Making a NZ long cycleway

March 30, 2009 at 8:36 am In Life, Rants, No Comments

I may have told you, I am cycling the length of New Zealand. Yeah, cool aye? People do ask me, and quite a lot, “why the hell are you doing that?”. They probably ask me that for a couple of reasons, but mainly because they are use to the sedentary, overweight version of me who in recent history is mostly remembered as “that guy who does stuff with computers”. I also get asked “is it because of John Key’s idea for a cycleway” which is usually followed by “you do know its not built yet?”

Here is why. Are you paying attention now? Oh good.

Towards the end of ‘08 I listened to a lot of people feeling a bit down and out about things. The world economy was making everyone think about how bad things were going to get for them, and no one seemed to have any positive ideas. I didn’t have any really ground shaking positive ideas either, but I saw the road ahead as a bit of a challenge, and even started throwing one or two ideas around. I was also looking at myself and seeing someone who needed to change what they were doing in order to move forward. I literally just wanted to get off my arse and do something. So I decided quietly, after a few glasses of wine on New Years Eve, that I would do just that. I would remove my arse from the desk chair it usually inhabits and put it on a bike. Why? Because. Because it is doing something.

I don’t seriously think riding a bike the length of the country is a really good way to turn things around for the country but it would at least change me. And who knows what might happen.

Since then I have been called mad, been labelled “mid-life crisisee”, and been flagged for failure by a few. Then John Key announced his idea for the NZ long cycleway, and the knockers quietened down a little. Now I am three weeks away from my first day of full on pedalling and making my own cycleway.

So why am I doing it. For inspiration, for me and others. For fun and to get away from my computer. To meet interesting people and to change things for me. I will probably have a bit of time to think about things too, and we have a few great ideas we are tinkering away at in the Voom Studio office so I will get a lot of quality time to think about them. We are developing a great SaaS product that we will be launching by years end and we are currently taking a whole day a week out of client work to build something new and exciting because it is an investment in the future and now is the best time to do just that.

You see, we can either give up and go hide under a rock, or we can get off our arses and do something new.

So that is why. And chances are I might be passing through a town or city near you during April and May. If you are keen for a catch up and chew the fat a little, I might have some free time on my hands, so drop me a line via email, visit http://nzuphill.8degrees.co.nz or Twitter @rowsell. And hey, if you have a bike I would enjoy some company for a kilometre or ten.

Why is it so hard to pay the govt online?

March 18, 2009 at 8:44 am In Getting Things Done, Rants, e-commerce, 3 Comments

I had a morning of sorting out bills, cause I really really needed to pay my car registration. I failed. Here is why.

First of all I went to https://transact.landtransport.govt.nz/

I selected the option to relicense my vehicle.

I complete the 3 step process of entering details and paying, and then after the “processing your payment, please wait” bit on the credit card payment screen (payment screens hosted by Westpac and Dialect). BAM I got this.

Note in the top right hand corner:

There is no merchant name. Comforting.

Also the broken nature of this page in general, with the text all over the place and strange red “x”s. This is a payment page for a friken government department! Hosted by Westpac! This gives me the heebeegeebees to be quite honest. So I tried it again, and got the same obscure error, and so I rang the call centre, to:

1. tell them they have a problem
2. check to make sure I haven’t paid twice for my car reg
3. pay for my car reg.

I get hold of Jane in the call centre but she cant help me because I can not answer the 10th identity question. I have established who I am, the car rego, date of birth, and trying to establish my address, but I am not giving the correct address, so she cant help. I have got the house number correct, I have the street correct, RD1 okay, post code is correct, but they don’t have Kerikeri as my town. So Jane wont help me. “Do you get your mail?” she asks.

So I have to play Guess-the-address to figure out what town or city they have on record. After a few minutes, I guess Northland. Horray, Jane can help me now as I am obviously not an identity criminal trying to pay for someone else’s car reg.

Phew, so I proceed to tell Jane about the problem they are having with their payment page. She checks to see if the payment has gone through, and luckily it hasn’t. But the broken payment screen seems to be my problem, not their problem, so I get to talk to a supervisor, and give him the run down on what is broken on their site. At this point I have resigned to the fact that I am going to have to go to the post office to sort my registration, so I am only still on the phone trying to help them out, as a tax payer I would like Land Transport to efficiently collect the taxes. I even have screen shots of the error pages, but no one wants them. “Do you have cookies enabled?” Yes I have cookies enabled. “You didn’t take too long entering in the details?” No!

