Search vs Hunt in Websites

I wasted forty minutes at a bank’s website last week. I needed to recharge a prepaid card. At login, there is a choice between the savings account login and prepaid card login. Which way do I go? The bank’s approach is to let the customer find out by trial and error. I tried the prepaid card login and discovered I could not do a recharge there. I found out the customer care number and called them. The support “executive” had no clue either. He told me that at login I should choose the prepaid card option. I told him that is exactly what I had tried, without any use. He told me to hold on and went off to get an answer. This business of consulting someone else took place three times and I had to hold on each time.

The first time he came back with borrowed wisdom, he asked me to log into my savings bank account. I did, and then had a question. Which tab do I select? He suggested that I go to “funds transfer” – a good guess, as I could perhaps transfer some money to my prepaid card as I transfer money to any other card. However, that did not work, so he went off to consult his colleague again. “There is a tab named Cards”, he said, “Click on that!” After bumbling around like this for quite some time, we finally discovered how to recharge the stupid card. He had been kind enough to stay on the line, suffering through all this with me. For the bank, this was not wasted employee time – it was probably free training provided by the customer!

This raises the question of the point and click model to tell a system what you want. It is very convenient, like a menu in some countries with photographs to guide the tourist who does not share a language with the staff. You find an item you recognize and point it out to the waiter; you get survive another day! This point and click model does not work when you have go through a hierarchical maze of tabs, making selection after selection without any clue till you get to see what you are looking for. In that situation, the “selection by search string” model works far better. For instance, Windows 10 has a slot at the bottom of the desktop labelled “Search the web and Windows”. If you type in “Hide rows in Excel sheet” and it takes you to your search engine, which gets you the answer – it may come from Microsoft websites or from someone else’s. You get a set of possible answers and can examine and select one. A great feature of this is that you are not restricted to a single word to say what you are looking for; many “help systems” force you to work under this restriction. It is like working with one hand strapped to the chair’s armrest! With a multi-word search string, you usually get the answer you are looking for in one shot.

How can a website, say a bank’s website, provide for access through a search string? Can the website let me click “Help” and type any of the search strings I list below as examples?

         Recharge prepaid card
         Register a new beneficiary for interbank funds transfer
         Form for requesting closure of account
         List of bank holidays in Delhi

I do not deny that the graphical user interface (GUI) involving icons, and point and click was a great invention; so is access to a webpage through the use of a multi-word search string. Like a screwdriver and a hammer, they are complementary. One does not replace the other.

HCI: Comment No. 4

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Why is it so difficult to get a problem with a computer rectified?

The last few days have been a bit of a mess. I could not easily access some bank-provided information. The technical staff of the bank's customer-care center went beyond what such centers usually do – they called me back on the phone and told me do a number of things that I usually get CCleaner to do for me; like emptying the Internet cache, the Recycle Bin, etc. I did that and got some relief, but soon was invoking CCleaner three times a day – several websites were playing hard-to-get. The system said problems in resolving host name or something like that. I used a bandwidth tester and found that I was getting good download (16 Mbps) and upload (0.7 Mbps) speeds. 

I asked the Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) call center, and its staff told me to clear the DNS cache. It didn’t help much. When I called them again, they guided me through an elaborate modem reconfiguration, using a configuration wizard. That worsened the situation - the modem stopped working and displayed a warning red light. There was another call, and another reconfiguration, which did not help either. It was quite late at night and I gave up. Then this morning I called again and did a third reconfiguration – using a land line speaker phone, with my wife helping by writing down IDs and passwords etc. By now I had discovered a discrepancy in an ID I was to enter. One operator had told me to type in something like 2797453892_ab and another wanted me to type something like  2797453892_ab@blahbroadband.in May be the system accepts either version, or may be one of them is wrong. It is OK if Ramani spends an extra 45 minutes in redoing something! Doesn't hurt the ISP’s revenue, and certainly not the call center’s! However, let me say one thing - every one I contacted over the phone was sincere, intelligent and articulate. 

The last person I had called also made an unsuccessful try with the specified standard procedure; he concluded by promising that a higher level technician would call me. This did happen two or three hours later. Meanwhile I had taken my laptop and modem to the shop that had sold me the modem. They pointed to a button at the back and said I ought to press it when these things happen and that it is a reset button. There is a hole next to this button and I asked if I should use a pin to reset the modem. They said no, the button will do. Forgive them for they knew not what they were saying! I had pressed that button whenever the ISP’s call center staff had asked me to reset the modem. I had told them the modem’s make and model number but they felt a small button next to the big (on/off) button was probably the right reset control. Now that I had the modem unconstrained by four cables, and in bright light, I could recognize that the label Reset was just below the hole and the label Wlan was the one below the button.

It was my lunch time, and my lunch had been put on a plate set on a small table behind my swivel chair.  I swung around and got a bite into a bit of chapatti. Just then came the call from the senior technician; he told me to forget the configuration wizard and do manual configuring. I started on that with all earnestness.  He told me to use the ID that looked like 2797453892_ab@blahbroadband.in  I did not have to do a hard reset at all. Another forty five minutes later, I seemed to be out of my problems, except for the difficulty in resolving host names. The gentleman had kindly stayed on the line till he got an all clear. He helped me replace in the modem's table URLS of the primary and secondary DNS servers by URLs of two other servers. May be the old servers had got overloaded; the new servers worked better. I thanked the gentleman warmly and swung around to my lunch. The chapattis had developed rigor mortis, but I was hungry enough for the fight!

All this reminded me of my telling, many years ago, a former boss of mine that the PC/Laptop interface was too complex for the majority of Indian users. He stared at me and had said “What is the problem? I have no trouble with my Laptop interface"! 

India has approximately 15 million broadband subscribers with fixed line connections. Soon the country is going to take broadband in big measure to villages. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Govt-kickstarts-work-on-broadband-connectivity-to-villages/articleshow/36502839.cms

Are we going to dump the system complexity I suffered from today on millions of villagers in 250,000 villages to be covered?

It appears to me that necessity requires that India and China should lead the world in designing simple interfaces for web access devices and computers.  However, this is a peculiar world – where the need for something is highest, usually the ability to pay for further development is relatively low. So, the needy usually have to make do with hand-me-down technology.

I feel that there ought to be a balance between adopting technology that works somewhere else, and working towards technology more suited to us.

Srinivasan Ramani
Making computer interfaces more suitable for human use.
Comment No. 2 on Human Computer Interaction (HCI)