The online ramblings of Dylan Bland

Can somebody please explain to me why it’s ok to club a seal to death?

Canada’s annual seal hunt is now underway with the Canadian Government promising “more humane killing methods” that require hunters to check an animal’s pupils and to slit its main arteries if there are any signs of life, after clubbing or shooting a seal.

Um, is this really any better? Sure, it’s better than skinning them alive, which apparently used to happen, but if the seals *really* must be killed in the first place, then clubbing them to death (if they’re lucky) should not be allowed. What’s wrong with a bullet? Too expensive? Please. Just look at where the fur ends up and then tell me if it’s too expensive.

Watch this video (not for the faint hearted) and see for yourself the result of this barbaric practice. As a species I honestly thought we were better than this. I’m ashamed. It makes me sick.

Email the Canadian Prime Minister

Earlier this year Trade Me did an overhaul of Travelbug to incorporate a new “last minute deals” feature, and at the same time fixed some small usability glitches that appeared in version 1.0.

I’d really like to see Travelbug succeed, as chances are I will someday use the site to research and book a holiday, so in this review I’ll offer up my thoughts on how I think things could be made even better.

First up I’d like to see a better use of the reviews. To me, this is what will encourage me to choose Travelbug over competitors such as wotif.com and ratestogo.com both of which have a good range of discounted New Zealand accommodation despite being based offshore. Easy ways to elevate the status of the reviews would be to include “sort by most reviewed” and “sort by highest rated” in the sort drop downs. Currently the site only offers “sort by highest price” “sort by lowest price” “sort by name” and “sort by Bugrank” (appears to be a mystery value and not related to reviews).

I’d also like to see stronger invitations for casual browsers of the site to place reviews. Unfortunately I’ve not yet booked through the site, so I’m not sure if Travelbug emails to invite you to add a review once your stay is over. I hope it does. But they could still actively promote placing reviews, and even provide incentives for good quality write ups. This will add up over time to make the site a whole lot more useful as a research tool.

Now I’ll move onto the more intense and geeky part of this review and offer up an alternative to the current layout that should offer significant usability benefits.

When I go to the Internet to book accommodation, there are three key pieces of information that I need to tell the site so that it can offer up the right places for me to stay. When, where and how much? For example, April 3 – April 7, Wellington and $150-$200 per night. Providing this information should allow the site to generate a list of accommodation options, from which I should be able to sort the list by things such as “most reviewed” “highest price” etc as described above.

I believe the current design is confusing in the way that it goes about getting this information. If you look at the screenshot you’ll notice that the date selector and the region selector are both way off to the left, thus appearing to have no influence over the list of results. The fancy price selector is where it should be, in the middle of the page, along with some less-than-useful filters such as “hotels” “motels” “serviced apartments” etc.

Trade Me’s current design

Shane and I spent a bit of time at work today reorganising the page to try and fix some of the problems I’ve pointed out in this review. This is a quick hack and certainly no work of art, but I think that the changes are effective. First up, the filters (when, where and how much) are grouped together directly above the results. This makes it easier for the user to understand what they’re looking at, while at the same time making it easier to apply new filters. We’ve also added in “most reviewed” to the sort drop down so it’s nice and easy to find places with lots of reviews (handy if you have no idea where to stay). We’ve also included a “star rating” and a “review count” in a small font beside the listing title to highlight the listings with reviews.

Our redesign

Finally, we added counts to the “Last minute deals” tab above the filter box. On Travelbug, “Last minute deals” offers discounts on accommodation if you book a stay within the next 28 days. Without the counts, it becomes misleading if you’re searching for dates way into the future, as it’s impossible for there to be any last minute deals on dates further than 28 days away. Adding a count, even if it just sits at zero, sets the right expectation for the user and doesn’t provoke a click that’s just going to take them to an empty page.

As I said before, the purpose of this review was not to criticize Trade Me’s efforts, rather it was to offer up some possible alternatives they may not have considered. But hey, this is just one person’s opinion and Trade Me may well disagree with me!

If you’re in the difficult business of web design and laying out pages, I hope that some of the issues I’ve discussed prove useful to you. We’ve learned a lot about this stuff the hard way, and hopefully some day soon we’ll have the time to fix some of the glaring usability problems in our own sites!

I’ve often wondered if it were possible for some of the great minds in advertising to come together and create campaigns to get people thinking about some commonly held ideas, beliefs and practices that cause pain and suffering throughout society.