“Can I email you the screen shots of the error page?” I ask

“Hmmmmm, no. Are you using Internet Explorer?”

“No I am on a Mac and using Firefox”

“Ahh. Sorry you can’t pay online with Firefox, we only support Internet Explorer 6 and above” WTF!

So here is what is wrong with that:

1. Internet Explorer 6 is 8 years old. It is good supporting legacy browsers (cause that is what IE6 is), but only supporting IE or better?
2. Internet Explorer accounts for 67.40% of the user share of browsers today, that means everything else is 32.60%. That is a third of all users that are not supported.
3. Internet Explorer is trending down in the browser stats. In the third quarter of 2008 IE was 72.22%, so it has dropped a total market share of 4.8% in six months, and like I said, this is a clear trend so it will keep dropping.
4. If you are only going to support only one browser TELL THE USER AT THE START of the process. Why let the user go through steps 1 through 3 at all. You can easily detect the browser in use, and alert the user that they need to downgrade their browser in order to pay online.

So if this is true, then Land Transport and Westpac are failing at an epic level. I hope it is not true, and I hope Dialect are just having a bad payment processing day and just need to sort out their error messages. But there seems to still be a lot of online services that only support IE, and Wespac themselves seem to be a big fan of it. I can’t use their corporate online without IE. I think it is time some of these online services take a look at how they are not transacting online.

Oh well off to the post office.

UPDATE:

@benkepes tells me via twitter he earlier this week paid for his reg using Firefox. So why does the call centre tell people only IE is supported? Perhaps it is the standard “you are using a browser and computer we dont understand” escape hatch?

UPDATE #2:

Well on return from a very nice stroll to the post office, I find an email from info@nzta.govt.nz

<snip>

I also note you called our Contact Centre today regarding the online problems you were experiencing and were advised that Firefox is not currently supported by the Transaction Centre or POLi payment. I can confirm this information is correct.

Regards

Contact Response Team

So the policy is to not support Firefox. However I am getting mixed info from people some saying that they can pay online with non-IE browsers, and some can not (perhaps a Mac flavour vs PC flavour thing), however it is obviously policy not to support Firefox at least, but it may not prevent some things being “technically” achieved, if you are lucky.

I have also been reminded by a few people of the horrible online toll payment system (also LTNZ) where to pay by internet banking(?), you need IE and an ActiveX control (note: this is just internet banking, not credit card processing. You can pay by credit card fine if you can find your way through the user interface). I always thought internet banking was something you did with your bank via your banks website? Why do you need to download software that only runs on a PC (note: you can get the ActiveX control to run in another browser using various 3rd party tools, but this may not work and is unsupported)?

Then I found this at http://www.landtransport.govt.nz/transaction-centre/index.html

It is designed to perform best with Microsoft Internet Explorer (up to version 6.0 ) or Netscape (up to version 6.2 ). Other types of browser are not currently supported.

Now when it comes to taking money from customers, I would have thought the first rule would be to have as few barriers in the way that would prevent them from giving it to you. So eliminating one third of the total browser market is not a wise idea. Sure, the majority of that third are windows users, and can fire up IE should they need to. But they choose not to use IE. Plus, they only support up to IE 6. Not 7, not 8. I am beginning to suspect that the policy is outdated, and it possibly suits them that way.

I could be missing something here but there are no technical limitations preventing any other mainstream browser from processing financial transactions online. So why make the concious decision not to support every mainstream browser?

UPDATE #3

Well I have been trying to pay the road toll, on my prepay account, for a recent trip to Auckland via LTNZ’s toll site to no avail. The service has been taken offline due to technical problems. This morning I learn that the service has been taken down due to a glitch where prepay customers were being charged up to 20 times per trip. Hundreds of thousands of dollars was debited that should not have been. No no no no no! This is no way to earn the trust of the public, who are probably not overly entusiastic about a toll road to start with. Not to mention all the other things wrong with the toll road payment systems, and the website itself. LTNZ seem to be dropping the ball both with policy and execution of their online systems in general.

stuff.co.nz re-launch

March 7, 2009 at 11:47 am In Web, stuff I like, 1 Comment

One of my new years resolutions was to not read the news online through the major news agencies and so far I am enjoying my decision. I am no less informed through other channels than I was before, either that or there is a lot of stuff that I just don’t care about because I don’t know about it. However, I heard that stuff.co.nz had relaunched so I had to check it out. Professional curiosity.

