I was really impressed by the pitch from Tellme earlier today. (Although, despite them being great voice usability experts, their web site is a pile of Flash-infested crud.) I’d assumed IVR stuff was dull. On the basis you’ll get the best insights from the session that superficially is least attractive, I selected this session. Turns out it was a good choice.

I really liked the idea as telephony as the most intimate medium — a whisper in your ear. But what Tellme really have cracked is making the IVR experience much closer to interacting with a human, and not a string of audio files tacked together with some shell scripts. They played lots of examples of really, truly awful IVR experiences. And then what they did to them.

This is important because good experiences drive real business. The customer’s impression of your business and brand is derived right from the experience they have. The example Tellme gave was UPS. Their old IVR system was very, very slow. The messages went on and on, slowly read. Do you really want UPS to be associated with “slow”? Thought not. Most of all, a good experience creates trust in your brand.

The first thing they’ve cracked is making the voice experience more seamless. They’ve created vast libraries of all sorts of clever combinations of phrases which get blended together by cognitive psycholgy and linguistics experts. And the result is super-impressive.

Their voice libraries go beyond what’s known as “single prosody”, the old-style IVR where you heard broken-up phrases glued together like “departing | Saturday. | July. | 22nd.” Instead they have multiple prosody — “departing | Saturday, | July 22nd” etc. (note the comma after Saturday.) It works. But they’ve had to record over 37000 WAV files just to read back numbers!

They’ve also cracked “points of co-articulation.” You can’t record every possible combination of terms. So record the first term followed by an example second one starting with one of the 40 phonemes in English — “Hi John”. Then record all the possble second terms: “James”, “Jim”, etc. Then splice in the right second term just in place of the example one. Again, the result is impressive.

You really can tell the difference in terms of comprehension and memory retention.

They also did a great pitch on optimising the usability of IVR systems. The phone is a linear presentation, and taxes short-term memory. You don’t have a 2D screen with bold, drop-down boxes, etc. The boundaries are also invisible. It’s not like the Web. There’s a strong “recency effect” — the last thing said (“press 0 for operator”) is first thing remembered.

So they have a bag of tricks. Personalise. For example the sports team “squeaked by” if you support that side vs. “lost a close one to” if you don’t. They “instruct as you go”, deferring navigation instructions to the time they’re needed. (Lazy evaluation always deserved a comeback…) They use “progress markers” - “First, tell us…” “Next,” “Lastly”. Adopt colloquial language, not written English. Optimise to meet user goals, not sub-tasks. And so on.

I’ve glossed over a lot of ineresting detail, and good stuff. If only they could put up a few corporate blogs and share their cool innovations and work on an everyday basis!

Martin's other tales are told on his Telepocalypse blog.

An interesting panel on design and usability. Most interesting is BJ Fogg sharing his useablity thoughts behind YackPack. This is really a neat application. I'd heard about it but not followed it up in the past. In his case he's actually subscri bed to twenty six packs right now. The interface is very simple. He keep reinforcing taking things out that people aren't using. Basically Yack Pack is a fun method for broadcast audio messaging. Both voice and text are available. Check out the explanatory video. It's intriguing. Here's an example of how to send an audio blast to a group of friends or pack.

It's a great example, with the use of pictures, the simple click, record and send. In many ways not all that different to the voice message feature in Skype. YackPack certainly illustrates where Skype could go with audio / video blasts. There's no reason this couldn't be developed and copied in Skype particularly now that SkypeWeb exists. Is it a priority at Skype? Probably not. Should it be? It's an example of a feature that is "new" thus Skype had the opportunity to innovate in this space and hasn't. When video blasts are restricted to your buddylist "spam" is not a problem. Similarly, additional groups that you might subscribe your SkypeID to would be a value added service. Note that networking groups would probably pay the subscription. Enough said.

Tag : etel

My parents are kleptomaniacs. Just don’t tell them I told you. The garden shed is bursting with stuff. The loft is full of old boxes. The shelves teem with ornaments. (eBay will have a good fiscal quarter the sad day they shuffle off this mortal coil.) And the drawers under the bed are stuffed with toys from our childhood.

