Now I’m going to ask you about your password, this is for security purposes.” OK makes sense I thought, it’s safer than giving my password to a human, So I presses the n^th letter of my password… Nothing,

“Please press the key that represents the n^th letter of your password” the menu system repeated, but this time it added “For example press 2 if the letter is a,b or c”.

The penny dropped.

The blackberry has a wonderful Qwerty keyboard, as do most modern smart phones, but this wanted my password as it appears on a 12 key phone keyboard. After an attempt to guess where the letters where I gave-up, so I rang again, this time to try and get a human to speak to… No option I tried (even the “Help using your phone”) would let me speak to someone without first asking me a question I couldn’t answer.

At that point I was calling Orange all the name under the sun. A letter of complaint, and possibly a law suit where in order! So off I stormed into town.

Half an hour later, after walking into town and calming down (I decided not to sue them, but still a letter and a blog post where in order), I was in the Orange shop.

Here everything changed. The guy I spoke to couldn’t have been more he analogised that the menu system was stupid, and suggested a work-a-round, according to him, if you enter your letter incorrectly three time it takes you to an operator anyway (N.B. this is untested by me).

He asked me to hold on a second, despaired out the back of the shop, and returned with “his” (or more likely the shops) phone, and customer services on the other end.

The guy in the call centre, was chatty sorted the query out quickly and best of all (and yes honesty is a bugbear of mine) didn’t pretend to be in the UK (Hint big business, we all know you outsource your call centres).

The people I spoke to couldn’t have done more for me, but the menu system… whoever thought of the wonderful idea off telling your customers to do something, they can’t do, and don’t have to anyway, should be fired.

Posted via email from scottherbert’s posterous

We’ve all heard the stories, of how Leaving a Vulgar Comment Online Might Cost You Your Job, or how a poorly worded e-mail can, years later, come back to haunt you but how many of us think about this in their daily lives? A little while ago I started to delete e-mail from my one of my contacts on a daily basis, why? I hadn’t had a major falling out with him? It was just that every e-mail they sent me was a chain letter, a joke or public safety warning a two minute search on snoops would undercover as fake.

I’m sure you have someone in your life like this someone who bombards you with junk on a daily basis, and I’m sure you ignore them as well. So imagine my surprise when I found out (after the event) that one of his e-mail wasn’t junk, but an invite. An invite I “hadn’t bothered to reply to”.

At about this time I read how traditional news sources (like newspapers and even TV) are dying and “New media” Twitter etc is taking over as the new mass news source. So where do we, your average user, fit in?

Well if Twitter is the new CNN, than we are the new Journalists.

“Every news organization has only its credibility and reputation to rely on.”

Tony Burman, ex-editor-in-chief of CBS News

As the Journalists of Facebook and Twitter (not to mention blogs and e-mails) we now have certain standards to live up-to, the internet is no longer the enjoy the anonymity of the 1990’s, Social media has changed all that, now on the internet everyone know who you are. In one respect this is very welcome, Trolling and Spamming won’t survive such full disclosure (would your mum like to know how to “Increase the size of her manhood”? ) and you and your skills and talents now have a much wider audience. It also has risks.

As the two cases I highlighted above show.

So how do we prevent ourselves falling into the trap of having that vulgar comment get us fired?

Well the simple answer is don’t make it, the more complex answer is we need ethics and we need standards. Thankfully over the last 4,000 or so years, there has been a group of people who have managed to build into their professional lives a framework that allows for just that. This holy bunch are called Journalists and we can learn a lot from the ethics and standards they, on the whole, subscribe to.

Posted via email from scottherbert’s posterous