Three usability tips from my weekend of surfing the net

This last weekend I started looking for a rental property - I’ve never had to do that before so it’s a brand new experience for me. But we are building a house so we need to rent somewhere while the build happens. It opened up a whole new world of pain from a digital perspective. I don’t know if anyone at realestate.com or any of the many real estate agents will read this post, but I really wish they would as there are some very, very frustrating usability issues with the way the whole real estate market communicates with its renters. I actually started to wonder if people even want me to rent their house! Well here are a couple of things I would change that would help them put the customer (me) first. 

Don’t deploy new the functionality if it is a poor user experience.

Realestate.com.au have this fantastic functionality where you can bring up a map, enter all your details and then find a place that meets your criteria. It’s a great piece of functionality and I wish every real estate site had something similar (rent.com.au - something for the future!). However, if you move the map, then click on a house, when you go “back to search” everything has reverted back to where you started from and all of your “criteria” has disappeared. So if you have spent 10 minutes refining your search, moving the map so its just right, then zooming in to the area you want to focus on - that’s now all gone. You need to spend another 10 minutes doing it all again! So while the map functionality is great - the couple of times I’ve used it it’s been a terrible user experience and actually made me go looking for other web sites! That’s when I found rent.com.au but more about them later.

Don’t think something is working great just because you have a positive response - measure the negative as well!

I received some confirmation emails that had these massive headers at the top of the email. I was out and about looking at all the houses I had shortlisted so I was trying to read these emails on my mobile phone (like every other person out looking at houses on the weekend). But when you open these emails, because of the size of the banner, the text is tiny. You have to turn your phone sideways, then using both fingers zoom out the text. Its takes 2-3 times as long to simply read an email! When I spoke to one of the agents at the open for inspection, he said he had complained and he gets complaints all the time, but the marketing department say its getting a good response. Seems the marketing department is a slave to the stats from their web site and are not listening to “real” negative feedback here. I wondered how much damage this was actually doing to this company’s brand!

Don’t make ridiculous demands on people in the name of “security”.

Ok, I’m not a security expert, but I don’t think we need to insist on 10 letter passwords to make our logins safe. I personally use a product that stores all my passwords and generates a new password automatically, so it’s not a massive deal as I can just get my password program to generate a 10 digit password that includes a capital letter, a number etc. However most people are not like me and most people use the same password for everything. What you should do is insist that its safer than most - so a capital (maybe), a number and a special character should be part of the password and then it is unlikely to be “guessed” with some random word or number generator. Making stupid demands on people who are trying to log in to your web site just creates barriers - and you haven’t even started to “work” with them yet! The site that made me sign up then proceeded to ask me all about the house I was applying for - yet I’d just been referred to this site by the agents site and in that referral was the house address - why couldn’t they also pass the details I was now being asked to enter? These are simple things guys, why are you making it so easy for someone else to come along, build a better solution and steal your business. This is the digital world we live in - its not like a retail front where its difficult to go to another store that seals your stuff - we just go to Google and type in what we need and we almost always get a page full of options!

So from my weekend of frustration I came to the conclusion that with a little bit of focus on some detail, these companies could really grab a hold in their markets and differentiate. I wonder who will make the investment…... 

Smart watches one year on...

Around April last year was the last post about my Garmin Fenix3 smart watch. Since then the platform has stabilised and I've had zero technical issues with the watch. Garmin are still sending plenty of updates, but it's to add new functionality and fitness "apps" and the quality of the code seems to be fine.

About 6 months ago I also bought an Apple Watch, mainly because I was travelling and only wanted to take one watch that could track any workouts I did while away and automatically sync on the timezones as we travelled. I came back in love with this watch as an everyday "accessory" however as a fitness watch it left a lot to be desired. The Apple apps used to track fitness are woeful in comparison to what you get from your Garmin watch. It also doesn't synch with other fitness apps which can be a little annoying, particularly given it saves all the workout data in the Apple Health app on your phone. The health app allows you to save data from Strava (and other fitness apps) but not the other way around!

