Although I will be kicked out of the web designer community for suggesting this, I think I’ve decided that design doesn’t matter. Well, maybe that’s going too far. But here’s an example.
Earlier this week I was looking to buy a Clive Pig vinyl album from the mid-1980s. A Google search turned up the Last Vestige Music Shop in Albany, New York (just 200 miles up the I-90 from my birthplace of Rochester).
By any measurement, Last Vestige’s website is ugly. You might even say it’s gaudy.
But that didn’t really stop me for a second from making a buying decision. Even the fact that I had to email them my request and wait for them to email back the URL for their secure ordering page didn’t really faze me. The purchase process, from beginning to end, took about 27 hours.
The process was not, in other words, most of the things that e-commerce is supposed to be: quick, easy, well-designed, etc.
But somehow — and I should add here that I as much of a design fascist as the next guy — none of this mattered. Indeed if anything the experience was more fun than the antiseptic process of buying something through Amazon.com.
In the end what mattered most to me was that (a) the process worked and (b) it was evident to me that there were real people at the other end of the transaction.
Isn’t it amazing that I feel a greater personal connection to the people running this obscure record shop in New York than I do to the cyborgs at the local [sic] phone company up the street.
I suppose what I have discovered is not that design doesn’t matter but, in fact, that it does matter: design a system that makes people feel like people, and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s got wonkly typography and a starfield background.

Nancy Franklin writes eloquently in this week’s New Yorker about the new ABC television show What About Joan. The show really is as good as she says it is. It’s actually even a little better (I don’t mind the “Ted baxter character”). Recommended.

Reading below you’ll find a close chronicle of my back and forth with Island Tel today about a networking problem. It takes a lot out of me to deal with this sort of thing — when you depend on the Internet to earn your living, having it not work is sort of like have only occasional access to oxygen.
Midway through the day I went out and had lunch at the Noodle House, which is a weird little restaurant located in amidst the fast flood clutter of University Ave. in Charlottetown.
The funny thing about the Noodle House is that it has what I think is the most attentive and expert customer service I’ve ever seen. I eat there perhaps once every second month on average, and yet I am greeted as a welcome patron whenever I walk in the door. The owner knows that I like to read the paper if I’m eating along, and so The Guardian is always offered to me. She also has my favourites pretty well memorized, and also remembers that I don’t use chop sticks. She also remembers that Catherine likes a particular sort of hot sauce, and does like chop sticks (but not cucumbers).
The table service is friendly but never overbearing, the food is excellent and varied, the prices reasonable. The decor is sort of 1970s Country Style Donuts, but you learn to overlook that with time.
I think the friendly folks at Island Tel should go and eat at the Noodle House. Several times a week. They would learn many good and useful lessons about how to run a business that makes customers feel important and valued.
P.S. Isn’t outsourcing your first tier technical support like outsourcing your restaurant wait staff?

Veseys.com used to rank among the ugliest, most difficult sites to use around (disclaimer: Okeedokee once pitched the site to Vesey’s; we lost out to Marshall Media). I’m happy to see that those plucky folks at silverorange have renovated the site, and the results are quite impressive. The new site is a little too heavily drenched in graphics for my tastes, and the highly-formatted pages have an awkward way of clunking on in, but you can forgive most of that because, hey, they’re selling flower and vegetable seeds, and seeing images is important. Bravo.

…is “An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft.” (from the The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing).

So I talked to UUNet’s technical support line about the router which Island Tel says is blocking traffic from my IP address. They checked the router and confirmed that there is no filtering taking place there. I called back the Island Tel Help Desk and was able to talk to Cindy once more, and relayed this. She insisted that the problem must be on the other end, and suggested I keep calling back UUNet technical support until I could get someone to help me.
So now Island Tel is blaming UUNet and UUNet says it’s not their problem. So there is, it would appear, no solution to the problem.
As Eastlink, in turns out, doesn’t presently offer high-speed service to my area, I’m out of luck and, I suppose, should now move to Boston so as to solve my problem.
Sigh.

