Feeling Gassy: Keyspan Energy Website Pain

Like most people, I’m a big fan of being able to quickly and easily manage my utility bills online and the good news is that now pretty much every major utility lets you do this. Where things get a little bit less happy is in the design and execution of these websites. Generally they seem to suffer from ‘everything-itis’, where the very usefulness of the site is squeezed out of them, normally by a committee (or committee of committees) who just can’t cut down their list of requirements to focus on what’s important.. the customer. Instead of nicely focussed user goal driven design there is a tendency towards overblown portals with opaque links, 95% of which the average consumer never needs or understands.

Today’s frustrations came from Keyspan Energy. Namely – excessive use of non-working Javascript (and no plain HTML fallback) and ridiculous support email requirements (which means they’ll never know of this problem). Having retrieved my password, very promptly – so that was good, I logged in using Firefox 2.0 and immediately found that no links on the site worked except for ‘Log Out’. Firefox is now a popular enough browser that people should be checking it works, but apparently not at Keyspan as the error log was full of Javascript errors. Hmm.. but nowhere could a simple, working HTML only version of the site be found. Oh development teams! If you keep doing this you’ll just have your nice AJAX toys taken away you know…

All was not lost though, I fired up my trusty Internet Explorer 6 (I’ve still not upgraded to 7 for just these sorts of reasons) and the site worked just fine. Well, I say fine, but when I submitted my meter reading I had no feedback to say the site had received it even though the browser had finished updating. Going back to the main panel, then back to the reading told me that ‘Only one reading could be submitted a day’ – but not what my reading was, so I could check it was correct – although apparently I wouldn’t be able to change it even if it was wrong. Oh smashing.

My planned task complete, and only in 15 minutes, I decided to be helpful and let the website team know of these issues. Eventually I located the support link, off the bottom of an internally scrolling section nicely out of site. Why not have it on the fixed bottom panel, easily accessible I wondered? Ah, here be vogons it seems. These folk really don’t want your feedback. How do I know this? Well, having found the support form and it’s handy selection of radio button choices, I found you can only submit the form having entered all your personal details, including full address, phone number and your account number before you could submit your question in a text field that was all of about 50 characters big. At this point I gave up. They already had these details as I’d logged into my account, so this was obviously a cunning management plan to make you only contact them if you are really really desperate – “Darling, could you just look in the burning cabinet over there for an old gas bill please? Keyspan need my account number so I can submit a gas leak help request online. Thanks awfully.”

So, Keyspan. If you happen to come across this post I apologise for not contacting you directly, but feel flattered that your website inspired me to spend 15 minutes writing this post instead of five minutes filling in your unnecessarily awkward support form.

Laser Graffiti

Graffiti. The ‘scourge’ of modern society, and of my spell-checker. Well society need fear no more, with this amazing laser guided graffiti projector. Beautiful in its simplicity – you just point the project at a building, callibrate it and then ‘draw’ directly onto the building with your laser pointer. Genius. [Thanks to Boing Boing]

Web 2.0 Release Forms

This month’s Radar magazine has an article about the ‘Prisoners of youTube‘ – all those poor folk who suddenly became famous because someone posted an embarassing video of them online. Since most of these clips are of the ‘Funniest Home Videos’ variety the people involved are generally pretty upset, since they had no idea they were being filmed and that other people would see. This does raise the question of release forms and how they are handled (or not) in a Web 2.0 world. Most online video sites say to ‘check this box if you have rights to upload this video’ but the truth is that none of them check this, it would totally destroy their models if they did. YouTube seems to be surviving a pile of lawsuits, either through taking down the content or creating partnership deals with the content owners, but that’s mainly for the big players, TV studios and the like.

So what of the individuals whose lives have been destroyed by this unwanted fame? Either they have to spend a fortune getting a lawyer together to get a cease and desist order, and to try and get financial reparation, or they can try themselves directly – but the damage has been done. The video is out. People laugh at them on the street. And even if one video service has pulled the video, someone will be uploading their copy of it somewhere else right now. Should they ignore it and hope it goes away? Or is this the time for a new Web 2.0 rights movement that protects the rights of people to mess up without being embarassed to death without their consent?

Truth is, as long as we find this stuff funny someone will find a way to get it out there. Especially if you can start to make money on it as youTube is now promising. It will be interesting to see where this goes next.

Social Flow

I’ve been re-reading the excellent Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience again and I highly recommend you all do too. In it, author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes his research into how people get into ‘flow’ states, that is states of enjoyable activity where you immerse yourself completely in what you are doing and stay deeply focussed. We’ve all done it at some point, missed our train stop when reading a book, sat down to do something then looked up and it’s the middle of the night and we forgot to eat and so on.

Mihaly argues that modern western society is full of flow destroying activities ripe with passive pleasure, such as television, rather than engaged enjoyment, for example knitting. These activities, while fun at first, lead to a longer term malaise as they do not involve us actively setting our own goals and following them through, which is core to the flow experience. Sports on the other hand are rife with flow, as they exist in their own world with strongly defined goals and excellent feedback to tell you that you’re there and getting better. Experts in the art and music world start to look for more complex experiences, moving from rock bands to classical or jazz, and then setting their own goals to analyse the music and deeply immerse themselves into that world.

What’s amazing about this concept is it works on a many different levels, you can even feel good about your day simply by writing a list of small tasks that need doing (goals) and ticking them off (feedback). Longer lasting, sustainable flow happiness comes from creating more complex experiences within overall goals, for example when you start taking photos you’re proud to create something that’s in focus, but as you spend more time immersed in the subject that is no longer sufficient – more complex internal goals must be met such as composition, lighting and the story being told.

So let’s look at something like mySpace in this light; you can start by signing up (most likely because your friends are there), you fill in your profile and you’re ready to go. This is a simple goal, easily achieved, and now you can start finding your friends – another simple goal. As you look around you realise that your page s pretty dull, so you go away and learn how to customize your page to make it your own (or steal someone else’s page you like). Eventually you have your ideal web home, and are confident to tweak it when you like. Now your personality is represented, you and your friends can comment/message each other as much as you like, and you can work out whether or not to go on a date with that kid with the cool but weird photos who messaged you (my advice is no, unless one of your meat-space friends knows them well and they’re cool). So almost all of mySpace’s activities allow you to set your own goals, or choose from social goals already set, and get rapid feedback from your friends and yourself on how you’re doing – a great flow experience. No wonder everyone spends so much time on there.

My next personal goal: how to engender flow into the next site I build. Sounds like an interesting challenge, with plenty of good feedback.

"Cannot delete folder" deleted

Having done a bit of file re-org on my laptop I found myself stuck with a folder which, though empty, could not be deleted. Windows kept saying “Cannot delete folder” apparently “another person” was using it.

After re-booting my machine the problem persisted, which is not a good sign as a reboot will normally kill off any process that holds the file lock. A quick search on Download.com turned up ‘Unlocker‘, a great little freeware app that fixed the problem straight away. Good job! Now all I need is something to unlock that nagging feeling of why can’t Microsoft just get this crap sorted out themselves?

Aside: A common cause of this for me has been flickr’s Uploadr app, but in this case it wasn’t – and normally a reboot fixes the Uploadr lock.