UPDATE Monday 31st October. For those in suspense, yes it finally arrived! The driver retrieved the parcel from the random house he left it at, and left it outside my door. I got a verbal apology but still quite a rubbish experience!

In a weird but useful twist, the driver took a photo of the parcel where he had left it in the porch. Customer Services emailed the photo to me so I could verify that it wasn't my house, enabling us to solve this baffling mystery! So the drivers make the effort to take photos, but apparently not verify addresses or leave cards...

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UPDATE Thursday 27th October: I called City Link again this morning and it emerged that the driver had indeed left the parcel in someone's porch. Just not mine. And not on my street either. Apparently he had got confused and left it at a house in a similar sounding street. Erm...I rest my case.

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First a confession: I’m an unhappy customer at the moment. Why? I ordered some photo frames online and received an email yesterday to advise that they had been despatched via City Link.  This should have been a positive thing but given my past experience with delivery companies, I had a quiet sense of unease. I was given a consignment number to track my parcel – City Link’s website said it would be delivered today between the hours of 7.30am and 5.30pm. This meant that unless it arrived in the first hour of the slot I would be at work when it arrived. Nothing I could do so off I went. Whilst at work I checked the website again and it said the parcel had been delivered at a time which must have been minutes after I left for work. It said the parcel had been ‘left safe – in porch’. I don’t actually have what I would call a porch, but there is a covered area in front of my door. This isn’t a secure place as it is open and visible from the street. So I was slightly worried but assumed the parcel might be with a neighbour who actually has a porch behind a door. On getting home there was no parcel, nor a note to indicate it had been left anywhere else. I have phoned City Link and spoke to a helpful person who wasn’t able to get in touch with the local depot, so no light has been shed so far.

Whether or not the parcel turns up, I don’t understand why delivery companies are poor at providing good service to consumers. This is not an isolated incident. I order plenty of things online so have dealt with most of the popular couriers. Here are my concerns: 

The delivery hours are inconvenient for most people

Without fail these companies will only deliver when many people are at work. In order to combat this, I sometimes opt to have things delivered to my work address but this is not ideal as I cannot park nearby so end up lugging bulky items around or having to drive back to work to pick them up. Not to mention that workplaces shouldn’t be clogged up with people’s personal deliveries.

The delivery timeslot is incredibly long

Even if you do work from home or take the day off especially to be in, who can guarantee to be in for 10 hours straight? Pop out for a pint of milk and you might miss it!

The day items will be delivered is unclear until the last minute

Sometimes the day something will be delivered is crucial to whether I want to buy it in the first place, such as birthday presents. Most websites are pretty good at advising on delivery times, but in the hands of a delivery company things can get delayed and confusing. I had one experience where I was waiting for a gift for weeks, and all I could do was check the parcel tracking details everyday even though the estimated delivery date came and went with no joy. The company had a recorded message on the helpline asking customers to check the website for help, an unhelpful cycle.

Instructions are either not left or might as well not be

Today no card was left, so if I didn’t proactively check the website I wouldn’t even know that delivery had been attempted. Cards I've received in the past are often shockingly unhelpful, not clearly describing where a parcel has been left or simply saying ‘left with neighbour’. Er, which one? One company said they had attempted delivery at 10am and would do so again tomorrow and the next day. There was no way of contacting them to point out that I would be at work every day, so I simply kept coming home to a new, identical card. This led to a visit to…

The dreaded depot

As a result of the above, I frequently end up having to retrieve my parcels from a depot. Usually there is a brief window of opportunity to do this for working people, from about 8am to midday on a Saturday (believe me, there is nothing I would rather do at this time. Definitely not sleeping). The company with the nearest depot to me makes a point of having no parking for customers and stating this proudly on its cards. Whilst I can get there on foot, I always worry about how big the parcel I’m collecting is and whether I’ll be able to carry it home. Having such limited opening times also means that there is usually a queue of people to make the experience even more joyous. Another company have a depot on an industrial estate a few miles away. Having located the estate via sat nav, I carefully drove around until I found the stated address, Unit 1 in about 30 Units. But Unit 1 was empty. I sat puzzled, frustrated and increasingly aware that the limited window of pick up time was drawing to a close. I called the helpline only to listen to hold music for 10 minutes on my mobile. Eventually I started to drive home, noticing a small side road at the front of the estate which I thought I’d better check. Yes, that’s where the depot was. No signpost, but then it’s almost as if they would rather customers didn’t find them.

So all in all there is a pretty shocking lack of consideration for customer needs going on. Perhaps it’s because delivery companies are actually serving companies as their primary customers, not us end users. But the likes of Amazon and every other e-commerce website must realise that your experience with the delivery company sending their goods has an impact on your view of them. Anyway, there is a clear gap in the market for a delivery service which allows customers to select from a range of days and times slots (including evenings and weekends) even if it means paying a bit more or waiting a bit longer. End of rant.

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Recently I was lucky enough to attend Regent Tweet, an event organised by Sister PR and London Girl Geek Dinners. Around 100 girls (and a few guys) gathered for some shopping and networking on London's Regent Street. Selected retailers laid on activities and generous free gifts in order to get girl geeks checking out their wares, blogging and tweeting. A genius concept!

The shops that really impressed were:

·      Bose – they showcased a demo of their new TV or ‘VideoWave entertainment system’. This features impressive home cinema sound, which is built into the TV so no separate speakers are required. It is also pleasingly minimalist as all your devices (games console, cable box etc.) connect to one box which can be hidden away. The best thing for me was the incredibly simple remote with about 6 buttons. Having never got my head around multiple remotes, I felt confident I could use this, meaning it is truly idiot-proof. The only downside is the price but if you win the lottery, this is definitely the TV to get!

