Fransgaard's lifestream

I have been a LoveFilm customer for a long time. It has changed names and merged so many times I can’t even remember what it was called to begin with… and I intend to stay a customer, but today that proved surprisingly hard.

It all started with the Debit Card I am paying with running out soon…

The PostIt alert

The first notification I got from LoveFilm was not an email or a SMS, it was this PostIt note attached to the lastest films I received in my letter box.

I thought this was a great idea! A company with digital at it’s core understands their customers behaviour so well, they realised the best place to deploy such an alert would be in the letter with the DVDs rather than an email.

But then came the online experience

As i want to keep being a LoveFilm customer, I went online to update my card details. As the card number remains the same the only thing I had to change was the expiry date… how hard can it be?

STEP 1: My subscription page

As directed by the PostIt note I went to “My Account” page and into the “Subscription page”. Simple, clean interface. No confusion there.

interesting the buttons look like the Amazon buttons, but that’s what to be expected since Amazon now owns LoveFilm. So far so good. Let’s click the “Change” button next to “Payment Method”…

STEP 2: Changing my card details

And I arrive at another clean and simple page. Yes, my debit card is indeed close to running out… but how to I edit it???

After going back and forward a few times I am sure I am at the right page, but there’s no “Edit” button.

So I decide maybe I need to enter my card details again as a new payment method, which I do…

STEP 3: The error page

Oh… there is a problem adding the same card details again.. make sense, but what should I do then? I have no idea! 

I then went through this process a fair few times to be absolutely sure I didn’t miss anything. In the end I gave up and decided to contact the LoveFilm help desk.

STEP 4: The help desk

As my problem is fairly simple I wrote a one-liner explaining my problem:

The card I am currently paying with is running out. I am unable to change its expiry date and I am unable to enter the same card with new expiry date as it is already listed.

I got a reply very quickly, but it was completely useless to me:

We can confirm to you that for security reasons we request all our members to update their card details themselves on line. To update your card details we request you to visit our website www.lovefilm.com using your email address and password. Then, click on the ‘My Account’ link which you will find on the top right of the screen.

Yes, I know… the PostIt told me, but it doesn’t work!

Fortunately there was a feedback option so I replied stating the answer had been unhelpful.

Again I got a very fast reply from the help desk. This time with the correct answer… but the answer blew me away like a major twist in a movie:

I can see from the records of your account that your LOVEFiLM account is linked to your Amazon account. I would like to inform you that you need to update the correct/new card details on your Amazon account which in turn will update on your LOVEFiLM account.

Hey, that is excellent… except that throughout my whole journey through this one piece of vital information was never presented to me. Everything was pointing to the “My Account” page on LoveFilm’s own website.

The devil is in the detail and the right details must be in place. Otherwise a very simple UX task becomes an impassable brick wall.

I’ve been doing a bit of research into UX/Design Principles. Here’s a bunch of links I found.

Start with this article by Jared M. Spool:

• Creating Great Design Principles: 6 Counter-intuitive Tests

10 good examples of UX/Design Principles:

• Luke W – Developing Design Principles
• UX Think – Experience / Design Principles
• Google UX Design Principles
• 52 Weeks of UX – 10 PRINCIPLES OF UX
• Luke W – MIX10: Windows Phone UI and Design Language
• Windows User Experience Design Principles
• Facebook Design Principles
• Google – Ten things we know to be true
• Whitney Hess: Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX Microsoft: How to Design a Great User Experience
• Government Digital Service – Design Principles

Please share any other good examples you know of.

For a while I’ve been struggling to explain how I define a true Social Enterprise. I’ve used terms like “constantly evolving“, “listen to your users“, etc. But while all these are true traits, they don’t explain what really defines a Social Business.

As it happened a friend of mine who is studying Counselling just sent me an SMS asking how I would define the term “Self-awareness”. My reply was:

“Self-awareness to me is the ability to step outside yourself and look at yourself and your actions from a third person’s view. – If you can’t do that then I don’t think you are self-aware and you are only acting on instinct.”

Nothing to do with Social Business, but as we worked together on the Burberry Social Enterprise project for a year, it triggered some happy memories and I started thinking.

Corporate Social Media on instinct

There are many examples of Corporate Social Media running on instinct:

• Grass-roots initiatives within the business introduces social media.
• Technology deployments adding social functions here and there.
• Employees use external social channels to communicate to each other.
• Public customer social media disasters forces social media response teams in place.

But all these isolated pockets happen without the collective consciousness of the organisation being aware of it… they happen because they instinctively are the right response at the given time.

