More thoughts on eBusiness in the UK

Last week I wrote about eBusiness in the UK and found myself stating that the education system was to blame. It may seem quite a conclusion, and substantiating that in a blog post would be quite a feat. So today I’ve decided to go back to the original statement and look at the symptoms, in search for something a bit more manageable that a bold resolve to change the country’s schools. In this post, I’ll start describing the problem as I perceive it. I’m going to talk about user experience, and I’m going to talk about a couple of people that get it right, and a few that don’t. Other posts will follow, where I shall try to suggest what do these organizations have in common, and what they may try to do to sort themselves out.

eBusiness infrastructure and User eXperience (UX) in the UK is not on par with its economic importance and the advanced adoption of those services by UK consumers. That much is a fact. Websites are frequently slow or down, pages are often broken and browser compatibility with anything but the latest version of Internet Explorer is rare. Accessibility is seen as an expensive luxury which is often neglected and the user experience ranges from rigid at best to utterly frustrating at worst. Some honorable exceptions exist, from Expedia -a US company running US code on US servers and run by expatriate US managers- to Last.fm -a true Web 2.0 pioneer. But these are rare among a rather uninspiring field including almost all of the country’s top online brands.

Examples abound: First Direct is my favorite whipping boy. The UK’s most recommended bank they may be, but their insistence on having their main interface pop up means browser compatibility is tricky at best, and with their choice that it must be resized to be tiny people are forced to work on a stamp-sized window, no matter how large their flat screen monitor may be. A great example of everyone getting the lowest common denominator experience. Or as I may call it, lack of trying on their side.
They don’t stop there: they actually hand over the totality of their homepage’s content to a third party (TouchClarity), who claim to be able to dynamically place in it content targeted to each visitor, but fail to mention that no content is actually displayed unless such visitors happen to have the right settings active on their browser. These settings are common, but by no means unique. The rest get nothing at all. A blank page with a tiny link that pops up a tiny login window, and a sentence claiming copyright.
First Direct are not alone. Tesco’s groceries website is not fully functional with Firefox. That’s 14{acc93bc4c50d705b6582df8463c6e78eab363e734bea58beb26f7f541e3e6037} of people on the last count. That’s the same company that proudly lists how many different types of trolleys they have -so as to cater for customer choice, apparently. Can you imagine them turning away 14{acc93bc4c50d705b6582df8463c6e78eab363e734bea58beb26f7f541e3e6037} of their customers because of their choice of car make? They don’t seem to have a problem online.

By themselves, each one of these failures don’t seem to amount to much. Typically, they will be looked at by someone managing an outsourced IT team, marked as category 3 bugs and requested the business to note them as known issues that require no immediate fix. For this, some guy who knows his technology has probably spent considerable time producing a suitably obscure document describing the complexity involved in finding a fix for this, stating that workarounds can be found by those technically inclined, and recommending a decision not to act.

Are the IT guys evil? Are managers clueless? Are customers powerless? All this and more on the next episode of eBusiness in the UK