I rang Telstra to cancel my data pack (see the post here for an explanation). The customer service rep, trying to be helpful and service oriented, asked me if she could ask me a few questions about my account usage to determine if I’m on the right package. I said ‘sure’ and this is what followed…
Business and Strategy, Customer experience, Psychology | Craig Errey | 
May 13, 2007 10:03 am | 
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I’ve talked about my Telstra Next-G service before (here and here) and generally I’m quite happy with it.
The data pack I used while I was away was terrific compared to the dialup I used to use. But you’ll see that there were some usability issues with the messaging provided by Telstra on my usage of the megabyte allowance.
It turns out that it also had a spill over effect on billing, meaning that if I had bought the data pack at any other time during the billing cycle than on the start date, I risked being charged excess usage fees. Read on for why this happened and the argy bargy I had to go through…
Confusable, Customer experience | Craig Errey | 9:31 am | Comments (0)
I was in a cab early on Monday morning this week. We took off and I noticed at the first corner that the meter already had $7 on it, when it should have been about $3.
Like most people, my first thought was ‘bloody cabbie ripping me off’. A thought driven by stereotypes that was circling around in my head making me get more and more annoyed as I watched the meter creep up.
We got to the harbour bridge and I said to the cabbie: ‘Can I ask you something? I noticed that the meter was at $7 when I got in. Why was that?’
Managing for success, Psychology | Craig Errey | 8:19 am | Comments (0)
I was in Toowoomba on Friday and came across this pedestrian crossing…
When you take a closer look, you’ll see that there are no less than 8 signs posted on the left and right and front and back of the crossing advising that ‘Beware – Pedestrians give way to vehicles’.
The crossing has special tiles distinguishing it from the asphalt, which, in Australia, generally means some kind of shared zone between cars and pedestrians where pedestrians usually have right of way.
Is it just me, or would it have been easier to make it a shared zone, where cars must give way (as is the norm)? Clearly, the signs were put up for pedestrian safety. I would think that complying with a standard would be more likely to preserve pedestrian safety.
The crossing should have been a shared zone with pedestrians having right of way – like it is everywhere else.
Confusable | Craig Errey | 7:56 am | Comments (0)
Last week I was a guest in a meeting. Half an hour later, I don’t think a single action or worthwhile thing had taken place.
Notwithstanding the fact that the meeting was run without an agenda, I started thinking about what makes for an effective meeting and how to get the most of them. I thought about the role of an agenda and considered that even with an agenda, the same thing as I saw would have ensued. I even thought about why you would even bother having a meeting since nothing seems to change in the workplace as a result of having one.
Most meetings are run with an agenda, with the view to keep things focussed. They still end up being discussions, albeit generally around the item topic. But nothing really gets done.
It dawned on me that there should be two kinds of meetings (and possibly a third if you’re like me and consider a ‘short’ meeting to always be a good meeting 
):
Keep reading to find out what these are about… Read more »
Managing for success, Psychology | Craig Errey | May 6, 2007 6:08 pm | Comments (0)
In this post, I outline a recent experience in micro managing. As a manager, if you’ve ever experienced the sensation that you can do a better job than your staff, or that your staff don’t seem to spot the obvious or think for themselves, then read on. You’ll be in for a bit of a surprise.
This post shows you how to identify if you’re micro managing people and what to do about it.
Managing for success, Psychology | Craig Errey | 5:05 pm | Comments (0)
The BBC news website reported that UK students are being urged to drop mathematics because it’s too hard.
Apparently, the subject is considered ‘difficult’ and so students are not taking the subject in order to increase their overall A-level scores in order to get into university.
The interesting question is: why is this happening now? Has anything fundamentally changed in the type of mathematics being taught? When I went though high school (in NSW, Australia), I took 3 unit mathematics. for comparison, the entire four unit mathematics curriculum for HSC was taught in the first 1 – 2 months of my University level mathematics course.
Why is that comparison important? If the students dropping maths to get a higher score want to do a science based degree, then they’ll need to do University-level maths. So at some point, they’ll be faced with some ‘hard’ learning to do.
Mathematics is the most fundamental of the sciences. If you’re a reductionist (like me) , or even a soft reductionist, then you’ll know that physics, chemistry, computing and lots of biology reduces to mathematical equations describing natural phenomena.
