From: Mark Hurst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sat Oct 18, 2003 4:40:31 AM US/Pacific Subject: Re: The Next Economy
----------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/18/technology/circuits/18brok.html
The New York Times September 18, 2003
A Complaint Box Turns Frustration Into Fun By MARK WALSH
While staying at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco this spring, Mark Hurst was annoyed when he learned that it charged guests $2 to make a toll-free call and $1.50 for a local call. As an Internet consultant who specializes in improving the "customer experience" of corporate and commercial Web sites, he found the charges akin to getting a dead fish on his pillow. When he vented his annoyance in a weekly e-mail newsletter he publishes that deals with a range of consumer experiences, he struck a chord with readers.
"That column got more of a response than anything I've ever written about the Internet or Web sites," Mr. Hurst said.
The outpouring of hotel horror stories led him to create This Is Broken (www.thisisbroken.com), a forum where consumers can air their gripes about everything from hidden hotel costs to baffling error messages to bad road signs.
Through the site, Mr. Hurst hopes to make businesses and other organizations more aware of their customers when they design products or provide services. He also wants to have some fun along the way.
"I want to keep the tone light," said Mr. Hurst, the founder and president of the New York-based consulting firm Creative Good, whose clients include Disney, MetLife and Travelocity. The amusing quality of This Is Broken derives mainly from the digital photos and screen shots that accompany most of the 60 or so entries he has posted since he started the site in June. Mr. Hurst screens and edits the submissions, which arrive from around the world.
Some require little explanation. A black square he posted to the site on Aug. 18 is a picture taken inside his apartment building during the blackout. "Broken: Eastern U.S. power grid," the entry states.
Another shows a freshly planted traffic sign and parking meter blocking the entrance to a Vancouver parking lot.
Airlines and airports have been a rich source of material for This Is Broken. A sign for services at Midway Airport in Chicago reads "Information" and "Police"; the proximity of the two words, stacked one above the other, gives the sign on an oddly Orwellian cast. In a posting about JetBlue, a woman with impaired vision complained that the airline's Web site would not accommodate the enlarged font she uses on her browser, and that two-digit numbers thus appeared as single digits on the online order form.
Mr. Hurst said he had received several complaints about www.buymusic.com, a new site that one person said contained conflicting instructions about whether individual songs could be downloaded. Another entry at This Is Broken points out that the site is accessible only to Windows users running Internet Explorer, and others note that the music site is not available outside the United States.
Not every glitch cataloged on This Is Broken is of the visual kind. There is an audio clip of an automated phone support operator informing a T-Mobile customer that he is caller No. 9,453 and advising him not to hang up "or you will lose your place in line."
While Mr. Hurst does not expect to bring corporate America to its knees, This Is Broken has made a difference in small ways. Yahoo's weather site (weather.yahoo.com) and Weather.com (www.weather.com) made corrections after users reported problems finding cities. (Doing so earned the two sites a proclamation of "Fixed!" above their combined entry at This Is Broken.)
The site also reports that the Palace Hotel is re-evaluating its phone rates after receiving a copy of Mr. Hurst's rant from one of his newsletter subscribers.
This Is Broken has no formal procedure for relaying complaints to the companies discussed at the site, but Mr. Hurst said he plans to make This Is Broken entries available as downloadable files that visitors can pass along to companies.
Mr. Hurst is holding a contest, which ends Oct. 2, that will award four digital cameras to eligible entrants based on a random drawing.
"This is another way to get people to start thinking about these issues," he said.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