Adding self-awareness to the Social Business

What if the Business stopped for a second and stepped outside itself and asked:

“What are we doing in social? Not individual projects like marketing campaigns or social CRM initiatives but everything we do in social?”

This would would force the Business to confront the hidden social media usage and their benefits.

• Our employees use social media as recreation during the day. We see it as a waste of time, but what does it mean to potential employees’ or customers’ perception on the company? And what does it mean for our employees’ well-being?
• What data is lost in disjointed conversations when employees use Twitter DMs, Facebook messages, private emails or private SMS to communicate because our corporate tools are a difficult to use – or don’t work at all – on mobile devices?
• What benefits are to be found, and what collaboration is happening, in the organic social serendipity created on the ground by all these hidden social media initiatives?
• What are customers telling us, we don’t hear because the information isn’t going to the right parts of the organisation or getting lost in translation?
• How is our business processes being changed from the inside? How can we nurture these changes to reap the benefits?

The out-of-body awakening of a Social Business

I believe looking at a organisation’s social initiatives from the outside, and truly understand the full scope of what is really going on, is the first step to becoming a true Social Business.

I have literally written this article as I was thinking about it and I don’t know if I am on to something here so would love to hear your feedback on this.

I’ve had my doubts on whether I should publish this article or not, but at the end of the day it helps me move on personally, so here it is:

Today, 8th of May, it has been 1 year since my wife passed away.

She was very active online and shortly after she died I wrote an article about how I’ve approached dealing with her digital estate.

The article has taken on a life of it’s own. It has been shared by charities, it has been linked to by Jeremiah Owyang and been featured on both BBC Radio 4 and Colourful Radio (yesterday).

… but none of this is because of me or my article. It is because this is an issue that is becoming increasingly relevant as the online population is growing up and getting older.

The Internet is part of our lives now. Our online profiles are part of who we are now.

One year on, where am I with my wife’s digital estate?

• My wife’s hobby blog remain live for a couple of reasons; Some of her articles are truly unique online; the site still have a fair amount of visitors; I’m using it as a communication channel to her extended network (but the site does very visibly state she has passed away).
• Her Flickr account remains open as it feeds many of the blog articles.
• In January, I closed one of her busiest channels, her Twitter account, as I felt I’ve been able to notify all her connections there and deal with all requests from her Twitter network.
• And ofcourse her email account remain open as it will be the last thing I close down.

What problems have I faced?

I think the one issue that stands out has been unsubscribing from emailing lists she had signed up to. Roughly half unsubscribe functions have simply not worked. After three or more attempts I have listed these as spam to keep them out of her inbox.

I wish there was an industry standard for dealing with this.

On a different note, I understand, and sympathise with, Yahoo’s stand on not giving anybody, not matter relation, access to a deceased person’s email, ever. But there has to be a practical middle ground.

What if they could give access to email accounts post death? So you, as an heir, can use it for practical purposes such as closing down other digital accounts, but without exposing the past, unless the deceased have given permission in a will?

Final thoughts

Jolyon Jenkins, the BBC4 journalist who interviewed me, ask me one question, which I had considered, but never thought about putting down in words. He asked:

Have you considered the legal implications of what you are doing? Breach of different digital providers’ terms and conditions and such?

The answer is: I have. I felt I had the moral right to access my wife’s accounts as she left me her passwords, but I did set myself some ground rules, which was:

• Do not read any of my wife’s emails or direct messages from before she passed away.
• Do read and reply to all messages arriving after she passed away.
• If replying via any of her digital profiles always clearly identify that it is not her, but me who is replying.
• Update any digital profiles to broadcast she is dead either with auto-response or by updating any descriptions.
• Close profiles as soon as I am 100% positive they are no longer needed… but not a second before.

…And prepare. I am eternally grateful for my wife making preparations in terms of writing down passwords and talking to me about what she wanted to happen with her digital estate (such as “Close down my Facebook account straight away”).

I hope it will be a long time before you have to deal with this yourself, but do prepare. Make a digital will to help those left behind in case you die first.

Here in the UK I’ve received an incredible amount of support and help with everything regarding my wife’s death… except her digital estate. I’ve had to figure that one out on my own, but not entirely alone as I’ve planned with my wife before she passed away.

Final final thought

I promised myself I wouldn’t do this as it is not really in the spirit of my wife’s practical ways of being… but…

Hug the ones you love. Don’t leave it to another day.

I did. And it has helped me moved on tremendously.