From stuff.co.nz’s own article on stuff about stuff here is how the new site is described;

Stuff, New Zealand’s leading news, sport and entertainment website, has been revamped and upgraded, with a fresh, new look, a range of new features and a major upgrade of the underlying technology to produce a faster, more user-friendly site.

First of all I think stuff.co.nz was well overdue for a makeover and change is good for Stuff, as it was looking a tad tired. However I am not convinced of the new look and usability just yet. It isn’t quite working for me (sometimes literally).

Things I am not so keen on

1. A customisable home-page you will never see.

One of the new innovations is a customisable home-page that you can tailor to give you the news you are interested in only. Hurrah, I love these features on other sites, especially on the customisable Google Home-page. However if you want to customise the Stuff home-page don’t get your hopes up too much. The top part of the home-page is fixed and you have no choice as to what content appears here. Fairfax does. To get to the areas you can customise you have to scroll down not one screen worth, but two screens worth of compulsory content, then you get your customised content. So the benefit of this is…? If I want to read the technology articles, instead of visiting the home-page and then scrolling down two screens, it is far easier for me to click the big convenient “Technology” link in the primary navigation. A user wants to see their customised content first, hell that’s why they bothered “customising” the page to start with.

Tip. As a user if I want to customise the home page, I want the things I am interested in at the top so I can easily find it. If you want to spam the user with compulsory content and ads on the home page, then dont make the home-page customisable. It offers no value.

2. Changing the nav on users.

Throughout the Stuff site, and all the other sister Fairfax sites, there is a nav bar right at the top of each and every page. This nav provides you links to all the sister sites, no matter where you are. On the Stuff home-page, it is there with links to all my favourite sister sites like Trade Me, Travelbug, Find Someone and Old Friends. In the middle of the home page is a big colourful navigation bar that has all the sections of the site linked to. Now, as I click into one of the sections of the Stuff site, the big colourful nav bar I just clicked on vanishes. WTF? Also the top sister site nav bar changes on me. It looks the same, but instead of linking to the sister sites, it now becomes the primary nav for the Stuff site, with links to the other sections like National, International, Business etc. So a user has just clicked into a section, and now the primary nav, the most important navigation device on a site, has effectively GONE. Not only that, another navigation device (for the sister sites) is also gone, and has transmogrified into the primary nav.

Tip. Keep your primary navigation consistent! Exclamation mark for emphasis. As a user I don’t want to have to learn new things on each page. I have seen your home-page, which has established the main conventions of using the site for me. Don’t change these conventions! Please keep the navigation bar on every page in the same (or close enough to) the place it was on the home page.

3. The Search UI is Broken.

After recovering from the nav moving around on me, I really wanted to try out the Google search. I clicked the “Search site button” but alas I got a blank page . No error message, no nothing. I click back in my browser and tried again. After clicking around for a bit I relalised I was using the search wrong. The “Search Site” button is a form submit button, but I could not see the search input field and was clicking “Search Site” without specifying what I was searching on. Have a look below and see if you can spot what I was doing wrong.

Spot the search input field
(hint it is the white box with a white border on a white background.

Tip. Perhaps the search input field should be a little more defined or visible even. (I was using Firefox BTW so am not sure if this field is more visible on IE).

4. Confusing icons and interactions.

I wanted to remove some of the rubbish like “Life & Style” (what the hell is Life & Style). So there is a pencil icon to let me configure each of the panels. Awesome, here comes the customisation fun, I was excited. By clicking on the pencil I get a new row roll down underneath the colourful header. I wanted to remove the panel and what do you know, right underneath the pencil (where my mouse is as I just clicked on the pencil) is an . I click the and the config row vanishes, but the panel is still there with Prince Charles still grinning like a loon. What I should have done was click on the word “remove” which neither looks like a button nor a link and is all the way on the left.

Removing Prince Charles Step 1. Click pencil

Removing Prince Charles Step 2. Don’t click , click the word “remove”.