Which turns out to be quite useful when you yourself have kids and an endless supply of goodies starts to emerge for free from Nana and Grandad. I’ve been reading this picture book to my older daughter, where a little boy hunts around for his lost pet froggie.

Very cute.

Speaking of which, I think we all know of a very cute voice application that’s currently hiding behind a log and looking a bit lost. Whatever happened to Skype’s mojo? Why wasn’t Skype 2.0’s arrival a case for dancing in the streets?

I can forgive the ringing noise being replaced by an extract from the opera Ode to a Kathmandu Stomach Upset. (Believe me, the full work is quite an experience. I’ve been there.) As a customer, I’m not too fussed whether video is a plug-in or comes out of the box. Tweaks in colour schemes and icons don’t impress me. (I’m male. It’s the way we are. I think my mum is still hoping I’ll notice when they’ve redecorated without having to prompt me first.)

No, what’s important is this. Make it work. And make it easy.

Let’s take the former one first. I bought a Plantronics DSP-400 USB headset a while back. It came “Skype certified” together with a small SkypeOut credit. I’m still happy with it. But it’s also very annoying to use. Because I like to listen to music from my laptop with real, quality headphones. Sometimes I unplug the headset when I move my laptop about, or want to use it on another PC, and Windows takes note and resets my audio devices to point to the built-in stuff. No matter how often I set my preferences in Skype to “Plantronics headset”, it keeps being turned back to Windows default each time I unplug. This is, needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), not a good experience.

It’s a design snafu in Skype. The actual requirement isn’t to select one device from the list, but I should be able to select the preferred order for audio devices it has seen. If the headset is plugged in, use that. Otherwise, revert to the next preference.

My laptop doesn’t have a built-in microphone, and I never plug one into the microphone jack. I should be able to de-select that as an input. Which means anyone calling me when I have no headset plugged in needs to be warned “Martin doesn’t have a microphone plugged in yet”. This case should be handled intelligently.

Perhaps USB headset owners are too small a minority to make this a priority. But then don’t waste your brand karma on declaring it Skype approved.

Another example is the new video chat. I’m pretty convinced that the video degrades the audio quality. My in-laws have low-speed DSL (256k down/128k up). Just audio is fine; add in the video and the sound gets choppy. This is bad, bad, bad. I can guess what’s happening. Skype uses an audio codec supplied by GIPS. The video is probably a separate thing, and not integrated. Asking GIPS to create an integrated codec that prioritises voice to maintain a minimum bit rate will cost Skype Inc mucho dolula. The audio codec API probably doesn’t make it easy to manage the bandwidth use. So we get a kludge, and the “integrated” product isn’t any better than the third-party plugs-ins. It’s more “overlayed” than “integrated”.

Sadly, Skype’s also having a mid-life attack of feeping creaturism. In the rush to add more feature tick-box items, usability and simplicity is being sacrificed. I think I’d find grouping of contact quite useful. But the user interface is just too ugly and obscure. Hint to Skype UI designers: screens are 2-dimensional. There are information architectures other than “list”! (As I’ve whined on previous occasions.)

And why have my SkypeOut contacts suddenly been elevated into the middle of my Skype contacts? This is a case of the product turning against me. Every time you call someone more than once it asks if you want to name and remember that number. Was a useful and harmless feature as long as the list of remembered numbers kept out of sight. But believe me, the UK Passport Office isn’t one of my buddies. And I’ve only just finished successfully suing Expedia in the small claims court after a car rental screw-up last summer. They’re not my friends, either.

I can only imagine the stress and turmoil the development team are going through as the eBay deal sinks in. But these problems smack of leadership issues, where priorities are not clearly being spelled out, and strategic alignment is being lost. If I were in charge right now, the edict would be “no new features!”. Let the API do the work for you. Focus on making what exists even easier. Make every use case or problem be handled ever smarter. The only exception to the rule is anything that integrates eBay merchants and transactions into telephony.

