The Transport for London website team's dedication to user centred design has helped make their site a leader in the public sector.

A recent report from the Public Accounts Committee has been critical of the way that UK government websites are designed and managed. But TfL.gov.uk, the Transport for London website, was one of the few cited for good practice and performance. It's no real surprise: the TfL team really understand the value of listening to customers, and designing for their needs.

Sometimes, we're pleased to say, TfL hire Flow to help them.

What London travellers really need

TFL's flagship offering is Journey Planner. Back in 2006, we helped TFL research and design the mobile travel alerts element of the service. Designing personalisation features for a website is never easy - because most of the time, people don't want to personalise. We all just want the website to do what we need with minimal effort.

Flow ran experience labs: one-to-one sessions with a range of different people. The lab sessions focussed on digging out the reality of London travellers' needs, motivations and behaviours.

A key technique was retrospective accounts: we gathered detailed stories about what people really did in specific situations. So rather than asking "what do you think about travel in London" we asked things like "Tell me how you got to this interview today," and "tell me about the last time something went wrong with your commute to work." To keep the conversation fun and manageable, we also collaborated with the respondents to create pictures, lists and timelines using sticky notes and marker pens.

Once we understood user needs, we could identify a service that people would really like. The travel alerts system lets you identify the routes you are interested in (typically the ones you commute on every day), and get travel alerts for those routes at specific times. We defined the concept, worked with TFL to create wireframes, then fine tuned them with two iterations of usability testing.

TfL personalised travel alerts: Prototype and live site.

Practical commitment to customers

Since then we've helped TfL research and optimise all sorts of things from the Oyster Fastload process to the London Transport museum website. And since communicating with travellers is a multichannel activity we've even run iterative usability testing in London Underground stations - quite a challenge.

Now approaching...

Flow is now working with TfL on a strategic project to map out the future for the website, and we're basing the process on user research.

To improve on the experience labs methodology, we're asking our research subjects to fill in diaries. We're catching reports of travel experiences while people are travelling, then following up on the details in the lab afterwards. From there we'll be using a scenario-based approach to map out what people's travel experience and identify the TfL website's optimal role.

The finished site will offer London's travellers an even more useful, usable and appealing travel experience.

Flow Interactive is hiring. I thought maybe some insights into life at Flow might be interesting for everyone - and might persuade some of you to come work with us. If you've got a talent for user-centred design, you'll love it here.

Here are some quick snapshots.

Here are some Flow consultants eating cake. This happens every Friday. It's a great opportunity to exchange tips and ideas, as well as to wind down for the weekend. We also have a quarterly internal mini-conference called Holy Flowday, and weekly lunchtime sessions called Flowlite. It's a great way to learn.

Also note:

• Football table: Esential kit for every Clerkenwell office.
• Large shelf of UX books in the background: Not so often seen in Clerkenwell offices. We really value knowledge, innovation and best practice - not just cake and football.

Here's a usability lab. We have three of them in various configurations and with good quality microphones and cameras, plus Morae or DVD recording. You can also see the magic mirror behind which observers can lurk. There is no better way to prove the value of user-centred design to a product team than letting them watch real target users trying out the design ideas. Project politics tends to evaporate.

We also use these rooms for conducting "experience labs" - sessions where we use all sorts of techniques and games to help target users show us the reality of their needs and behaviours. The very the best way to work out what people need is often go and hang out with them. Contextual enquiry and ethnography are all about getting out of the lab - a very popular activity with Flowsters.

And finally, here's a project war-room. Research and design generate a lot of facts and ideas that need to be marshalled, soaked up and communicated. Flowsters are obsessed with using sticky notes for this purpose. So we do have a lot of project war rooms where individuals and groups can surround themselves with their work. We're convinced that this technique leads to better quality results.

So, fancy working at Flow? It's a chance to work on a real diversity of projects for top-grade clients, and do design the way it should be done. With a team who are passionate about UCD. In a great space. For a good salary. UCD heaven.

