I recently purchased a new mobile phone from a major Australian Telco, at the same time I moved from a pre-paid service to a contract, all with the same telco. Unfortunately, all did not go smoothly and this led to numerous interactions with customer support over a one-week period. Throughout the process I experienced a number of frustrations, all of which were exacerbated by having to engage with an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu each time I called customer support.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that IVR is a great tool, and has many brilliant applications. However, what made this Telco’s implementation of IVR frustrating was that rather than providing the caller with a number of options to select from, the system initially asks the caller to explain the reason for their call. This assumes that the caller already knows the options that are available to them and the words/phrases that they will need to use in order to access the correct menu option.

In my opinion, this is like telling me that I need a key to unlock the door in front of me and rather than providing me with a set of keys that I can compare to the keyhole I am given some materials and told to go ahead and make a key a key that fits the lock. What makes it worse is that I HAVE to go through this particular door, there are no alternatives. Best of luck.

Here is an example of my first exchange with “Lara”:

Telco: “Hi, I’m Lara, welcome to [Telco name]. I’m here to help you with your call today. All you have to do is talk to me. So using just a few words, tell me the reason for your call.”

Me: “I have ported the number from my old pre-paid sim card to my new contract sim card. I am now receiving calls to my old number on my new handset but my handset indicates that the phone number of my sim card is different. I suspect that this may be why I can’t access or setup voicemail.  I would like to get this fixed. ”

Telco: “Sorry, I missed that. I’ll understand you better if you use just a few words.”

Me:  frustrated pause…”issues with my new sim card and voicemail”.

The system then latches onto some words in my statement that relate to their menu structure and offers me what it sees as the most relevant option. I have no idea if this is the right option as I don’t know what all of the options are and I won’t know until I speak to someone, quite often after a prolonged period on hold. As a result, I frequently found myself in the wrong department with no idea how to get to the right department. The very friendly call centre staff often transferred me to another department, but due to the Telco’s use of VOIP, the call repeatedly dropped out before I got to speak to anyone and it was back to Lara to start all over again.

All-in-all, it leads to an extremely poor user experience which tarnished my perception of the brand and has led me to actively recommend family and friends avoid this Telco. My experience serves to highlight how menus provide invaluable orientation for users. I suspect that my frustration would have been greatly reduced if Lara had started off by providing me with a list of options to choose from. Perhaps even more importantly for this telco, I would not have clogged up their customer support line with my queries for a week if I had been provided with these options up front. You have to wonder how much money they are spending on servicing customer support calls which could be avoided by simply offering customers a list of options to choose from at the start of the customer service call.

Breadcrumb trails, those links you see at the top of the page that often start with text such as, “You are here:”, provide a number of benefits to users and website owners alike:

• They act as a signpost to where the user is within a site. This is particularly beneficial to users that arrive on your site via a search engine. The breadcrumb trail allows these users to identify what section of your site that they are in, as well as providing a quick preview of the type of content the site holds.
• Breadcrumb trails also allow users to move back to any page in the trail with a single click, rather than multiple clicks of the browser back button.
• They also provide some SEO benefits and Google is now including breadcrumb trails in their search results.

The name “breadcrumb trail” suggests a path that the user has taken to reach their current location (think Hansel and Gretel) and this is certainly true when considering a very linear user experience. However, that linear experience is no longer truly representative of the way in which many users interact with websites, particularly content rich sites where users have a high level of engagement.

Consider the following example, a user arrives at the home page of a news website, they click on the primary navigation option Entertainment, then a sub-heading Movies and then an article. Up to this point the breadcrumb serves the users well in reflecting the journey.

It is quite likely that in order to increase the amount of time that the user spends on the site, in our example above, users are encouraged to click on some form of related content (e.g. blog, video, image slideshow). Typically, this content is located in a different section of the website which results in a resetting of the breadcrumb trail. This suggests that despite its name, the breadcrumb trail is actually intended to demonstrate the location of content within a site’s IA, rather than how the user has arrived at a particular page (insert image).

What does all of this mean for the implementation of the breadcrumb trail, and recommendations we make as user experience professionals? Although our experience suggests that only a minority of users will use breadcrumb trails we still feel that they have a role to play on a website; however the definition and application of that role is a lot more ambiguous than it used to be. What do you think?

In testing recently, we came across a user behaviour that was challenging, not so much in itself but more so for its impact on the category and how it needed to be taken into consideration during website development.

Taste.com.au Recipe

One of our Clients was in development of a website that targeted aspiring cooks. In a nutshell, they wanted to confirm that their planned website was in line with user needs, and also that they were on the right track with the specific functionality that had been developed.  We used focus groups and moderated one-on-one user testing on the project.

During the focus groups, the importance of search became very clear. As mentioned above, this in itself was hardly ground breaking. The intriguing bit however was how much search engines (and by default, Google) had become the de facto homepage for this particular category. User behaviour was to go to Google and search some aspect of cooking, and to proceed to the websites recommended in the natural search results. The use of Google was so much a part of the process that the users were nearly universally unable to name any of the websites which were dominant (by traffic counts) in the category. The users knew the sites only by the pages that they had linked to via Google, which tended to be deep within the individual sites.

The behaviour was so prevalent that it became clear that our Client would need to rethink their homepage design and information architecture. Specifically, they had designed the site so that some of the core features were only clearly visible from the homepage, and were less easily accessed via the individual pages of the site. Understanding the user behaviour in this category led us to recommend to the client that they rethink their content pages, and consider how each one was effectively the ‘homepage’ of their site for most users. They needed to reconsider how to dial up the site’s branding, and how they could introduce some of the other features of the site (which had only previously been available on the site’s homepage) to the users without getting in the way of the core purpose for the users’ visit.