I've written before about how much of a pain in the neck it is to deal with HSBC Mortgage for anything outside of regularly scheduled monthly payments. If a payment gets hung up in the mail somewhere and is up to 15 days late, a computer calls you demanding a payment be made right then and there. No option is given to talk to a person and explain that the payment was sent so just sit tight and you'll get it you greedy impatient bastards. Lately all of our payments have reached them in plenty of time not to have to deal with this junk. My wife and I have different bill paying philosophies. When I used to pay the bills, I would send them out as soon as possible. She likes to wait until closer to the due date so the money stays in our account collecting interest, and with bills like the mortgage that have a grace period, sometimes she'll wait a little while. I instructed that HSBC be paid early so I don't get any more calls.
At one point, we thought we would try to use our Rewards Visa to pay the mortgage because we could get lots of rewards points that way. Well, HSBC has some policy (and again, you can only deal with the computer) that any payment done outside of sending a check requires a service fee, which I believe is as much as $30. Seriously, this is one of the largest banks in the world and they want to gouge you for paying with a credit card?
This and other examples leads me to wonder who comes up with these business policies? Have you ever visited a website or downloaded a program that seemed to have been designed only for the use of the designer or programmer? "I'm the greatest coder who ever lived, and you'll just have to do things my way because I know better than you do" seems to be the mentality.
I found a post on Web Worker Daily called Web Design: The Human Approach. This advocates a form of role playing in the context of designing a website. Designers should create personas and characters and then work through the website as that person to see if the site can meet his or her needs. I honestly believe that this approach should apply to other concepts as well, especially programs and business processes. Two of the most challenging and life changing classes I've had at the University of Phoenix were on business systems analysis. A good systems analyst should be able to look at the business processes, interview the users and other stakeholders, and then design (or purchase) and customize a system to meet those needs. A system can't be geared too much toward the users nor can it be geared too much toward the business processes. For example, until last year, my current company still used paper timecards. My previous company, which I left in 2004, was using an eTime system as early as 2000 or 2001. The system was painful at first, but by the time I left the company the bugs and kinks had been worked out and I thought the eTime system was great. This company, rather than copy a successful concept, decided to reinvent the while and create a new eTimecard from scratch. The timecard is written in Java, is only supported on Internet Exploder 6, and crashes my browser 2 out of 3 times I try to use it. I've actually found it to be more reliable running in IE Tab in Firefox where it only crashes the whole browser 1 out of 3 times. When the application was first rolled out, it was apparently written entirely against the business rules for the paper timecard. The rules were if you made a mistake, you had to line out the entire line, initial, and write an explanation for the mistake at the bottom. The electronic timecard followed the same rules to a painfully exact level. If you were in the block for Tuesday, for example, and entered 4 hours against a contract, then tabbed to Wednesday, and said "Oh, no, I only worked 3 hours on that contract on Tuesday!", you could not go back and change it. You had to void the entire line, add an explanation in a pop-up box, then add the charge number and start all over again. I remember at one point I got so angry with this cumbersome process I actually wrote in the pop-up box:
I made a mistake and recorded the wrong amount of hours against this contract. I would also like to add that this is the stupidest application I have EVER used. What bonehead wrote a program that doesn't allow you to make a change during the active session? Isn't that the whole point to moving to an electronic system?
I would like to think that my witty and insightful comment turned the company around, but I'm sure it didn't, or at least I couldn't have been the only person to complain because the rules were fixed which is good. Now if you make a mistake you can change it until you save the timecard. After you save, you must provide an explanation for chances. Even though I never notice my mistakes until after I save, I can live with this.
I put that story out, not to complain, but to support the point to this post that if you find yourself designing a website or writing a program or even crafting business processes, take into account the people who will be using your program, visiting your website, or following your business processes. Most of the time, you are not designing for yourself.
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