We’ve already got plenty of VoIP tools that kinda work, sort of, as long as you don’t hit any snags or unusual situations. Skype’s positioning is around simplicity, reliability and ease of use. Lose sight of that, and your cute frog will be forever lost.

Martin reads to us from his Telepocalypse weblog.

Would you like to animate your Skype profile? Reallusion has launched CrazyTalk for Skype which enables messaging with facial expressions and character animation. Thus they say making your Skype conversation more amusing and creative. Your friends will have to get CrazyTalk for Skype too to play. It's a free download to get started.

CrazyTalk for Skype is a dynamic animated messaging tool featuring customizable emotive facial animation allowing you to create Skype characters from any photo! It is much more fun than conventional video chatting. Animate Skype with loads of content you can download from the web or create yourself with CrazyTalk Avatar Editor. Share them with your friends whenever you like, using whatever photo you like, animated however you like – to become the face of whoever or whatever you want to be! Reallusion

Overall, this is another smart piece of piggyback marketing on Skype. It creates new value for Skypers interested in having some fun while introducing the "Skype" community to the oppportunities and benefits in animation. To create your own photo animations you will have to trial or purchase CrazyTalk Messenger. More than a few Skypers should know how to use it and get others laughing. Reallusion is offering a "free" CrazyTalk Messenger so you can animate your own photo's in a promotion they are running. Share with your friends and win.

I know some of my readers will ask why would you do this? I really don't have the time. However I can see an animated character taking a voice mail, or providing some other form of info as just a beginning. For the most part the solutions will just be more fun than that. When Skype adds video (real soon) then even more opportunities for sending animated movies may appear.

Reallusion has effectively created an avatar-like program for Skype that goes beyond what's offered on MSN and Yahoo. I'm sure their technology could be worked into anyone of these messenger programs and perhaps that is what they hope to achieve. For the moment Skype's API wins again in leading the way.

I firmly believe one of the things about Skype that is frequently misunderstood is what makes it special. Many media articles tend to focus on the people ("lanky forrin folk") and the product. But what makes Skype unique is really how it is adopted.

A department store sells a unique aggregation of goods. The trousers are the same as in the fashion store next door. The scented candles no better or worse than those from the boutique candle shop. So the products are pretty standard. Likewise, the standard goods were manufactured in standard ways. They are sold in a standard way — just pick one off the shelf, walk up to the counter and lay down your credit card. (This isn't always so — for example, Argos in the UK has its catalogue retail stores where the goods are picked for you from its warehouse while you wait.) The department store is financed in standard ways, marketed using standard techniques.

So it is the distribution of the goods that is what makes a department store special. And the same applies to Skype.

In essence the Skype product feature set has never differed much from instant messaging and open source competitors. At least when viewed as a simple feature 'tick list'. What Skype has done uniquely well, though, is to tailor every part of the product experience for ease of adoption: from investigation to use to recommendation onwards.

This could glibly be dismissed as 'viral marketing', but that doesn't do justice to the depth of their achievement. For the term 'viral marketing' doesn't explain how everything in the web site and product is oriented towards getting people on board with the minimum of obstruction. The term 'viral marketing' merely focuses on the moment of contagation.

To find out how well Skype's doing, you just need to take a look at some of the competition. Let's examine the download experience of AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, and contrast them to that of Skype.

(Apologies in advance for the layout mess of this article; I just don't have the energy to do some fancy CSS to put borders around the images and scale them better.)

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)

First up to the plate is AOL. "Mum, just go to the AOL home page and grab their messenger client, then we can chat for free." Oh, yeah.

AOL, MSN and Yahoo all have a problem from the word 'go'. An a non-US resident, which web site do I go to? The ".com" or the ".co.uk" one? (Skype is notoriously global in outlook.) Let's assume we go the .com route every time. After all, my IP address is trackable to be in the UK, my browser is telling them my preferred language is "en-GB". They've got enough clues.