Well, I thought things were going to work out better than this, but here’s how it went with Cindy at Island Tel.
For some reason Cindy, who seemed helpful and like she was going to work on the problem until it was solved, passed the file to Tracey. Tracey called me to find out the IP address of my desktop machine, and asked me to release the IP address so they could set up a mirror machine to see what the problem might be.
About 1/2 hour later Tracey phoned me back to announce that (a) the problem was specific to that IP address, and (b) the problem was not Island Tel’s problem, but Alter.net’s problem. She went on to suggest that Alter.net was probably blocking traffic to/from that IP address for some reason… perhaps because of “inappropriate network activity” on my part (which is absurd).
I assumed she would go on to suggest that they could just take that IP address out of commission and get me a fresh clean new one, but she didn’t and when I asked, she said they couldn’t do that because “somebody else would just end up with that IP address and end up with the same problem.”
And that was it.
If I treated my customers like this, I would be out of business. I realize that Island Tel has to make financial decisions about how much or how little they are prepared to go to support their customers. In my case, it’s not far enough. I know that if I was dealing with Kevin at ISN he would hammer away at this until I was a satisfied customer, and not because he’s a friend but because it’s the Right Thing to Do.
How can I convince Island Tel that it’s in their best interests to go just as far with just as much moxy? Or should I even bother?

So now I’m on the phone talking to someone else at the Business High Speed Internet office at Island Tel. She tell me that Watts Communications does the “first tier” technical support for Residential High Speed Internet. I explain to her my current frustrations. I offer to upgrade to the Business product if it will let me talk to a technician. She thinks this doesn’t make sense, as I would be paying more for exactly the same service. She offers to transfer me directly to “second tier” support. So I get to talk to Cindy. Cindy is very capable, obviously understands exactly what the problem is, makes sure she understands all of the details, and tells me that she will call me back in 20 minutes to 1/2 an hour. I no longer feel like a jerk. Cindy even says “this is obviously time-sensitive as you have some work to get done on that server.” This is good.

So I called the Island Tel High Speed Business desk to see if I moved to their Business as opposed to their Residental High Speed Internet product, could I get better technical support.
What I was told, in essence, was the Island Tel has nothing to do with the technical support for Residential High Speed Internet. In fact the guy I talked so said that he had no idea who offered technical support for Residential High Speed Internet.
Apparently, if I sign a three-year contract (although I was told that this is a “meaningless” verbal contract that I could easily get out of), I can get Business High Speed Internet for $59.95 a month. This gives me all sorts of cruft that I don’t need (domain name, etc.), but also apparently lets me talk to actual Island Tel technicians (as opposed to the mystery guys that handle Residential support, that is).
The question is, should I continue to date Island Tel at this point, or look at the Eastlink offering?

So I’m having another problem with my Island Tel Internet. Last time I had problem like this, Island Tel threatened me with legal action for talking about it, but I think they were just frustrated, so I won’t let that bother me.
The current problem is weird: I maintain a server for Yankee Publishing in Boston. I use my Island Tel High Speed Internet to ssh to the server to maintain it. I’ve been doing this with no problems for over a year.
Yesterday at 2:30 p.m., I could no longer reach the Yankee server, and I haven’t been able to since. After contacting Xensei, Yankee’s Quincy, MA-based ISP, it became evident that the problem was on this end: for some reason, the Aliant/Bell/ITAS network was rejecting packets from the ypi.com server.
Weirder still was the fact that only packets directed at my IP address were being rejected. I could get at the server with no problem from other machines on the Island Tel network. Heck, I could even get at the server from another machine plugged into the same DSL-connected hub here in the office.
A simple problem to solve, one would think. Or hope. So I called 1-800-773-2121, the Island Tel technical “support” line. And talked to a guy who, through no fault of his own, could neither understand the problem, nor offer to do anything but “escalate to second level technicians.” They would be back to me “in a couple of days” he said. (this couple of days thing seemed so absurd I ignored it, thinking it was some sort of joke or worst-case-scenario thing).
So last night I naively sat back and rested easy in the notion that the problem was being addressed by the crack second level guys.
Until 8:46 p.m. when I got a call back from the first level guy looking for the IP address of the ypi.com server. He’d forgotten to ask for that.
Or until 11:10 a.m. this morning when I called in again to see how the big escalation was going only to be blown off with a comment that I should just sit tight and be patient.
Or until 11:20 a.m. this morning when another first level guy phoned back to ask for that ypi.com IP address again.
At this point, any goodwill that Island Tel has earned over the last year by providing me with good service is now gone. My overall feeling is that they wish I would go away.
The funny thing is that this is all about attitude, and has little to do with technical issues. I know that the Internet is a complicated jungle to figure out, and I would be naive to think that anyone can make it work all the time. But I also know, from my universally positive experiences with both Xensei and ISN that it’s possible to run an Internet company without making your customers feel like jerks for bothering you.