Marks and Spencer and the Inverse of Service

I’ve mentioned the book The Thank You Economy before. If you are in the business of providing things for other people you should read it. One of the central tenets of the text is that you should regard a failure on your part as a chance to show just how good you are in “failure mode”. The idea is that if you shine in this aspect of the business then you can create your own evangelists. At the very least you will prevent people from moaning about you in blog posts.

Marks and Spencer have not read this book. Or at least the lady serving us today hadn’t. We were returning something that had broken. And we were told that “Because it is part of a two part set we have both parts so that it can go back to the suppliers”. Now, from a Marks and Spencer business process point of view this probably makes sense. But from a “Customer with a broken thing point of view” it sucks. It meant that we had to go home, find the other bit, and come back again.

I hate it when people try to make their problems my problems. It is not my problem if someone sells me something that subsequently breaks. It up to them to fix it. If they immediately try to bat the issue back to me I reckon this is wrong. In the end of course, being British, we meekly went away to find the other part, but if I’d been on my own, without the civilising influence of number one wife, and there hadn’t been a queue of people waiting behind us, I think I would have had a go at getting a happier outcome there and then.

The item in question was not expensive and there are much worse things that can happen to you than having a dodgy customer service experience. However, the thing that most upset me was the sense of an opportunity being missed. Rather than making happy customers (who they presumably want to come back some time in the future) they have made us a bit less inclined to shop there and look somewhere else next time.

Windows 8 Camp at Hull

On June the 6th we are having a Windows 8 Camp at Hull. The aim is to get students building Windows 8 applications and to help this along Microsoft are going to come up to see us and get things started. If anyone at Hull fancies getting involved then they can sign up for here:

http://hullwindows8.eventbrite.com/

The format will be the same as the Windows Phone Camp earlier this year, and there will be pizza…

Along with the event Microsoft will also be selecting applications and games produced by students to be fast-tracked into the Windows 8 Marketplace. Places for this are strictly limited and each proposal will be assessed individually. If you want to get involved with this, step one is to join the Windows 8 developers Linkedin Group for UK developers http://linkd.in/ukw8apps. If you are a student and you aren’t on Linkedin you should be. Once you have signed up and joined the group you can start putting together ideas for a Windows 8 program to pitch.

Samsung Series 7 Slate Rocks

I blame Black Marble. A week or so ago Robert (Boss) Hogg and Steve Spencer from the company came over to see us and give a presentation on professional software development. Very good it was too. As we were chatting at the end of the session the conversation turned to tablets. I mentioned the Samsung Series 7 Slate that I fancied and Boss said “Oh, we have a few of those. Found a very good price on the internets and Samsung are doing a “VAT back” offer that makes them even cheaper”.

And that was me sold. I had to sell some cameras and lenses to get there, but for a price slightly higher than a fully loaded iPad I’ve now got a really proper portable tablet. It has an i5 processor and 4G of ram, which makes it the second fastest machine I own. The only slight snag is that it has a small-ish 64G internal SSD, but since I’ve been using Live Mesh and Dropbox to store my data I’m used to making do with carrying fairly small amounts of data around with me. At the moment I’ve got pretty much all the software I need loaded up along with data and I’ve still got over 20G left. If I want to take some movies with me I can put them onto a micro SD card and pop them in the slot on the top. I can also be very confident it will play anything without conversion because at the end of the day its a PC.

One standout feature is the Wacom pen support. There is multi-touch of course, but I can also write on the screen surface with a digitiser pen. I can’t really put into words how good this is. The OneNote program, which I’ve always liked but never had the right platform for, suddenly comes alive. I can convert my dodgy handwriting into text and search it, and put my documents into Skydrive for instant sharing. Taking notes in meetings will never be the same.

The tablet also comes with a docking station which gives me HDMI video out and a second USB port (could really do with more). I’ve got at least four hours of use out of my first charge of the battery.

Last night I put Windows 8 on it, following the instructions on the Samsung Windows 8 Preview site. The only really scary bit was deleting every partition on the disk so that I could get the installer to complete, but after that everything went well. And it just works.

I love my iPad, but I hate using it to create anything larger than an email. The Samsung gives me a touchy interface that makes it easy to consume data, plus raw power and a productive environment and all my familiar tools. And a fantastic pen based interface. This and Photoshop would be awesome.

This machine has even replaced the twisty tablet in my affections. I reckon this is a little slice of the future and when Windows 8 launches and these become the norm there is going to be a second wave of tablets coming along, but these will be properly useful.

One note of mild warning: There has been a bit of kerfuffle about problems with the screen glass coming away from the bezel. Some people have had problems with this, particularly with early versions of the hardware. Mine doesn’t look like it is prone to this and the rate of reports of the problem are dying down a bit at the moment. It is hard to make things this small and slim without there being some manufacturing issues. I remember that my first iPhone 3g wasn’t exactly well stuck together, with an overlap on one edge that made the sides not quite flat, but it worked fine for the time that I had it. However, if you are buying one second hand I’d advise that you take a careful look at what you are getting.

Hull Programme and Module Catalogue

Here’s a trick, if you want to take a look at what we teach at Hull and how our courses fit together you can take a look at the university module catalogue here.

https://www.courses.hull.ac.uk/

You can search by course code or department and get the learning outcomes and assessment mechanisms for all our modules.

Think of the User

I’ve jut spent the day in the programming labs looking at first year work. When I go to bed I will not be counting sheep, but Sweepy Cleaner games and Bank applications.

Some of the work was astonishingly good. One thing I did notice though was quite often the applications (I’m thinking mainly bank here) were a bit hard to use. Sometimes to achieve an action you had to move to a menu, type something in, press a button, click a confirm dialog and then click another dialog to acknowledge a message that you’d done the task. I often made the point that if there were 1,000 bank accounts to be entered these actions would add up pretty quickly and lead to a bunch of very unhappy users.

If you are making anything with a user interface you must show it to some users. Saying “I did it this way because I thought it would work the best” is not really a recipe for success. Getting someone to use it, or using it yourself for a few transactions will quickly bring home whether or not an application is easy to use.