If you don’t have a good understanding of maths, then how can you expect to have an understnading of the fundamentasl of your discipline.
Mathematics also underpins logic such as inference, deduction, induction, reasoning and critical thinking (these can eseentially be regarded as synonyms).
I think the most important thing for all educational institutions is to examine the passion for mathematics that the teachers themselves have (if they avoid maths, so will their students) and the content of the curriculum and pedagogical methods. there are numerous methods to improve the quality of learning for students. these techniques can improve the performance of students and nothing breeds success like success.
Mathematics (as well as language grammar) is essential for understanding the world around us. You just need to look at the quiz shows and pubs and venues with gaming to see how poor people are at understanding statistics and the odds of winning.
The next time your kids complain about maths, consider how important it is. consider how your own attitudes shape those of your children and take a look at the quality of teaching. As parents, we have considerable responsibility to ensure our children are well equipped – the jobs of the future rely more and more on information, critical reasoning and judgement. Mathematics is critical to develop these skills.
General, Science | Craig Errey | April 28, 2007 7:34 pm | Comments (0)
Word 2007 features a new Zoom tool in the status bar, shown in this snapshot:
I regularly use the zoom tool, especially when viewing multiple documents side-by-side. Often I have two word documents open at around 82% (it’s the zoom value that works best for my screen resolution of 1920×1200 pixels) and another document, like a spreadsheet or project plan.
The tool tip for the zoom level (see the ’90%’ status indicator to the left of the zoom tool) says I can ‘Click to open the Zoom dialog box’.
My question is, why can’t i just type the value directly onto the status? All I would need to do is click on the ’90%’ and type a different zoom level.
This post is the first of many where I make small design suggestions to increase the usability of the applications I regularly use. You might think they are only the ‘little things’, but they all add up.
Usability, User interface design | Craig Errey | April 18, 2007 5:40 pm | Comments (0)
I bought a 500MB datapack for my Next-G account so I could use my handset as a wireless modem while in regional Australia. Imagine my surprise when I got this message from Telstra after 3 days of use:
You have used 80% of your 512000kB included data. Call Telstra on 125111 to upgrade to a data plan with higher MBytes allowance. This is a free text message.
Being pretty good at maths, I knew that after 3 days of usage at around 50-75kbps (Next-G is good in regional areas, but nothing like the 1-2Mbps in metropolitan areas) and the times I had used it that I had probably used 70 – 80MB of data, I knew it was nearly impossible to have used that much data.
I phoned up Telstra, probably costing them the phone call rates and the time of the call centre rep – probably about $10 – $15 (of my money as a shareholder!!). It turns out that I bought the data plan a few days prior to my billing cycle. So Telstra software calculated the pro-rata allowance and determined that in that time i had used 80% of about 20% of the data plan and then sent the text message.
If only they had created a tailored message.
If only they had not done a pro-rata calculation and instead treated the data plan as having its own billing cycle.
No need to make a call. No need to wonder where all the data went. No need to waste my time.
Of course, I suggested to the call centre rep that a change may be warranted. I won’t be holding my breath for that.
A few days later, I got another text message letting me know I had used 108% of my allowance.
No why wouldn’t they text me before I go over the limit? Why wouldn’t they shape my connection speed to avoid the excess charges? I know the error message is wrong in my case – but it’s certainly right for other people.
Confusable | Craig Errey | 11:43 am | Comments (0)
The third post today on usabirritations!!! You can tell I had a bit of a backlog. There’s more to come, but I’ll leave them for another day.
In this screenshot:
You can see I was trying to access a short cut to Documents and Settings. The screenshot shows the error message I got.
What was actually happening? Inspecting the properties for the shortcut showed the following:
Can you see what the problem is? It took me a while to figure it out, but the shortcut actually has no target (folder)!!
Again, the poor error message made it confusing to workout what was going on. If you scan back to it, there are actually three different error messages. The first says the location is not ‘available’ (in the title bar). The second says it is not ‘accessible’. And the third says ‘access is denied’, implying a permission error.
Clearly, the error message should have said that the shortcut has no target, which would correspond to the empty field in the properties panel for the shortcut. The error dialog should also have given me the option to edit or search for the target.
However, the best solution would be for Vista not to have included a shortcut with no target in the first place.
Confusable | Craig Errey | April 17, 2007 10:25 am | Comments (0)
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