Blog homePhew - great Christmas - spent time driving around Germany enjoying both the Berlin and Frankfurt christmas markets (and finding out that Avis now offer Porsche sports cars for rent from Frankfurt)….. although my budget didn’t quite stretch that far!
Anyway, back now - and my news years resolution is to get back to blog posting daily…. (something I failed to do in December as I was slightly rushed off my feet with all sorts of projects going on)
During the last few days I have spent some time sandpapering our reservation system (TourCMS). I am a great fan of sandpapering - and its something that not enough companies do with their websites or systems.
In essence, sandpapering involves going around a website and smoothing off the sharp edges making them more rounded. Through careful application of sandpaper you can greatly improve a user’s experience of a system. The golden rule of sandpapering though is that you can’t turn a chair into a table…. for that you need a slightly more fundamental project!
Sandpapering normally isn’t an activity that people do except in smaller companies - because normally a designer or developer is asked to “make this new project work” or “make that work” and never really allowed to go and improve the system anywhere they like on work that was undertaken previously (because that would involve significant regression testing that would take too much time vs the benefit).
Improvements that fall into the “sandpapering” category are those like:
- Changing default values for when pages or forms are initially loaded
- Adjusting text copy to make it clearer
- Adding ALT or TITLE tags to HTML elements - giving a bit of “in situ” help where it is most useful (no point hiding things in manuals)
- Sorting out form alignments and spacing
You could argue that the larger companies don’t release a new project until it is perfect - so they don’t need to sandpaper their websites or systems. I would disagree with this - every single time we get a support enquiry where a user has’t understood something we tend to spend a bit of time trying to work out what we could have done to have stopped that request from happening in the first place. The problem at many larger companies is that support is disconnected (within an organisation) from development - so designers / developers never get to hear of where customer confusion is occurring - even where a simple 30 second copy change could make life easier for everyone.
Likewise, when we give training, if we are finding something difficult to explain, this is often a flag that a section needs a bit of sandpapering. These loops need to feed straight back to the designers / developers in order for sandpapering to become useful.
Developers tend to have another word for sandpapering - they would call it “refactoring”. This would be going back through previously written code and maybe rewriting sections to make them work more efficiently. (I take great delight going through code and rewriting SQL to minimise database calls). Unfortunately not many developers have the luxury of refactoring on a regular basis - which tends to mean, in the end, that systems become bloated and difficult to maintain.
Anyway, happy new year to all. I think 2008 will be a big year in online travel.
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