Chapter 42

I had one of those hours-become-days airport delays coming back from visiting family a couple weeks ago and the experience keyed into something that we think about a lot in terms of customer service.

Every other airline had a screen like this. But at the Airtran counter they had something that had more in common with one of these. And over the course of our three hours in line it became clear that the board wasn’t being actively updated. So we stood there for a frustrating afternoon in an information vacuum, not knowing if we could make our connection or would have to be booked on a later flight. Only at the counter did we learn that our flight had been cancelled and we’d have to return the next day for a rerun of the same.

Aside from all the practical help that just a small bit of information would have been–giving us time to make other travel arrangments, sparing my parents extra round-trips to the airport, allowing us to skip dosing our dog up with the sedative he takes before flying–simply taking the step of updating the status board would have measurably decreased the stress level of the planeful of passengers in line.

Here’s a point of contrast: After our second go of it was unsuccessful, we ended up getting a refund and booking the next day on US Airways instead. And, as it turns out, that flight was pushed back quite a bit too. But we weren’t left guessing about it because I woke up to an automated call that told me the duration of–and even the reason for!–the delay and offered a path to follow in case I needed to make alternate arrangements. And at the airport, the first thing the representative told us was, “It looks right now like you’ll be able to make your connection. But keep your eye on the status and come back here if it changes.” So, though the flight was delayed an additional two hours, we made it home because when we saw that the status had changed they were able to help us fly standby.

Clients sometimes tell us that we’re the most responsive vendor they’ve worked with. And–though Tonya schedules our deadlines with something approaching clairvoyance and Alex is known for lightning-fast coding–it’s not that we have a superhuman ability to get work turned around. It’s just that we know how frustrating it is for our clients to be in the dark if their website is broken or the Dean needs something on the homepage as of yesterday. It only takes a few seconds to say, “Hey, that looks like some bad records in the faculty database. We’ll take a look at it first thing in the morning.” Or to slide the little plastic FLIGHT CANCELLED into its appropriate slot.

Tags: airline, customer service, flying

Even though I assess, evaluate, critique, and praise Web sites for our clients every day, I don’t really use that lens in my normal, everyday browsing of the Web. I mean, don’t get me wrong, badly designed, poorly organized sites annoy me. I might even yell to no one (I work at home most of the time) when I’m frustrated with a site or see something that’s particularly garish. I also note good ideas and generally keep up with best practices. But I don’t waste my time overthinking or reacting to random sites I like or don’t like.

So I surprised myself this morning when I came across the Oregon State Fair’s Web site and was so impressed with its design, functionality, IA, and writing that I actually wrote a glowing, completely unsolicited email to their marketing director. (By the way, I found her email quite easily.)

I know the team that developed this site left no rock unturned. I can tell immediately. There are no weak links: They spent just as much time making sure the writing was spot-on as they did refining the design.

It’s a complete package:

• The design - great, catchy, beautiful, perfect for a state fair
• The IA - clear, easy to navigate, with a touch of unique flair (Big Tomato) that does the double duty of reinforcing brand
• The writing - smart, clever, knowing, funny, succinct
• The functionality - I love My Can’t-Miss List (such a great use of shopping cart technology) and that the big Purchase Tickets graphic on the top of every page

Even when our involvement on a client project is limited to design or strategy, we always emphasize the equal importance of these four elements. But of the four, writing is often overlooked until well into the project. As a result energy and resources are in short supply when the time comes to focus on content. I look forward to the day when all the RFPs we receive include a section on writing; when Web committees allocate a line item in the budget to content development before the project even starts.

I don’t mean to overemphasize writing, but as the lead IA strategist and content developer at White Whale, it’s something I fret about all the time. I let the other guys worry about functionality and design. In the end, sites succeed when it all comes together.

I haven’t been to a state fair since I was in high school but I’m going to this one. Amazing what a great Web site can do.

Tags: design, IA, inspiration, state fairs, writing

Optimization is one of the most enjoyable parts of software design, but unfortunately it does not claim a high percentage of development time. Generally speaking, it is not a task to consider until the time spent is justified, which is often toward the end of the development cycle (but not always!) Still, it is an important step, especially with products like LiveWhale, which has to perform well under high traffic spikes. I’ve already talked about general page caching before, but fine-tuning a PHP application for speed when something is not cached is also important. Here are some thoughts on how to do just that.