·      Jack Wolfskin – I hadn’t heard of this shop before but they are a Germany company who do all things outdoorsy. To say I’m not the outdoor type would be an understatement. The last time I went camping an exploding gas stove provided unexpected drama and once the shock and minor burns had faded (!) I decided it was perhaps best if I stuck to hotels. But if I was tempted to risk an outdoor pursuit again, I would talk to the staff in Jack Wolfskin who were great at explaining the outdoor gear they stock. There was a competition to put up a tent as quickly as possible. I’ve never been allowed to do this when I’ve been on camping holidays as the other people I’ve been with wanted it to stay up, but through a combination of reading instructions, help from the staff and embarrassment at the growing crowd of bystanders in the shop, I managed to do it in around 7 minutes. Twice as long as the winner took, but an achievement for me! The mojito we were given directly afterwards was also most welcome.

·      Oliver Sweeney  - a shop selling high end, stylish men’s shoes. Again the staff were very friendly and allowed us to create our own shoe design on an iPad. The best design won a prize at the end of the day. I rated this shop because they understood that most of the girls at the event were interested in technology and how it is changing the consumer experience, and designed their offering accordingly. If they did shoes for women I could spend a lot in here!

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Having just written a paper on Intelligent Transport Systems, and specifically communication to and from vehicles, I'm intrigued by Waze which is described as a social media application that provides navigation instructions based on live feedback from other road users. As you are driving you can share information passively simply by having the application open on your mobile. If you slow down or stop it will detect that you are in traffic and mark this on the map for other users. You can also actively send messages warning about hazards you encounter on your journey. This would have been really useful when we had snow earlier in the year and my hour long commute became a 5 hour nightmare. Now I just need to get my iPhone to try it!

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On Saturday I attended UXCampLondon 1.5 at LBi on Brick Lane. This was my first time at a BarCamp and it was a really great experience!

A BarCamp is basically a user-generated conference - everyone who attends presents a short session which can be a polished presentation, a demonstration or a discussion. The atmosphere is very informal and the sessions are not announced before the day, so there is a sense of spontaneity about the whole experience. 

Here is a photo of the grid (by Jeff Van Campen) where everyone wrote their session titles on post-it notes. It quickly became clear that the hardest thing about the day was going to be deciding which sessions to attend. I was really impressed with the diversity of the topics. Here's a brief outline of the sessions I attended:

• UX must die by Jason Mesut - I was very intrigued by this title! Jason talked about the threats facing UX such as the perception that what we do is common sense and how other disciplines are starting to do similar tasks to us, but also identified some opportunities for the future. I really liked his model of the 4 areas UX professionals typically operate in: Experience Strategy, Interaction Design, User Research and Information Architecture. He showed that we all have a unique 'map' of the extent to which our role involves these things. It is a great way of making sense of what we do and planning how we want it to change.
• Embedding usability from scratch was a session I did with Michele Ide-Smith (her slides are here). I hadn't met Michele before the day but we arranged the session via Twitter which in itself was pretty cool! We both had some slides on our experiences of introducing usability to our organisations and it was interesting comparing the public and private sector perspectives.

• Agile & UX by Michelle Adams - this was a really useful presentation for me. Michelle talked about how the principles of Agile are very compatible with UX (ultimate goal being to deliver a great customer experience) and shared her experiences of working with the Agile process. It seems that being 'committed' i.e. part of the team might be the way forward.

• Tentacles of an Octopus by Mehul Hirani - this was a bit different! We had to create an egg cup out of some random materials (paper plates, staples, sticky tape) and the results showed that even with the same brief everyone had come up with something different, demonstrating the power of unleashing creativity. Mehul talked about different brainstorming techniques he found useful and others shared their ideas. One that stuck in my mind was a technique where you think of all the things a product shouldn't do (e.g. be impossible to use, be prohibitively expensive) and then reverse them to come up with a list of the things it should do.

• When is bad usability good for business by Trang Du - a very thought-provoking presentation. Trang showed examples (e.g. RyanAir) of companies whose websites seem to break every usability rule and yet they still get many customers returning. She suggested some interesting reasons for why this worked: if websites look cheap, people assume the product is also cheap even if it isn't, because people get used to the experience not being great and somehow this becomes part of the brand's offering, and because these sites take you so far down a path that even if it's been a bad experience, you don't want to start again from scratch. The talk got me thinking about how certain persuasive design techniques actually deliver a bad user experience but still sell things. 

• Animated sketch prototyping by Chris Neale - Chris has devised a method of creating animated paper prototypes using a web cam and The Animationizer, a tool he created. This seemed to be both very simple but also very clever. I would like to try it out.

• iPad UI: Why it matters by Fabian Marry - another very useful talk. Fabian highlighted why the iPad is different to tablet computers and the iPhone. He gave some tips for developing for the iPad and showed some great examples to illustrate his points. Since very few of us can get our hands on the iPad at the moment, this talk made me feel very well prepared for when it does happen. 

• My Society & me by Joe Lanman - Joe talked about his work with My Society. They have some great websites which I wasn't aware of, such as TheyWorkForYou which enables you to find out more about your MP, their history and how they voted on key issues. Another is WriteToThem allowing you to easily contact your MP and another is FixMyStreet allowing you to quickly report a local problem to the council. This was an inspiring talk to finish the day as it was such a worthwhile and useful project.

All in all a great day, many thanks to the organisers.       

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I've been thinking of setting up a blog for some time but it's taken a few inspirational events (and people) to finally push me into doing it. Starting my MSc in User Interaction Design at Kingston University is the first one - I am studying part-time and started in September 09. It's taken me a while to get into the swing of working and studying, but I can see the value in using the blog to record my thoughts on what I'm learning and how I'm attempting to apply it to my day job as a Research & UX Manager. It would be great if people in a similar position find it useful too!

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