So now that I have both how do I use my watches? Easy question to answer! Anything related to fitness I wear my Garmin which measures heart rate, cadence, vertical oscillation (when running),  speed, maps my run/ride/swim, SWOLF (for Golf or swimming), ground contact time, power (when riding), stress score (though I don't find this particularly useful as it essentially just measures your heart rate), lactate threshold, I find the recovery check as you start your workout a nice touch as is the recovery time estimate when you stop, You can log all your swim drills and now with the new HRM strap I can record my heart rate in the water (which gets stored in the strap until the strap can reconnect with the watch and download.

I use my Apple watch as a smart watch. So if I'm travelling or I know I have a day full of meetings and want to be able to see my next appointment or who is calling, emailing or texting me during those meetings without getting my phone out. The Apple watch design is beautiful (as with much of what Apple produces) and the light tap you get when it wants to notify you of something is better than any other smart device I know of - certainly a whole lot better than the crazy vibration you experience with the Garmin when it wants to notify you of a text message!

As a fitness tool the Apple watch could be so much better (even integrating with apps like Strava would be a massive lead forward), but that wasn't what it was designed for. Likewise as a smart watch the Garmin is pretty basic and doesn't quite reach the heady heights of the Apple watch (think ease of use, design, UX, UI etc). But as a fitness watch the Fenix 3 is easily the best on the market - bar none.

Latest Garmin update for the fenix3

There is a new OS update for the fenix 3 doanloaded earlier this week. It's caused the watch to freeze 3 times now, basically a similar issue to what happened when I downloaded a watch face from the App Store. Not sure if there will be a fix coming soon, but hopefully it won't take too long as I've stopped wearing the watch as its a pain to have to reboot every time the watch face freezes!

Parkrun - a great way to get fit and stay fit

Had to share this story, you can see it and others at www.parkrun.com.au...

‘I Run!’ by Chrys Stevenson

As I stood at the starting line of the Golden Beach parkrun with 150 other runners, I thought to myself, “How the hell did I get myself into this?” Less than two years ago I was a proud couch potato. I weighed 129 kg and wore size 24 jeans. I was a keen equestrian in my teen years, but I never ran – not even as a child. Sports days at high school were spent in “Detention Room C” as I refused to participate in physical activities. I called myself a ‘conscientious objector’! In August 2013, after more than two decades as an obese adult, I decided it was time to shed the fat suit. Now in my mid-50s, I had reconnected with a man I dated in my 20s. He made no demands upon me to lose weight, but I decided my body no longer reflected how I felt about myself. It was time to change. As a skeptic, I rejected fad diets, elimination diets, expensive weight loss programs and home-delivered frozen foods. Instead I determined that weight loss was a simple matter of mathematics: burn more calories than you eat. I modified (rather than revolutionised) my diet, reduced portion sizes, filled my oversized wine glass with soda water or Diet Coke instead of Sauvignon Blanc and joined the local gym. I committed to doing some kind of exercise every day; walking, swimming, light weights - even gardening. The kilos quickly melted off and my fitness level improved. I maintained a steady weight-loss of 1kg per week; I was regularly walking 5km and could swim 25 laps of the Olympic pool. I was no athlete but I was fitter than I’d ever been in my life. Once I reached my goal weight, my gym trainer encouraged me to run. Run? I couldn’t run! Was he mad? At first I ran with all the grace of a tranquilised giraffe. But, soon, I fell into a rhythm. It wasn’t long before I graduated from running half the length of the gym’s carpark to a gentle 850m jog into the local village – and then, back! By now I had shed a massive 65 kg – half my original body weight! I’d gone from Size 24 to Size 10-12. My weight-loss goal achieved, my trainer urged me to set a new challenge. I decided I’d try to run 5 km without stopping by Easter 2015. I wrote it in texta and pinned it to the notice board in the gym. I hadn’t yet run 5 km. The best I’d achieved was 3.9. Could I go the distance? I didn’t know. A chance meeting on Facebook with a parkrunner from South Africa alerted me to the Golden Beach parkrun. It seemed like a good chance to achieve my goal. Perhaps running with others would give me the extra adrenaline boost I needed to run that extra kilometre. “Go!” yelled the event director and I took off in the middle of the pack. Soon, the fastest runners began passing me. Then people who were clearly older and (ahem) larger than me trotted past, followed by people with dogs, ladies with prams and (oh, the humiliation) seven year old children! At one point I looked behind me and there was no-one there. I was dead last of the runners. It did occur to me to pull out there and then and save myself the embarrassment of finishing last, but I decided there was more disgrace in not completing the course. So, I kept on at my slow, but steady pace; a tortoise amongst a leap of hares. I reached the half way point and looped back on the home run. Now (as someone at my gym had promised me) I began passing some of the runners who’d started too fast and were running out of puff. That spurred me on - not only could I run, I could pass people! I finished the course having maintained the same steady 8 km/hour pace throughout. I was slow, but I didn’t stop or walk once. “38 minutes and 44 seconds!” yelled the time-keeper as I crossed the finish line and the crowd applauded and shouted, “Well done!” I was reminded of the t-shirt that reads, “I run. I’m slower than a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter, but I run!” I run! Who knew I could do that? Now I’m thinking, “Maybe I could run a bit faster …”