At the code level, LiveWhale is a framework, which means the same codebase is hit for many different types of requests. The question is then: how to achieve high performance with a codebase that has to perform so many tasks and is therefore code heavy. It makes sense to divide code across a handful of files. The objective here is to only load libraries when you need them. A typical request will only use a tiny percentage of the entire codebase, so there’s no need to read a great deal of code from the filesystem and eat up RAM per PHP request. Also, with a modular system like LiveWhale, it is not explicitly known what modules exist that will need to be loaded. An important optimization is one where only the first request to the server has to perform logic to determine what to load. The results of this expensive operation are cached, and all subsequent LiveWhale requests enjoy dramatic savings in the module loader. Continue Reading »

Tags: application, cms, livewhale, optimization, performance, php, speed

So I started this tradition in my adult life where I celebrate my birthday every year by purchasing a quasi-expensive item that resides on my mental wishlist. Sure, maybe its a silly tradition to some, but for me it is more like an annual graduation present, a sort of a “good job son; you’ve worked really hard this past year, and thus made it one year closer to your ultimate goals” in the form of an item that my scrupulousness would never permit me to purchase otherwise. Being the level 27 nerd that I am, these “presents” to myself have pretty much always been in the form of tech gadgets, this year being no exception, as I am now the proud owner of an iPhone.

Being that I adopted back in February—just after the fancy 16gb gen1’s release—I’ve been witness to a great deal of technological evolution, albeit in a fairly short time. After the first week, i had that “this could be better” impatience that we-the-ingenuitive get shortly after a brainstorm, and I jailbroke (a tiny hack that allows one access to the inner recesses of the iPhone) my phone, installing a ton of 3rd party apps just prior to a trip to Barcelona. These apps put a lot of the functionality I’d expected of my new pocket mac into motion, such as:
- being able to actually put documents of any nature onto the device without the typical iTunes rigmarole (seriously, that thing is going to BE osx at some point if it continues it’s trend of forcing users to become increasingly more reliant on integrating with it to use their files/gadgets).
- FTP access.
- reading, storing, and bookmarking PDFs.
- writing real text files.
- playing games (not crappy cell phone games, but emulation of the nes/snes/genesis/gameboy/etc childhood favorites that are still somehow desirable after all of this time. )
- and the usual osx ammenities like a dictionary, a translator, a conversion tool etc.

During our trip abroad, these new found features were invaluable, particularly in terms of communication and commerce when my American Standard/half-fluent/US Dollar programmed mind reared it’s ethnocentric head. Even after our return, I found these new abilities so infinitely useful that I couldn’t imagine the void that should be in their place. Continue Reading »

Tags: iPhone

I’ve called this post “Introducing LiveWhale News” because I’ll leave “Introducing LiveWhale” to Jason. It’s that big behind-the-scenes project we’ve been hinting about for a bit, and there’s quite a lot to say.

But at the risk of stealing some thunder from that announcement, I’d like to show off something that we’ve been spending a lot of time on:

This is the add-a-news-story page of LiveWhale, the CMS we’ve developed as an answer to problems posed in our infamous (among our clients, anyway) content management manifesto. In later posts I’ll go into some detail about specific interface choices we’ve made (a personal favorite is the flowchart behind attaching images to news stories), but for now I’ll talk about what we didn’t do. Continue Reading »

Tags: cms, interface, livewhale, lwblog, usability

Every day in 2008, Brenda Hutchinson is filming sunrise and sunset (while ringing a bell) and blogging the results. When Alex was in town, we went to the bridge around sunset and Lauren was recruited to ring a bell (the shame of being mistaken for a tourist!). But in addition to the bell ringers below, you can catch cameos by two-thirds of the White Whale development staff and one-third of the White Whale canine staff:

Tags: bell, blog, staff, video, youtube

Hi everybody,

I was in Portland on Monday to unveil final Lewis & Clark site designs to an open audience.  It went really well, and I think we have an approved final candidate! 

The next step is for it to go to a larger public, on the redesign blog (which in this case is being run by Lewis & Clark instead of us, though we’ll be posting there from time to time).

If you’re interested, visit the Lewis & Clark New Media blog, where the designs will be appearing soon, and watch the action unfold!