Alex Muller

As much as stuff like this shouldn’t affect my opinion of a company, it’s pretty nice to open up Tweetie on iPhone and see a reply from Virgin asking how my train journey is going. Wonder what the critical mass of companies using Twitter is before this starts getting annoying, and how long until we get there.

Transport for London send weekly emails about which London Underground lines and stations are going to be closed to maintenance and improvement work on the weekend. This is from the one titled “Weekend line and station closures 5/6 September 2009”:

Piccadilly line trains will not stop at King’s Cross St. Pancras station due to station improvement work on Saturday. For further details and alternative routes, please click here

Which is why I was really pleased to be standing at that very station at 6pm yesterday (Sunday the 6^th) with no Piccadilly line trains stopping there. If you’re going to go as far as sending out an email to warn people, how about checking it’s actually right?

Hey, First Capital Connect – we need to talk.

You know databases, right? Those things that can store a whole load of data for you? Yeah, start using them properly. Don’t send me my password cleartext in an email, and don’t send it all uppercase when that’s not how I entered it. Do you even support case-sensitive passwords?

Oh, and find the guy who designed this part of your UI, take him out back and beat him up a little:

…simply untick the box.

Which box?

Dear National Express,

Brill, you’ve finally failed. Now instead of money-grabbing like you’re so used to, why don’t you think about cost-cutting for once? For example, I was having a think about those great tickets of yours…

This is what gets printed for me if I book a return journey from London Kings Cross to York:

So, how about we rejig a few things. Even if you guys don’t save any money from printing, you’ll get that fuzzy warm hippy feeling from using less card or paper.

See, what I did there is applied a very complicated design process called “make the stuff that people actually care about really big”. Unbelievably, it doesn’t matter to me what that long number is, so I made it small. Are you catching my drift yet? “What’s a ToD?”, I hear you cry. I have no idea. I also don’t care.

Using the first, we’re down from five tickets per return journey to three. Now let’s suppose you make the collection receipt optional (I’ve been on your service every couple of weeks since October last year, and I’ve never needed one) and uncheck the box by default. Two tickets per return journey instead of five.

The second’s probably a little ambitious, but wow, imagine the possibilities of a company actually removing stuff that isn’t useful on 99% of journeys (this statistic was very accurately calculated using a technique known as “making it up”).

Yes, I’m sure there are reasons things haven’t changed. National Rail probably set up some beautiful unified system in 1994 that every train company can use to print tickets, or whatever. Once again, I’m reminded of how big business and IT (or the web) are a match made in heaven.

Oh c'mon, National Express. Surely you've learnt by now that outright blocking stuff isn't the answer. It doesn't really prevent it, and actually just pisses people off. Really, your Wi-Fi can't deal with a minute long YouTube video? A DNS lookup later, and…

Blocking by domain name. Clever.

So, so frustrating that they block this 4MB YouTube download, but won't try to stop me updating my browser (30MB) or downloading some video podcasts (~100MB).