Andrew points out that Kyoto and Osaka are near each other and that was probably behind the offers from Expedia that I had complained about. Helpful info that I didn’t have, but unfortunately, it got worse.
A few days later I received email from Expedia
To: Steve Portigal
Subject: Steve, here is your itinerary confirmation for your 01/02/08 Osaka trip
[deletia that makes reference to our Osaka trip multiple times]
Even more concerned than before, I wrote them and received this message
Dear Expedia Customer,
Thank you for contacting us.We regret that your experience with Expedia.com was not satisfying. Comments such as yours are read by numerous people within Expedia and help shape our policies and practices as we learn and grow.
If you have further questions, feel free to reply to this e-mail or contact Expedia customer services at 1-800-397-3342 and reference case ID 36793797.
In other words, I submitted a complaint and they aren’t going to act on it, unless I submit it AGAIN. Okay, I do that.
The next message is even worse.
Dear Expedia Customer,
Thank you for contacting us.
Kyoto, Kyoto-fu (Change name) Expedia.com itinerary number: 121380781812
If you have further questions, feel free to reply to this e-mail…
No actual communication. Is anyone out there? I try again.
Dear Expedia Customer,
Thank you for your immediate response.
Please accept our apologies for the misunderstanding with your hotel reservation. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused you.
Your itinerary serves as a confirmation of your purchase, and we’ve sent an updated copy of it in a separate e-mail. You can also access your itinerary online at any time. Here’s how:
…
Again, no one is addressing my key question: why does my Kyoto reservation keep getting referred to as my trip to Osaka? Once more into the breach…
Dear Steve,
Thank you for your reply.
Please accept our apologies in regards to the misunderstanding with your reservation. We regret any inconvenience that may have occurred and would like to assure you that every reservation is important to us.
Your problem may stem from incompatibility between your browser and our system. We have already escalated this technical issue to the appropriate department.
In the interim, your hotel reservation at the Hotel Monterey Kyoto is confirmed while the “OSAKA” tag line have caused you such inconvenience, the printed itinerary of your reservation is still binding and a confirmed reservation for a hotel in Kyoto, Japan and not in Osaka.
…
So somehow my browser is causing them to send me email messages about a different city? The crucial piece of info (thanks, Andrew), that these are nearby cities, never appeared, and a spurious technical issue was blamed (it’s not a browser issue; perhaps they want to blame the model of car I’m driving for the emails they are sending?) but at least a human being intervened and confirmed that what I thought I bought was indeed what I bought.
Great job, Expedia people! Ridiculously poor support to go with a rather silly system! Let’s hope we don’t have an actual problem at any point.
CBC News has a tool on their masthead to report a typo.
Some people like to report typos (I’m one of them; I also like to be notified of typos). But there’s also a comment here on ways to listen to customers; CBC perhaps noticed some patterns in type of feedback they were getting and decided to create a channel just for that type of input. As well, by offering that link they are encouraging people to participate in the site on a very simple level, as typo submitters.
Today’s NYT magazine included a letter written in response to How Do you Say ‘Got Milk’ en Espa?±ol? (about Hispanic advertising).
Giving catchy names to particular demographic segments is one of advertising’s oldest tricks to make the craft seem “scientific”. But why spend time defining the characteristics of each segment if it turns out everybody is a mix of all of them -“a Straddler . . . with certain Learner/Navigator undercurrents”?
Agreed. As I’ve written before, personas are user-centered bullshit.
One of the fun yet challenging aspects of spending two weeks in another country was stumbling over all the little things that I know how to do back home but didn’t work. I paid for a snack using pocket change, and eventually had to hold the pile of coins out to the counter dude so he could take the right amount. The coins say their value, in English, but in order to complete a transaction in the normal amount of time, you have to be familiar. It was an interesting feeling, to be such a foreigner.
At another point, I was riding the DLR (train) with my Oyster (smart card). A conductor comes along to swipe the card and there’s a small interaction where the passenger holds out the card and the conductor holds out the wand (yes, it was a wand, not the usual credit-card-swipey-slot thing). I wanted to put my card on top of his wand, but he wanted to put his wand on top of my card. I was just supposed to know the gesture. Sounds like a bit of a dominance issues, actually.
In using the self-check at Tesco (a grocery store), I realized the software was the same as what I’ve seen here at Home Depot, etc. but when it came time to pay, the voice prompt told me to insert my card into the chippenpin device. Turns out this was Chip-and-PIN, where credit cards and/or ATM cards have extra security via an embedded chip, and an associated PIN. These readers use a different swipe gesture, with the card going in the bottom of the keypad. Anyway, I stood there with my non-chipped credit card, putting it in and out of this bottom slot, to no avail. After I surrendered and paid cash, I realized there was the familiar vertical swipe slot along the bezel of the monitor, a different piece of hardware than the chippenpin.
And this one was subtle but confounding:
This is the TV remote from my Paris hotel room but the London hotel had a similar issue. In my experience, the red power button turns the TV on and turns the TV off. But in both these hotel rooms (and maybe this was a hotel issue more than a Euro issue) the way to turn it was to press the channel buttons. Enter a channel and the TV would go on and display that channel. The power button was actually on “off” button. You can imagine me sitting in front of the TV with a remote and trying to turn it on, in vain, until frustrated random button press gave me the result I wanted.
I often look around at local transit and marvel at how much the cues and other information in those systems are designed for people who already know how to use them; but I was able to plan for and learn about transit enough to be come a fairly comfortable user. It was these small interactions without cues, and under time pressure, where I found myself bemusedly incompetent.
Yesterday on KQED’s Forum their guest was Brooke Gladstone from On the Media. I was struck by this quote, early in the broadcast.
I will ask a question…maybe 5, 6 times, and the person we’re interviewing gets around to answering bits and pieces of it after every iteration and we will sometimes assemble all those answers into one.
This is the art of the interviewer — probing, following up, asking again, in order to get to the answer, eventually. It’s why interviewing in teams is tricky, because the other member of the team needs to know what’s in your head, to give you space to ask that question over and over again til you get to it. Regular people do not speak in soundbites.
We also see this over and over again when we’ve synthesized conclusions and we go look for supporting video data to share with our clients. It’s just not there as some obvious artifact. That’s why, of course, our recommendations come from synthesis — insights are not sitting there waiting to simply be scooped up, they have to be assembled from a variety of sources.
I am envious of those with amazing audio/video editing chops who can use the data to more closely approximate what we want to say; but at the end of the day, the big ideas rarely come out of people’s mouths directly.