• More about Flow's work
• More about Flow's people
• More about the vacancies, and how to apply
  

The web still has the capacity to delight and disappoint me in equal measure. Recently I experienced examples of both extremes on exactly the same day.

Extremely good

Threadless  sells t-shirts, and sells them well. Limited edition t-shirts, designed by anyone who wants to design them, and voted into production by the Threadless community.

On their site, as on many others, I often use the basket as an ongoing wish-list, collecting the stuff that I might buy if and when the conditions are right. But if you do this with Threadless' basket you stand a fair chance of missing one of those limited edition t-shirts. So Threadless have come up with a nice email to let you know when this is going to happen, and here it is:

The call to action is strong, the tone of voice cheeky and familiar but still polite ("thank you from your pals at Threadless.com”).

Extremely…. well, bad

That very same day I received a film and ink pack for my photo printer; I'd ordered them online having done a little research and ordered a pack of 100. However the pack that I got in the post was only a 50. Frustrated, I telephoned the supplier:

10 Man on phone: "What was the product code on the invoice?"
20 Me: "CO3548"
30 Man on the phone: "that's the 50 pack"
40 Me: "Well your website and the email confirmation says its the 100 pack"
50 Man on phone: "What was the product code on the invoice?"
60 GOTO 20
RUN

In the end the query was passed on to someone else and while waiting for the call back I thought I'd check my order online and log into my account. Perhaps I was flustered from the phone conversation, but I made a mistake with my password. This is what greeted me:

Okay so now I'm not just a little miffed but in fact somewhat teed off, let's just read this out loud together:

"Internet fraud is a serious offence..."
"we record IP addresses to help trace the location of fraudulent transaction attempts"

Wow

Adding insult to injury, I now have the wrong item in my hands and I feel just a little bit criminalised to boot. I waited in anticipation of the call to come and the website left me in quite a self-righteous, unhappy customer kind of state.

In the end the call back was really good: there was an apology, a reason (well an excuse - data entry error), and they sent me the right product out in exchange. Even so, the experience was unsatisfactory and inconvenient and I'm unlikely to use the site again.

If only the site could have reflected their (eventually) helpful manner in resolving the problem; and if only Threadless sold photo paper.

We were excited to hear the that the National Express East Coast website has been short-listed for the National Transport Awards. We have to wait until July to find out if we've won though.

Flow worked Atos Origin and Splendid on the project. We know customers love it - let's hope the judges do too.

The gag: take the interaction that you have with friends via facebook, and transpose it into a real life conversation. It's hilarious and cringe-provoking.

An old contact comes knocking on your door wanting to be your "friend" and brandishing compromising photos of you that he will share with everyone.

Watch the video on YouTube.

It highlights a couple of interesting points about designing online interactions.

When a new communications medium appears, it takes people a while to understand good etiquette. There are stories of people shouting at each other in the corridors when e-mail started to become widespread in companies in the early nineties. People said things to colleagues in emails and didn't think of the real-world consequences. Similarly, I heard a recent tale of people being fired for posting defamatory comments on an internal corporate blog without thinking that everyone would actually read the comments.

Designing an interactive product like a website is designing communication. And understanding the rules of etiquette is important. A few years back, e-commerce websites had a tendency to engage you in dialogues like this...

Customer: I'd like to buy these shoes.

Salesman: Certainly. Where did you hear about this shop? And when is your birthday? And would you like me to send you some email every week?

Not appropriate in real life, and interestingly, not appropriate online either.

Site designers are becoming much better at understanding the rules. It's now easy to unsubscribe from just about any email newsletter that's plaguing you. Most marketers have realised that even though email is a huge driver of traffic, unwanted emails drive no traffic, waste marketing time and resources and have a negative impact on a customers perception of their brands. In the UK, it's also illegal to send unsolicited email.

Gaining permission from your target customers is the trick. And that takes a long dialogue between customer and website, probably over several visits. Creating a dialogue that builds trust and engagement is one definition of good user experience design.

Thanks to Karl Sabino for the link.