So let's hunt for the entrance to the rabbit hole:

OK, it's there. It has a nice biggish icon. It just requires you to be telepathic and know that "AIM" is their codeword for their instant messenger. And that "Join AOL" isn't the same thing as, um, joining AOL's IM network. Let's click forth…

Good - a call to action, bang in the middle. But there are some niggling 'buts'. What if I get distracted by their kind offer of a trial of their new client? I'm outside the US (see bottom of screenshot) — do I need to download something different? I don't have a screen name — am I supposed to get one before I download?

So AOL have given you plenty of excuses to abandon you shopping cart.

Next!

Mon dieu! You mean it didn't just start the download? Am I an upgrade or a new user? OK, let's go to 'new user'.

Note the sidebar — AOL are positively inviting you to abandon the download and go sniff around some of their other stuff.

Phew! They want my mother's dog's date of birth before I can download it and try it? Luckily I'm a 102 year-old Swiss woman today.

Um, except Switzerland apparently comes between "Congo" and "Cote D'Ivorie". I guess AOL forgot to pay the license fee for the advanced sort option when they bought in SQL Server. Naturally, "Germany" comes right before "Djibouti", too. I'll bear that in mind. (I couldn't find the UK, anyway.)

Nooooh! It can't be true! But I love you — I want to give you my life story, hold and caress your IM product in my hand! Don't leave me now…

MSN Messenger

So, AOL was an embarassing user experience catastrophe. Can MSN do better? At least the rabbit hole has a sign, even if painted somewhat obscurely:

Click on…

OK, so what do I do now? The top of the screen is animated, and marquees through their key products (Hotmail, Messenger, Spaces) each with their own "learn more" button. So one usability problem is that if it switches just before you click, you get the wrong product.

Anyhow, we wait for "Messenger" to be shown, and click…

Oops! Just takes me right back to the same page, minus the fancy graphics. Maybe they never tested their web site with Firefox?

Let's go back and click on that "MSN Messenger" text link…

Err, where do I go now? What am I supposed to download? Abandon ship, I think.

Yahoo! Messenger

I think our friends from Sunnyvale can do better, don't you?

The good news: a prominent icon, clearly labelled. And you can even tell that it lets you talk!

OK, since the icon didn't set up the expectation of a download starting, they've got to stick an intermediate screen in. Note the lack of clutter and diversions. Download, learn more, nothing else.

Uh oh! Which one should I choose? Is there anything good — or missing — in the UK version? I think I'd get a call from my mum at this point. Remember, a lot of newbies are really afraid of making mistakes.

Cool. Simple download instructions. Although I'm not sure that the idea of saving to your desktop is going to be universally understood.

All in all, high marks to Yahoo!. A force to be reckoned with?

Skype

So, on to the masters of the slick download.

Subtle? No way! But effective, absolutely.

It's good. It tells you what to do without any jargon. I think they can do better, though. I should get instructions perfectly tailored to my browser, not just generic Internet Explorer instructions.

Scores on the doors

You would have thought that by now the traditional IM networks would have got this process down to a fine art. But clearly not. Marketing clutter, technical faults, invitations to abandon ship. These are cumulative. Someone isn't doing their job. (That said, it could be worse. Ask your mother to provision herself with an open SIP softphone and establish a public identity. Ouch!)

There are lots more bits to the Skype adoption puzzle that make it sweetly special. The greater degree of internationalisation. The lack of use of the registry, so it'll install on locked-down corporate laptops. The fact that incoming calls ring, triggering a Pavlovian "answer the call", rather than popping up an obscure dialogue box. And so on.

The only mystery is why Yahoo! is the only one rising to the challenge of out-distributing Skype. AOL were once the kings of distribution, via CD carpet-bomb. Microsoft outran them by bundling with Windows, a superior distribution strategy. Yet neither can get the basics right of a simple download of their most personal, sticky and vital communications tool.

Until the competition starts putting the user front and centre in the experience, and not bizdev marketing deals or internal product marketing struggles, Skype will continue to sweep up new users faster than the opposition.

via Telepocalypse

I'm really unhappy with the information architectures we adopt to display presence information. Many of you will be familiar with the work of Edward Tufte and his innovative displays of multidimensional and fluid data on 2-dimensional static paper.

