Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Second sight Just look at how fast these pages load, even on a regular old modem! Experiment with how effortlessly you can move from article to article, cut and copy text, email links to friends, or use the data in any way you like. No frames, no JavaScript, no special applets to download. No tracing your pathway, no spy programs nested on to your hard drive, no compliance-inducing interface designed to pull your finger towards the "buy" button. Experience this lightning-fast, user-friendly world for yourself. Then you'll understand what it is people like me have been complaining about for the past five years. This simple, open and accessible information architecture is the closest you can get today to the internet that those of us who were online in the early 90s keep talking about. Now you know why we whine so much. It is not that we are nostalgic for the innocence of our interactive youths. We merely have a very clear recollection of how much better early web interfaces served the needs of students, researchers and anyone looking for some information.

VCs risk outpacing consumers - Tech News - CNET.com As new investors begin to evaluate business plans, he said, they should rely on certain litmus tests. One is that the right strategy is unknowable in advance. "Have a strategy to learn, rather than a strategy to implement," he advised. If a technology enables "the larger population of less skilled and less wealthy people to do something that historically they could not do or that only specialists could do," it also has high potential for success, he said.

Jazzed About Work It's almost impossible to determine which comes first -- technology or the need for technology. But for me, the starting point is always human need: You can't build a technology without first thinking about how people might use it. Early on, at least, the development process is not about technology; it's about sociology.

Fast Company -- Jazzed About Work
If people are going to use computer technologies to augment their interactions, those technologies need to have the directness and spontaneity of a phone call, the visual immediacy of a fax, the asynchrony of email, and the privacy of a closed-door meeting. All of this started to crystallize for me one night, when I came home and found my son playing a modified capture-the-flag version of Quake. He and his friends had actually designed their own virtual environment: They could look up, look down, look left, look right. They could jump up and grab the flag. They could even talk to other team members. I sat there and watched him for a while, and then it hit me that this was his way of communicating. He was socializing with other people by playing this game on the Net. And I realized that those of us in business -- who have so much to gain through effective communication -- were using lame, document-oriented tools. Our own kids were using technology far more effectively than we were! They were operating in an environment where small groups of people can self-organize and interact. And they made me think that I should be able to use technology in the same way.

Darwin Online - Read Darwin -Nice Guys Finish First - Customer Relationship Management QVC has also changed the job descriptions of customer service reps to make it clear that they are "customer advocates" who are rewarded for uncovering glitches and suggesting new processes—not just "complaint handlers" who respond to one gripe and move unthinkingly on to the next. It was fairly easy to get the reps to make the shift. Call center managers were another story and had to be encouraged to listen to reps. "Unfortunately, some people had to leave," Hunter says. "They didn't get it."

Darwin Online - Read Darwin -Nice Guys Finish First - Customer Relationship Management Before Hunter arrived from Citibank nine years ago, QVC kept track of company-focused metrics: calls per hour, sales per minute, profitability per customer. Now QVC emphasizes customer-focused measures: How friendly are the call center reps? How knowledgeable are they about the products? How clear are invoices and product instructions? How many people does a customer have to speak with to get an answer? How often does a customer have to call a second time to get a problem resolved? QVC gathers these metrics by fielding customer satisfaction surveys (quantitative and qualitative, run by outside companies) and by tracking every last phone call. Cross-functional teams made up of call center staff and systems staff review customer service reports every week and figure out what areas need work. For example, when Hunter arrived at QVC, 15 percent of customer service callers had to ring back a second time to get their problems resolved. Since some of those calls were from customers who had returned items and wanted to make sure their accounts had been credited, QVC began crediting customers' accounts more quickly and sending cablegrams to let customers know. Thanks to changes like this, the number of callers who need to make repeat calls to customer service has shrunk to 3 percent, Hunter says; the goal is for it to reach zero.

Economist.com The reasons for such failures are complex. Some designers bet too much on technology and forget simplicity. Asking consumers what they want is not necessarily the answer: many of them don’t know. Only expensive and time-consuming direct observation, says Mr Nielsen, will tell you where they encounter problems with a site. .... “If the PC was about adding features”, explains Mr Rifredi, “hand-helds and cellphones are about what to cut.”

Let me write that down: the genius of documentation But there's one more important, overarching reason to create documentation for a Web project. It forces you and your team to decide what you want to do. It forces you to design. It forces you to strip away ambiguity and fuzziness and indecision, to decide just exactly what needs to be done. In short, it forces you to think.