Portarlington race review

The portarlington tri is the 4th race in the Gatorade series and their longest sprint distance race. Apparently this was the 29th running of the portarlington tri and the winner of the inaugural event was competing in my age group! This race is longer than the others in the series as its supposed to help competitors step up to Olympic distance in the final race of the year (coming up on the 30th). Consequently it was the longest race I had done in my very short time doing triathlon. Being a few hrs out of Melbourne, the majority of competitors stay somewhere on the peninsula and so have a short ride, walk or commute to the venue. We ended up booking a house in portarlington so I had a short drive to the foreshore where there is plenty of parking. The venue itself is great although the transition area is right at the bottom of a hill so your riding and running up a hill before you get onto a relatively flat course - something I should have taken better notice of when setting up for the race.

For me I was not worried about finishing the distance, though an 800m ocean swim was further than I'd swum in the ocean before and the swim leg is easily my worst leg. I figured with the relatively flat course I would be able to make up time on the ride and the run, particularly given my run had continued to improve over the season and I was now regularly clocking under 5min/klm pace. I didn't count on having an upset stomach though and this made it a race where I was never going to get close to my PB's in anything other than race distances. I had checked out the setup on the Garmin the night before and figured it was all setup and ready to go. Start the triathlon app as you go into the swim, hit lap at the start and finish of each transition and stop at the end. Easy! Mostly the watch worked great but for some reason,at the end of the event, the swim details don't have any map associated. It seems to have largely got the distance correct (if you assume that walking and porpoising in the water is not counted as swimming by the watch), but it didn't send distance details to strava when it synced. I'm not entirely sure what happened as it picked up map details for the other two legs. The only thing I can think of is that while I was waiting in the water for my swim wave to start, I started the app, made sure we had a gps signal (which came through really quickly) and then didn't think about it again until just before the starting hooter sounded and I realized my watch had reverted back to a normal watch. I hit start again just as the hooter sounded, saw it was on the triathlon app, hit start again to start the app, then one more time to get the little green triangle (like "play" on your CD player) which seems to be what the Fenix3 displays to indicate an app has started. I figured all would be fine but as I mentioned, it didn't seem to track the swim and produce a swim map, though it may have been down to user error, but I probably won't know till my next open water swim.