We need to do better with presence data, because that data is going be become a lot richer. So, inspired by Tufte, let's see what we can do. I'd like to introduce to you my little pet Tod the Tadpole. As you'll see, I was diagnosed with disgraphia horiffica and have the drawing age of a 3 year old. Never mind.

(A friendly wag suggested this should be Simon the Sperm, but as a family blog I'll demur…)

What this does is adds some more dimensions to our presence display. The most obvious one is a temporal history of our availability. In the example, when the tadpole tail is high, you're available, when it's low you're not. The time scale is squeezed up as a log scale; the last minute and last hour might have the same pixel-width; the far end of the tail might be summarising whether you where around at all last week in just a few pixels.

This history is useful. If someone has just got back from vacation, you want to see that. If someone's online all the time, there's no rush to grab them; conversely, if they're rarely online and you see them come on, call them now!

The up-down movement of the tail is smoothed by adding some inertia; coming online doesn't make it zoom straight to the top, but applies a point force that accelerates it in that direction. (I guess some user testing would tell us whether "y", "dy/dx", or "d2y/dx2" is the right vertical scale.)

Day and night are shown too. This is important when buddies might be spread around the world and very mobile. I've drawn it really badly, but twilight and dawn would be light grey, whereas the middle of the night would be a jet black background. Tod is approaching sleepy time. Naturally, the lengths of the day and night phases would reflect your actual daylight at your current latitude.

You might even choose to colour the daytimes with weather-related information from the locale of the person, such as temperature hues or a pattern of raindrops.

The tail might also encode data about the nature of the presence, beyond being online or offline. For example, the red parts could indicate "busy" — i.e. typing, talking or dragging. (Just clicking in a browser might be regarded as the equivalent of being idle!).

Episodes of mobility, where such data is available from the user device or a network operator, could also be displayed, such as by using a dotted line.

Looking into the future, the background might indicate someone's predicted presence status. If their calendar has a meeting shown, add a border for "busy". If they're due to catch a plane, add a border for "away".

The "head" of the tadpole is also presence-enriched. If you're listening to music, a set of headphone appear on your head. Hey, the little sound-marks coming out of your ears could even beat to the music! Roll the mouse over, see what they're listening to. If you're on a phone call, it looks like you're wearing a headset. And so on.

Of course, the head icons would be personalisable for more immediate recognition. After all, they're your avatar. A great service would be one where you could feed in a normal digital photo of yourself, and it would do all the pattern and colour recognition to churn out a race, age and facially structure look-alike (assuming that's what you want!)

Facial expression could also come into it. A huge chunk of our brain is given over to watching faces, and it's not used much in today's presence and telephony. Don't show a clock icon when someone is away — make them look like they're dozing!

Ideally the head would have a contextually appropriate background, such as a stylised version of "home", "office", "car", "out and about" and "abroad". Tricky with a small icon, but possible if you allow a little more screen real estate.

Which brings me to my last point. Take a look at this miniaturised screenshot of Skype.

Yes, it's weeny. This protects the privacy of those careless enough to become my buddies. But more importantly, it lets you see the overall structure rather than the detail.

What do you see? A ton of white space! Is this vertical scrolled list the best possible information architecture for presence data? I think not. Now, I'm not sure what the right one is. You need predictability of location so you can find folks. You need to properly group and sort according to current presence status as well as tribal affiliation (different work, family and friend groups). There's a lot of variables, and an unconstrained space on which to display them. Other people get PhDs doing this stuff.

Why is better presentation of presence data so important? Because the toughest part of a phone call is the rendezvous. We often miss each other, play phone tag, have hurried "can I call you backs" (and don't). We often simply don't make some social calls for fear of calling at a bad time, and eventually relationships with old friends dissolve. Anyone who thinks telephony is just about creating a duplex audio stream isn't looking at the whole problem.

Anyhow, I eagerly await for someone to rise to the challenge. In the meantime, remember Tod the Tadpole next time you accidentally call someone at 4am — who isn't there anyway.

via Telepocolypse