It seems wrong to me that billions of dollars is spent every year persuading people to buy such useless things as a particular brand of tooth paste or washing powder, but that the same money isn’t spent challenging ideas and beliefs that are causing pain and suffering throughout the world. It seems like such an incredible waste of talent.

Campaigns such as Like Minds and Positive Women are a step in the right direction (and should be applauded), but they’re few and far between and tend to be born out of Government Departments, no doubt after years of lobbying and paper pushing.

What I’m talking about is short simple ads that are designed to do nothing more than get people thinking. I’ve seen some great stuff on YouTube that I’d love to see stripped down and shown on prime time television, such as this one on homophobia, this on animal cruelty and this on what we teach our children.

Can we lift issues such as this above the media noise and grab the attention of everyday people? I think we can; all it really needs is commitment from some of the best minds in advertising to donate a few hours of their time each month to dream up some thought provoking material, and then someone with access to a bit of money to help fund production and book the inventory. I wonder if some of New Zealand’s biggest media providers (TVNZ, TV3, APN, Fairfax etc) may even come to the party and donate unsold inventory. Who knows.

I also wonder if an idea such as this could be trialled on the Internet using cheap-to-make banner ads, linking to web sites and YouTube videos. If anybody reading this thinks they could help to get something like this off the ground, whether it be money, contacts or know-how, I’d really love to hear from you.

If you’re living in New Zealand and you’re lucky enough to own an iPhone check out Kiwi-ise for some great fixes and upgrades designed specially for the local market. My favourites include the caller ID fix and the new map icon for the home screen. I’ve also noticed that I now receive voicemail notifications, although I’m not sure if this is a change at Vodafone’s end or a result of installing these updates.

I’ve also successfully updated my iPhone’s firmware from 1.1.1 to 1.1.4 thanks to iPlus. To upgade, just follow these easy steps:

1. Upgrade to the latest version of iTunes
2. Use iTunes to back up your contacts, photos etc
3. Download iPlus
4. Click “restore” in iTunes to upgrade to 1.1.4 (this will LOCK your iPhone)
5. Run iPlus using the Windows command prompt to unlock your iPhone

The latest firmware gets you some great new features including sending SMS messages to multiple people in your address book plus the ability to reorder the icons on your home screen. Great stuff!

With 2008 being an election year, I’ve started thinking again about the thing I hate most about democracy: you only get one vote.

With your one vote cast once every three years, you have to consider the hundreds of policies offered up by each political party, and then pick the one party you like the best.

Love Labour’s non-aggressive foreign policy but dislike how much money is spent at home on social welfare?
Or perhaps you love the Green’s stance on the environment but wonder how the economy would hold up if they controlled the cheque book?

At the end of the day, each of us has to choose which issues are most important to us personally (and oftentimes they wont be the ones that are debated in the media) and then vote accordingly. The stink part is that in casting our one vote, chances are we’ll also be passively supporting policies that we don’t actually agree with.

Is there a better way? More referendums could work. Split the issues up and let us vote on them individually. Of course, this would require the media to stop watering everything down to a headline or a sound bite so that we can be accurately informed of the issues. It would also require each of us to invest more time caring and thinking about politics. Voting without giving proper thought to the proper information would be a mistake.

Is it any surprise there is so much political apathy in New Zealand today when as voters we’re only allowed one vote once every three years? I’m not saying that referendums are necessarily the answer, but surely there must be a better way?

Following on from my previous post on communication anxiety, another thing that I’ve noticed is how people often choose the wrong medium to communicate.

TXT messages along the lines of “how are you” can quickly lead to a dozen messages, each taking several minutes to compose, when a quick telephone call could have done the job and cheaper too! Another pet peeve I have is when people call on the phone asking for specific pieces of information. “What’s your street address?” followed shortly by “how do you spell that.” Send me an email.

Here’s what works for me:

• TXT – for short pieces of information that require a single reply max. E.g. “Still on for dinner @ 7PM?”
• Email – for information where accuracy is important. E.g. Facts and figures, articulating complex ideas. Appointment times.
• Phone – for conversations. Doing this over email sucks and clutters your inbox.

Of course there’s always exceptions, but in today’s world where there are dozens of communication mediums available, choosing the best way to speak to one another can save a lot of time and prevent a lot of avoidable frustration!

It seems that our new site happysheep is a victim in the YahooXtra SPAM filter botch up that is preventing New Zealanders up and down the country from receiving opt-in email.

Any email sent to an Xtra email address that includes “http://www.happysheep.co.nz” in the subject or body will be automatically filtered to SPAM, regardless of the address or server that the email is sent from. It doesn’t matter if we send email from one of our mail servers, someone else’s mail server, gmail…whatever…it just wont go through.

