Translink, you’re breaking my heart

I finally (finally!) got my Translink card. So excited! It now joins my BART EZ Rider card, my MBTA CharlieCard and my WMATA SmarTrip card.

(Aside: TTC and (NY)MTA, get on this.)

Inside the envelope are several letters and brochures. I head to the Translink web site to add funds to my card.

Fail #1 Nowhere on the front page do the words “add funds” or “add value” appear. If you go to site map, aside from the two “Register your card” links, under “Get TransLink®”, there’s an Add value online link. Finally!

(Please drop the ®. It’s unnecessary, ugly, and impairs readability and scanability.)

But, there were two problems. First, they don’t take American Express. Boo. But the larger, more catastrophic problem:

Fail #2: It may take up to 72 hours for the value you ordered to be added to your card.

Seriously? Funds need to be added in real time. Period.

There are a few more problems with the web site. On the home page, there’s a box with contact information, including an email address. But they’ve made it so hard to use. The email address isn’t even a link. (And selecting it is hard, too, because it’s buried under several layers.) Look:


<li><span class="standout">Email:</span> <a href="mailto:#" accesskey="e">[email protected]</a></li>

And when you hit the home page, you get five different 301 or 302 redirects:
http://translink.org/
http://www.translink.org/
http://www.translink.org/TranslinkWeb
http://www.translink.org/TranslinkWeb/
http://www.translink.org/TranslinkWeb/index.do
https://www.translink.org/TranslinkWeb/index.do;jsessionid=tCfKg-cBzZp4P1P1GuMtBQ**

Seriously?

What kind of a URL is https://www.translink.org/TranslinkWeb/index.do;jsessionid=tCfKg-cBzZp4P1P1GuMtBQ** anyway?

Recommended reading for the Translink webmasters: URL as UI and Cool URIs don’t change.

Sabre doesn’t get it

NBC in Dallas ran a piece called “Airlines Rethinking Customer Care. In the piece, they talk about airlines using customer data to personalize the customer experience.

Yawn.

Places like OpenTable and Wyndham have been doing this for years. Great restaurants kept detailed notes on their best customers with pen and paper.

The anonymous talking head from Sabre — which makes that awful flight reservation system used by Alaska, American, etc — thinks that the best way to use all this data to make up for an error is to — wait — give customers “a scripted apology.”

Mike Lazaridis is on crack

Mike Lazaridis:

A: I look at it this way. I say that our browser technology was developed with very different requirements. By writing our browser in Java, that provides our CIOs and wireless managers the assurances they need, to allow the browser to access internal information at the same time it accesses external information. So the overriding design criteria for our browser has been to not compromise on that experience in the enterprise phase.

I couldn’t make sense of this.

Tony explains: “he just had to get the words java, enterprise and assurance in a sentence.”

HOWTO read and pronounce URLs

URLs usually appear in written form — online or on paper. Sometimes, URLs are spoken aloud. You’ll often hear URLs read out:

  • during television and radio advertisements
  • in voicemail messages
  • on conference calls

So what? Well, almost everyone gets it wrong.

And you sound like an idiot when you do.

I’ve seen directors of national political organizations and billion-dollar public companies make these mistakes.

In the interest of saving you and your organization future embarrassment, let’s run through a quick example. Suppose we want to give out the URL for Google Voice, the replacement for GrandCentral.

The URL for Google Voice is:

http://www.google.com/voice

You would read it aloud like so:

w-w-w dot google dot com slash voice

What not to do:

  • Don’t read out “http://”. Nobody needs to hear “h-t-t-p colon slash slash.” It’s at the beginning of every URL. That’s eight syllables you waste.
  • Don’t say “backslash.” A backslash looks like this: \. If you type a backslash instead of a slash, your web browser will give you an error.
  • Don’t say “forward slash.” A forward slash is the default type of slash. It’s either slash or backslash. Don’t waste those three syllables.

Suppose you want to read about my house concerts. The URL for my house concerts site is:

http://concerts.shrub.ca/

You would read it aloud like so:

concerts dot shrub dot c-a

  • Don’t read out “http://”. Nobody needs to hear “h-t-t-p colon slash slash.” It’s at the beginning of every URL. That’s eight syllables you waste.
  • Don’t say “www” — it’s not in the URL.
  • Don’t pronounce the trailing slash. (I’ve never heard anyone do this, but you never know.)

A note about top-level domains

The last part of the hostname is the top-level domain (TLD). For google.com, it’s “com.” For concerts.shrub.ca, it’s “ca.”

If you have a three-or more letter TLD (com, net, org, info, biz), pronounce it like a word. For “eff.org,” say “e-f-f dot org,” not “e-f-f dot o-r-g.”

If you have a two-letter (country code) TLD, spell it out. For Canada (.ca), say “c-a,” not “ka”; for Switzerland (.ch), say “c-h.”