The user experience is all about the small details. Some times very small things can affect the experience to such extent that an otherwise brilliant service completely looses its meaning for the user. A good example of this from my own experience is Wifikartan. A service that I found, loved and suddenly stopped using. Let’s take a look at how a small missing feature can make a loyal user to move on.
Wifikartan is only one in a series of services called “Min Karta”, eng. ”my map”, The services is all created by Ted Valentin, an entrepreneur, developer and a well known blogger from Sweden created to find, rate and comment on specific category of places like Sushi restaurants, churches, hotels and other establishments as well as places like beaches and camping sites. The solution is based on the Google map api. All sites are fast, reliable, offers an easy browsing experience and are fun to use.
I got really excited when I found Wifikartan and thought I found the ultimate service. By entering my current location I could instantly get directions to a spot with a free Internet connection with the closest one listed at the top. This proved to come in very handy for me because I like working at coffee shops. I feel very productive, particularly like going to a coffee shop were there is a wlan available and I don’t have to use my own mobile phone to connect the Internet. A common situation in my life is that I have a few minutes to kill before the next meeting or activity and I then need to find a spot large enough to open my lap top to sit down and fit in some work. The mobile version of the site made even more sense. By using it I could find the place exactly when I had the need while being on the move.
The spot page on Wifikartan.se. An easy search field in the header enables the user to enter the current location. A Google map view to the right with the near by spots marked. The details of the spot is shown in the main column along with the users ratings, comments and uploaded images.
I started to rate the places I found through the service and uploaded photos and found it a lot of fun. Whenever I hade some white space in my daily plan a set out to find a new place and a was very active for a few months. However, suddenly I started to get annoyed by the service. From time to time the offered access in a place was temporary out of order or it was not free. Sometimes I got even more disappointed when a place that was listed didn’t offer any connection to the internet at all. Whenever this happened I felt misled and got frustrated that I had spent the time to use the service and ended up at a place that didn’t live up to the expectations.
I learned to read the comments more carefully. Sometimes other users had presented their complaints about a malfunctioning or missing connection and by studying the comments I could avoid some of the places. At one time I ended up at three different places recommended by the site without connection on the same day and by then I finally stopped using the service all together.
On my personal page you will find my last comments where I express my frustration of beeing guided to a spot by the site, and not finding a wlan at all or beeing asked to pay 8€ per hour to use it.
The interesting question from a usability point of view is how this is possible. If Wifikartan is all about spots with a free Internet access, why are places without an Internet connection showing up at the first place? Why are the users not allowed to report a malfunctioning connection in a way that and make this information clearly visible to other users?
It turns out that the critical feature that could solve this problem is missing. There is no field in the comment and ratings dialog to report if the connection is temporarily unavailable or not available at all. As a matter of fact, a status indicator of this information is not available in the search result and spot detail page either. The users are by design refrained from sharing this information. From a usability perspective the site is there for simply badly designed. The other maps from the “My karta”-services does not suffer from this problem, at least not in the same extent. A sushi parlor does not temporarily stop serving sushi in the same way a wireless connection has its mood swings. All Internet connections suffer some down time. But while the connection is temporarily down the first user of the Wifikartan, should be able to report this so that other user wouldn’t fall in the same trap.
The other problem the mobile user faces finding electric sockets when the batteries are low. Some places that offer wireless lan does not offer any sockets from their tables because they don’t want the customers to hang around too long. This is a drag when both you and your electronic companions feel exhausted and need refreshments. It would therefore be great when choosing a place to get information about the sockets availability of the establishment in question as well.
From an interaction designer as myself the suggestion to Ted Valentin is to add two fields to the ratings dialog in the service:
- The connection quality — were the users can add mark a connection as temporary unavailable, or not present and one for the outlet policy. If a spot is marked with no connection the administrators of the site have an easy way of knowing which places to remove from the site completely.
- The electric socket policy – The users can describe if the place offers any electric sockets and if they do, were they are located.
Furthermore, if a place that no longer offer a free Internet connection, and therefore are removed from the site, decides to reinstall it or stop charging for it there ought to be a way for users to reinstate it and start to rate it right away.
From an effect management perspective one of the most critical part of any site, is that the users feel that they are always able to get access to updated and correct information. If they find out that the information is wrong they are often willing to make an effort to correct it. One of the goals for users of user generated knowledge bases like Wifikartan, Wikipedia, IMDB or other such service strive to become big heroes in a small niche. To get attention from fellow users is the inner emotional driving force behind the interaction and make this services go round. To aggravate or prevent users from providing their input or not giving them credit for doing so will eventually lead to discouraged and lost users.
/ Mårten Angner
Hi Mårten!
I have been meaning to write and answer for quite a while. Here it is!
To begin with, thanks for a great post. I really appreciate such good and well articulated feedback.
As you know, Wifikartan.se part of a network of websites. I’ve been trying to keep the sites as simple and similiar as possible. Simplicity has been my guiding principle. Therefore I have avoided adding features to the site that make them different from each other.
Wifi-spots, restaurants, beaches, churches etc can all be reviewed along a bunch of different critieria. Signal strenght (for wifi), parking spots (for restaurants), dangerous water currents (for beaches), priest quality (for churches) etc etc. It goes on and on. My thought as been: If you want to review these things the best way to do it in text. So if you think a priest is talking to loud, you just write so. If you think there are too many kids on a beach, you write so. If you think there are too few electical sockets at a wifi-spots, you write so :)
True, in order to find the best place to go to, you will have to read the other reviews. There is no “aggregate function” for these things, but if you read the reviews you will quite quicky realize which wifi-spots are good and which are bad.
When it comes to the ability to remove a place from the website: That actually exists already. If you click the link “update info about this place” you can put a tick in the box “this place has closed”. Or you can write a short note saying that the place has closed.
This, however, is obviously not communicated well enough. If you didn’t realize that, then probably very few people do. :)
I will try to look at that shortly, making that functionality easier to spot.
In the meantime, I’m monitoring all the reviews, and if someone writes that a place has closed or uhnplugged their connection, I remove it manually. :)
The biggest “problem” though, is very few of the users contribute. A lot of people read the reviews, but quite few write reviews of their own. The more people that actively contribute to the site, the better it will become, for everyone.
Therefore you are a very important user, and I hope to see you back. :)
Ted