It’s all about consistency.  Or is it? When it comes to communications, organisations are concerned about delivering a consistent branded experience.  However, sometimes it is easy to lose sight of the purpose of communication itself.

Here’s an example - yesterday I changed telephone accounts.  I must say it was a good experience on the phone.  Despite being on hold for 20 minutes, the person on the other end was friendly, chatty but also professional.  It was as pleasant as you could expect with such a mundane task - until she started reading from the company script.  All of a sudden it was as if somone had replaced the person talking to me with a corporate machine.  Admittedly, it was the part about the legal stuff where it is important to get it right.  It could be argued though that such obvious reading from a script on this topic only makes it worse.

Up until that point, I was having a conversation with a person, who I was aware represented a large company.  After that point, I was only aware of the large company.  A pity.

Technology wastes our lives. How much time is spent waiting for computers to boot? How much time standing in front of fax machines wondering if anything was actually sent? How much time trying to get through to an operator when you’ve called a toll free number?

Apparently we get mad at all this time wastage - a 2,600 person international study found that consumers damage or destroy about 10 percent of all high-tech gadgets. Reported acts of rage included punching, hammering, incinerating, shooting, driving over and microwaving these devices that are supposed to help improve our lives.

My impression is that it’s getting worse. Firstly, the tendency for devices to have more and more features makes it harder for us to figure out how things are supposed to work (is it a cellphone? a camera? a razor?). And secondly, we are getting increasingly impatient as our lives get busier and busier. We have lower tolerance levels and less time to waste on understanding technology. We’re spending more and more time on the web, and on the web we’re used to being in control. Page taking too long to load? Click away. Not finding the information you need? Go to Google.

Essentially, the web is making us impatient with anything we can’t skim. This includes being on hold, which is why customers love self service. It’s a well known phenomenon in customer support that people would rather find the answers themselves on your web site than have answers delivered to them by picking up the phone and calling your call centre. It’s because the customers are in control of their own time.

These customer goals marry up perfectly with the business goals, because rather than paying for an employee to reset a password or change an address the customers do it themselves. Organisations can get away with fewer frontline and call centre staff.

Of course, it’s not just technology that wastes our time. Oftentimes it’s people who use technology poorly who waste our time. Michael Dertouzos suggests that "prolific email authors should think of each message they send as an instrument that reduces the recipient’s life by 2 to 3 minutes." Good idea, especially since a UK survey found that some of the UK’s biggest companies spend an average of 10,000 pounds per person per year paying employees to read and write unnecessary emails.

Many usability issues are related to respect. Designers need to have more respect for the user’s mental and physical effort. Technology needs to have more respect for our time. It’s the ultimate limited resource. We only have 24 hours a day, so it should be treated as a precious, precious thing.

- Trent