Plus, “remove” is the only option anyway, so I have to click the pencil, then remove to remove the panel, but remove is the only option. So why the pencil?

Tip. Instead, why not have the remove option instead of the config pencil. Then I can remove panels with only one click, not two. If at some point you need to give more config options for each panel, like being able to specify the type and the number of articles to show (which would be really useful), then reinstate the pencil. But right now it is just adding clicks.

4.1 And while I am talking about the configurable panels…

I can move the coloured panels around on the left, but not the panels on the right. If a panel is moveable, then give it an icon indicating this. At the top of the panels there is a good intro instruction that says:

But some content can not be moved. How do I know what can be moved and what can’t?

Tip. Why not put the icon for “Move content” (the arrows) that is includedin the instruction, in the panel headers of the panels that are movable?

5. Give me a sign-in form.

In order to configure the site pages, I need to register with My Stuff. When I registered with the site I got this brief confirmation message.

Success

You have had your email confirmed, you can now login.

But there is no login link or form. There is a tiny weeny [sign in] link up in the header of the site. But that says sign in, I want to login. This is something that catches me out often, so that’s why I look for it. Pick a terminology and stick with it. One day I will learn too.

Also once I have “Signed in” the “Sign in” link becomes “Logout”.

Tip. If you have just confirmed someone’s account, either sign them in auto-magically, or have a sign-in form right there on the confirmation page so the user doesn’t have to hunt around. Also be consistent with your terminology. It is either sign in or login. Sign in is better, and should also be inversely Sign out.

6. Slow.

The site is really slow to load, perhaps not dial-up over broadband speeds, but it is slow. And here is why:

• The home page is 1129.9K. That is a megabyte and a bit. Wow.
• It has 379K of JavaScript and 500k of images.
• It is made up of a whopping 230 HTTP requests.
• Too many JavaScript files. http://static.stuff.co.nz/js/jquery.js and http://static.stuff.co.nz/js/jquery.jqURL.js is included 9 times each. That is 16 requests that can be got rid of for a start. Another tip would be to combine all the scripts together into one request. The stuff.co.nz homepage has 230 http requests. A browser typically downloads two resources from the same host at a time. That is a lot of resources to load all up and simplifying the load of the JS into one file would provide a huge performance boost.
• There are no expires headers on a lot of the resources, so each page is asking for the same images, JavaScript and styles sheets again, and again and again. An expires header simply tells the browser when an element on a page is due to “expire”. If an image has an expires header of next Thursday, then each time you load the page (until next Thursday) your browser won’t ask for the image each time, instead it will just use the copy it downloaded last time. Expires headers are set relative to the first time your browser loads the resource. So images like photos may never need to expire as the wont change and stuff has set the expiry of these resources into the future to 2037 which is good, however there are a lot of reusable images being loaded from the CSS have an expire date of yesterday.
• Move all the JavaScript to the bottom of the page, please. The loading of scripts blocks parallel downloads. Normally your browser will have simultaneous connections for download page elements, so the browser will download two images at a time or more. However as scripts can affect the rendering of the DOM, if the browser needs to load a script, it blocks all other downloads until the script is loaded and executed. By moving all the JS to the bottom, before the close of the </body>, not only do you know the DOM is almost complete so your JS can interact with the DOM safely, all the other resources will have loaded so the JS won’t block any other requests.

7. Georgia, oh Georgia

I am not keen on Georgia font for the article titles, then having the content Helvetica. Pick either a serif font or a sans-serif font. Mixing them up looks ugly (in my book).

Tip. Go sans-serif, it will tie in with all the other Fairfax sites better. Verdana or Arial is good.

Things I like

The weather in the top left hand corner of the banner. 90% of the time I looked at you Stuff, all I wanted was the weather. Fabulous!

Over all it is a nice change. Aside from all my criticisms above, which can all be easily fixed, the new look is fresh. It is an improvement on the old stuff.co.nz. I think there are some nice ideas coming through in the new site. I understand it has just launched and there will be ongoing changes needed, as long as the site is refined and some of the things that I have mentioned get fixed I think it will make for an awesome news site.

I am not picking on things for the sake of picking on things. When I used to read the news online I loved Stuff, and I visited it several times a day. I would really love the new stuff.co.nz to be better. I give it a C+ in it’s current form, and I am sure Stuff will try harder and will make it better.