In terms of the race, the start was good and I felt good for the first 200m of the swim before making the turn at the end of the pier. While we had been waiting for our start the wind had whipped up and so as we turned, we turned into some reasonable swell. I struggled for the 300m out the front of the pier and then when we turned back to shore I took a short rest and felt good for the final 200m or so. IHowever in the swell  had swallowed a heap of water - in fact so much that I walked the last 30 meters into shore (or maybe the tide was out, it was either that or me drinking it all, who can tell). I guess I could have swum the last little bit and I'm not sure which would have been faster, but there is something about having your feet on (relatively) firm ground when your a poor swimmer. Headed into T1 and the watch says I was over 4 minutes - poor! It may well have been though as I had to put on socks and I came out of the water a little slower than I probably should have for no other reason than a lack of concentration. I got the bike gear on and ran out past the mount line and realized I had made a real rookie mistake. I had the wrong gear selected for trying to start on a hill and wasted about 2 minutes trying to get my feet in the pedals and get going up the hill. But once I was going the legs felt good. Unfortunately the stomach didn't. I felt really bloated from the seawater and really wanted to throw up. I didn't, but managed to burp up a lot of sea water over the next few klm's (sorry if your eating your breakfast!). Whilst my legs were feeling good, the 20-30klm/hr southerly was now squarely in my face, and remained so up to about the 13-14 klm mark, so I tired quickly. However when we turned off the coats road we turned into the only hilly part of the course, so whilst my speed increased, it wasn't considerable and it took a bit more from my legs. I was starting to feel ok though and was getting through my Gatorade which I usually carry on the bike for a little carb intake during the bike leg. The last 7 klm's I was motoring and managing to average over 35klm/hr and was actually feeling quit good. Into T2 and as soon as I started running it all fell apart. My stomach started cramping along with my left calf and as I walked up the stairs out of the transition area I felt really disheartened, thinking I might have to walk the whole way to get this done. I started a "Cliffy young" shuffle and managed to get a few klm's down the road. I couldn't stand straight because of my stomach, though my calf had come good and my legs felt fine by about 3 klm in. The stomach never quite recovered and consequently my run leg was pretty poor, though when I looked at the times I actually thought it was going to be worse than it was. So I finished feeling not so good with a very average time, but I did finish and I had a couple of good lessons learnt.

1. Be more careful about what you eat the night before, particularly if your allergic to anything.

2. Know something about the course and select the right gear for your bike before you get on it and try riding!

Garmin Fenix 3 - Day 8

I read an article yesterday on the Apple watch in Smart company. You can see the full article here.

There seems to be a common thought emerging from a number of tech analysts which makes me think most of them can't think outside the current leaders in this space (being Apple and Samsung...or perhaps Microsoft). What the analysts seem to be missing is the fact that the whole smart watch revolution will be about data. So the people that are going to pick this up first may not be the normal "bleeding edge" tech savvy people that bought the first iPhone, but sports people are all about tracking data to improve their fitness/sport. Seems the geek bloggers don't understand the audience that demand for these devices are going to be driven by.

At the end of a week wearing the watch full time I have to say I really enjoy the smart notifications, its a functional watch and the only down side is, as an everyday watch, its quite large. Though having said that I know that there are plenty of people wearing gigantic watches on their wrists these days. I'm just not used to having my sleeve unable to fit over the top of my watch!

Garmin fenix - day 7

Battery is at 44% at the moment. I've used a little more today due to the run session from this morning when I had the watch running for about an hour in the run "app". That clearly takes more battery than if your not connected to satellites!

Satellite connection was a tiny bit slower than the other day, but I think it was probably faster than my 910. Jury is still out on this point though and I'd like to connect a few more times before I make any judgement. Note I have glonass turned on at this point, so I assume it should be faster to get satellite reception.

Not much to add from my run session this morning. It was dark so I didn't look at the watch until I got home. I do like the little summary you get at the end of the run though and everything associated with a session has become easier (except the actual running) with the different interface and fenix3 buttons.

Though speaking of it being dark, I was out last night at a Cirq de solei (great show by the way) and couldn't read the time but just flick on the back light and the time becomes easily viewable - try doing that with your standard analogue (though I'm conscious that I could do that with my digital watch that I bought in 1985 when digital watches were all the rage).

No more sessions scheduled now till Sunday morning. I plan on wearing the watch during my race and trialling the new "triathlon" app on the watch. I havent worn my watch in a race before so hopefully the wet suuit arm won't get stuck while I'm trying to transition to the bike leg. But then again, my transition times are so woeful it will hardly make a difference!