Tell the Difference Between These Three Pictures 1877

snip phone interview things

It strikes me with lots of these questionaires that they have no room for what you think are the important messages; just the multiple choice things marketing dream up. They usually have delusions of grandeur.

Example; my bank. They were a very well run small outfit that got bought out, and the founders are probably well healed. About now they are bleeding cash and customers are defecting in droves; and they run lots and lots of marketing surveys of the touchy-feely stuff. They don't get it. The small outfit was designed around network banking. They had(still have) a plain html network bank with good security (off-line crypto card). Every security and IT expert were using them.

Now they want us to use a bloated, picture rich box with oodles of bad javascript and probably as secure as a piggy bank. When we stubbornly refuse to switch (they have switch rates reported as low 10s % after a 6 month campaign) we get "surveyed" with multiple choice. They ask a lot about touchy feely stuff like how I like the appearance of the "new and improved" page.

They don't get it that I don't care. Paying bills is boring anyway. A plain HTTPS-HTML form and a securecard does it. Key in the accounts, amounts, messages to recipient; do account transfers. I really want to be able to use it from a PDA over a mobile phone at 9600 bps or less.

Supporting standards, not windows, is extremely important.

But their survey doesn't evaluate basics. I put the last interviewer in a catjam; I was very polite and just asked as a condition for the interview that he faithfully reproduced my opinions. It turned out, he couldn't.

Lots of questions were answered with "that question should be unasked. It does not register as something I care about, nor would want you to spend resources on." One of those was about the flash animations. I filter those.

Step one step back here and see what happens.

We apply this thingie called a computer, but we do not harness it's flexibility. We just use it to write the paper forms for manual use into stone. (Or COBOL, which has similar ossifying traits). We don't go out and look at the processes that happen beyond the paper form.

-- mrr