This is causing us all sorts of problems. We cant contact our existing customers (Zillion, nzflatmates, GP Store) to tell them about happysheep, and those that somehow manage to sign up on their own accord don’t even receive their activation email. Clearly this doesn’t help the early growth of our site. Very frustrating.

We visited the Xtra web site to try and find a solution to the problem, but were quickly redirected offshore to Yahoo, who incidentally now host email for Xtra customers. We found a Yahoo email address we could contact regarding problems such as this, and promptly sent an email alerting them to what was going on. We received an auto-reply asking for more information. We painstakingly documented answers to their questions, a process that took around an hour. This was sent off to Yahoo on Thursday but haven’t received a reply, and we’re not the only ones…

“Xtra has also advised O’Brien that Telecom has no direct influence on Yahoo’s anti-spam policy, and referred him to Yahoo’s html help page. O’Brien has contacted Yahoo but has had no reply.” Read more

I think it’s crap that New Zealand’s largest ISP can outsource such a critical part of their business to a huge overseas company and then provide no local support. Wake up Xtra, ensuring your customers receive the email they’re asking for is kinda important, don’t you think?

Recent news that Domino’s has introduced online ordering will no doubt be of interest to geeks up and down the country.

Peter Jones, Domino’s New Zealand General Manager, calls the new site “state-of-the-art” but I’m not so sure.

For starters, the site requires that you enter your name, phone number and street address before you can check out their pizzas. Talk about burying your best content. Amazon.com doesn’t ask for your address before you browse books. What’s the difference?

Peter goes on to say “It’s a unique system because the customer can see in real time what stage of the process their order is at, such as making, cooking and leaving the store with the driver.”

Erm, guys, this information just isn’t useful. Tracking a courier parcel across town I understand, but do we need to know exactly when a pizza has progressed from “making” to “cooking”? Trust me, with YouTube, Facebook etc people who use the Internet just aren’t that bored.

Hell on the other hand does it all right. They answer the question that’s on your mind when you order: I’m hungry, how long until I can fill my belly? On Hell they give you estimated delivery times right bang in the middle of the home page, where it should be. You can browse pizzas on offer without signing up, and the site isn’t dominated with company info and franchising opportunities. It’s even fun to use, an important ingredient if you want people to recommend you to their friends.

I believe that good web design is all about putting yourself in the shoes of your customer/user/reader and making it super-easy for them to achieve the primary goals. That means letting me browse delicious Pizza, not employment and franchising opportunities.

Sorry Domino’s, you fail. I think I’ll stick to Hell.

Interacting with people is one of my favourite things, but more and more I find myself overwhelmed by the growing number of communication mediums.

Home phone, work phone, mobile phone, TXT messages, MSN, Skype, email (four addresses and counting), Zillion PMs, Facebook, carrier pigeon…the list is growing by the day. Is it possible in that in the 21st Century we’re just too available?

Over the past couple of days I’ve become mindful of the fact that my constant state of “availability” is causing me anxiety. I bring my phone with me everywhere, and nine times out of 10 check it immediate if I receive a TXT message. It’s the same when I’m at the computer and I receive an email. I reckon it’s an actual addiction.

I’m ashamed to say that this behaviour is stopping me from getting things done, and worse still, is stopping me from *being* with the people I’m actually with at the time. I’m allowing myself to be interrupted and it’s not fair to those around me.

Now that I’ve noticed this I’m confident I’ll be able to do something about it. From now on I plan to leave my phone on silent more often, and try to only check my email at specific times of the day. You never know, I may even learn to turn my phone off at night when I go to sleep. That would be a first, seriously.

Being the geek that I am I couldn’t help but treat myself to an iPhone for my birthday in December. Three months on the novelty is starting to wear off and I’m finally able to offer an objective rundown on the pros and cons.

Pros

• The super-sexy styling never gets old
• Threaded SMS conversations rock
• Email on-the-go frees you from needing to “get back to the office”
• Surfing the web while you’re waiting for your coffee is awesome
• Unlocked correctly, it works perfectly on the Vodafone network

Cons

• It freezes and crashes all the time
• The reception is terrible
• It hurts to hold it up to your ear for more than 5 minutes
• The virtual keyboard is extremely difficult to use if you’re in a hurry
• Doesn’t support PXT
• It attracts too much attention. Your SMS conversations and photos are fair game.

Do I regret buying one? Hell no. Want one? Place a free listing on happysheep and you could have one on us!