Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

I've developed a habit of being at least 6 months behind web 2.0. This is less to do with not knowing what's going on - I have plenty of people around me like Lou, Jennifer and Danny who are on top of all this stuff - but more to do with being willfully ignorant. I've set myself some kind of perverse challenge to distance myself from the very customer experience shifts that are happening all around me and that should figure significantly in my work. I try to convince myself that its like being in a band that's not obviously influenced by others ('we don't listen to other bands, modern music is all crap'), but I suspect its more to do with being over 35 and having no friends, which makes 90% of social networking pretty hard work.

By the time I've signed up for anything, its usually on the sine wave trough of coolness and most subscribers have moved on. It doesn't have to be a social networking site, however. I'm just as good at ignoring subscription and on-demand services - I've never downloaded a free mp3 or a movie in my life - so I thought it might be an informative exercise to check up on the BBC iPlayer to see what that experience might be like. The BBC News site is one of only 5 sites that I will visit every day, and have done for the past 10 years or so, without ever really being disappointed by it, so anything new from them is worth looking into.

Another one of my web experience contradictions is that I rarely use search on a web site to find something on that web site. I'll use google (other search engines are available) to find a site in the first place, but when I'm there, I have endless faith in the usability design and information architecture experts that have invested their time and flexed their minds on trying to understand the customer experience on that site, and the probable customer journeys. Many times I'll get what I want with ease, either because the site is so small, its all there in front of you, or because the design really does support the task I need to accomplish, and what I need to do at each stage is obvious to me. Other times, its just luck, of course, or my task happens to coincide with a press release or feature story. But sometimes I'm confounded, when I don't think I should be.

As I write this, I've just found the iPlayer and signed up for the beta, which will probably expire before they get my request, but it was not an easy find. Even if you don't daily visit the BBC News site, or The Register, or Slashdot or wherever you go, you might have heard about the iPlayer. Its been on the networked TV news many times this last week, so even if you don't know your AIX from your Ubuntu, you probably know its about watching telly on your computer. You might expect that with such a high media profile, it would be obvious where to get it. But it wasn't. I mean, you start at bbc.co.uk alright, but notwithstanding my aversion to site searches, there's nothing on the home page to tell you where to find it. It might be under 'TV'. But it's not. It might be under, erm, 'Entertainment'. But it's not. I'll try a programme and see if there's links from there. Any programme. 'The Real Hustle' looks as good as any. There's links to clips, let's see what happens there - oh, it's the BBC3 player and I don't have Real Player G2. I thought I did. Anyway. Let try going via the News site. Nothing there, hang on, let's try technology news. Aha! An iPlayer story. Quick, go there. There, in the 'Related BBC Links' section are all the iPlayer links I need, including the iPlayer page itself and the press release, neither of which actually contain links to the sign-up page.

As it turns out, the iPlayer page is actually found via Home > About the BBC > TV, radio and online > BBC channels > Television > BBC iPlayer. I can relate to this entirely. We have an About Sun section on sun.com and the sun.com worldwide sites, which was, for a long time, like the foster home for unparented content. In other words, it was the publishing teams, not the business owners, who decided what went in there. 'About Company X' is often the place to start first if you're not really sure, as many loose ends get tied together there. I'm sure I've just missed the home page feature links and stories that get me directly to the iPlayer. I was probably a few months late. If I'd used the site search, I would have got there in a flash, but I was being awkward, so I might just get what I deserved. However, I usually read 'awkward' as 'naive' or 'new'. I've watched my family and other newer internet users exhibit this behaviour. If they can't click to it, they won't get there, and before you say 'A-Z Index', its not in there either.

This isn't really a grumble, its an observation regarding a specific item on a specific site, but it mildly annoyed me on a Monday morning. I'll just add it to the small list of customer experience annoyances in my head. I think finally finding it and then seeing that the logo is a dubious flickresque concoction annoyed me more.

Tunes: Kings of Leon: McFearless

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