Browser choice screen on KeepMeBooked

Microsoft's browser choice screen deployment is timed perfectly, because over at KeepMeBooked we are about to deploy our own 'browser choice' message to encourage people to use Chrome or Firefox which run KeepMeBooked about three times faster than IE does:

(We are working on getting IE to display our pages faster, but it ain't easy. While I don't really approve of EU bureaucrats meddling with IE's market share, the internet will be a better place once more people start using Chrome or Firefox.)

Here it comes: Microsoft's new EU-compliant advertisement for Chrome and Firefox

Here it comes: Microsoft's new EU-compliant advertisement for Chrome and Firefox:

Gotta love those EU bureaucrats!

What happens if I don't download it? Does MS get fined for not complying with EU anti-trust law? What a load of nonsense.

KeepMeBooked remote usability testing with UserTesting.com

Just ran our first remote usability test using UserTesting.com. Details over on the KeepMeBooked blog.



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New in KeepMeBooked: close off rooms for maintenance

You can now set a room as unavailable in KeepMeBooked. This is useful if you are closed for part of the year (and so don't want your rooms to be bookable online for that period), or simply that you need to close a particular room for maintenance.

Full details over on the KeepMeBooked blog

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Would KeepMeBooked have helped TechCrunch blogger avoid his Valentine's disaster?

A rant about a disastrous Valentine's weekend has appeared on TechCrunch, a widely read technology blog. It seems that a TechCrunch writer (MG Siegler) booked a fancy hotel on Expedia only to turn up and find that the hotel has no record of this booking.

Siegler is astonished that Expedia relied on faxing the hotel to confirm his reservation ...
[read the full post over on my KeepMeBooked blog]

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New in KeepMeBooked: improved PDF summary; delete payments & adjustments

New in KeepMeBooked: improved PDF summary; delete payments & adjustments



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Blog about KeepMeBooked and get 3 months free

Post a review of KeepMeBooked on your blog and get 3 months free.

Details on the KeepMeBooked blog.

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New in KeepMeBooked: export data and hover-for-booking-details

Couple of new features on KeepMeBooked this morning: export data and hover-for-booking-details

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Usability: booking multiple rooms online (again)

Back in December I blogged about how complex booking interfaces become if you want to allow groups of guests to book multiple rooms online. Suffice to say, it generally gets pretty messy, with many sites producing quite complex matrices of numbers-of-rooms and guests-per-room and so on. At its very simplest, this kind of interface ends up looking something like this:

For each room type, the guest needs to say how many rooms they need. And then for each room, how many guests in the room. Necessary, but the guest is definitely going to have to stop and think in order to complete this form, and we really want to avoid making the user think.

For me, a simpler interface would be something like this:

You can still select two doubles (one with two guests and the other with one guest) and a single (with your fourth guest). What's changed?

No room types. Just rooms.

This doesn't work if you have, say, 100 available rooms, but works just fine for up to, say, 20 available rooms (which is the kind of size our customers are). By abandoning room types you can just list all the rooms, and let the guest pick the combination they need. This means you can use a checkbox to select a room, not a number. And you don't have this fiddly "Guests in 1st room", "Guests in 2nd room" business. Numbers need to be read, checkboxes can be glanced at, so this should be quicker and easier for the user to absorb and act on.

There is another big usability advantage to listing rooms, not room types: you don't need the guest to specify occupancy room-by-room in their original search. I mean this kind of thing:

which gets fiddly and messy, especially as the user doesn't yet know what rooms are available. Maybe they'll take 2 doubles if they are available, otherwise a four person family room would be fine. The user might have to conduct multiple searches to see what combinations are available, and that's a right pain.

If your results screen just shows a list of rooms, you can just show all the rooms that are available and let the guest pick the combination they'd like.

Now you might think that picking a combination from a long list of rooms requires more thinking, not less. When Steve Krug and other usability gurus talk about not making the user think, they aren't suggesting the user is stupid and is unable to think. The user just has better things to think about than how to work a website.

Like deciding which combination of fabulous rooms they'd like their family to stay in. That kind of thinking is fine. The kind of thinking our interface is trying to avoid is 'Which of these darn buttons do I need to click to select the right combination of fabulous rooms?'. And if there are too many buttons, and too many numbers, that's what the user will be thinking about, not about how fabulous your hotel is.

At the moment, our online widget still sticks with booking just one room at a time. We'll do some more thinking and testing on this before we release anything more complex. But I think the mocked-up screen above could work very well.

(Cross-posted at the KeepMeBooked blog)

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New in KeepMeBooked: min stay rules and online deposit payments

Well, don't know what they've been putting in the water, but we're seriously on a roll this week, with another two new features released in KeepMeBooked today: minimum stay rules for online bookings, and the ability to take deposits for online bookings.

Read more on the KeepMeBooked blog







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New in KeepMeBooked: colour-coded bookings

The KeepMeBooked calendar now has colour-coded bookings to see at-a-glance who has paid, who hasn't and whether they booked online or offline.

Read more on the KeepMeBooked blog







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Hampshire Primary School Admissions Policy: how I'd re-write it to make it understandable

(This post relates to the primary schools admission policy in Hampshire, UK, but is of interest to anyone who thinks official documents should be easier to understand.)

In Hampshire, and probably other parts of the UK, parents heard last week whether their children have a place at their preferred primary school or not.

This a big deal: not getting your preferred school might mean your kid goes to a different school to all their friends; might mean going to a different school to their sibling (school run nightmare); might mean a long drive instead of a walk; and might mean going to a school which is, well, just a bit crap.

In our area, we hear that a lot of parents have been allocated schools a long way from their preferred school because they all made one fatal mistake on their application forms. I'll come to that mistake in a moment.

First some background: everyone expected primary schools in our area (around Winchester, in Hampshire, UK) to be oversubscribed this year. Children starting school in Sep 2010 were born in 2006, a year when the local maternity ward was widely reported to be running at full capacity. There was a mini baby-boom that year, apparently. One school was until recently under "special measures" (where central government intervenes because it doing so badly), so no-one wants to go there, increasing the pressure on other schools.

So parents were aware that their preferred school might be oversubscribed. To try and increase their chances of getting in to their preferred school, some parents have made a disastrous error:

They didn't list a second preference on their school admissions application form.

Their thinking being "Well, if I say I'd accept such-and-such as a second choice, that makes it seem I'm not too bothered about getting in to my preferred school. So I'll just put the one choice down, so they know I really, really want to go there."

This has backfired disastrously.

Many parents who haven't got into their preferred local school, and haven't expressed a second preference have just been allocated a place at any school which has space, which is (inevitably) a school few other parents want to go to.

The thing is, I am fairly certain from reading the official primary school admissions policy, that listing a second preference school has no effect on strength of your first preference. Those parents gained no advantage from leaving the second preference blank. But that's not clear from the school admissions policy document unless you read it very carefully, and have a long, hard think about it. Here is the crucial paragraph:

"For the main admission round, all on time preferences will be considered simultaneously and ranked in accordance with the admission criteria. If more than one school can offer a place, the parent’s highest stated preference will be allocated."

(emphasis mine)

The admission criteria are things like how far you live from the school, whether you already have a sibling at the school, and for religious schools whether you go to the right church. The admission criteria don't include whether you listed that school as your first or second choice. And certainly don't include whether or not you listed that school as your only choice.

That's reasonably straightforward, but the business of "considering all applications preferences simultaneously" is very hard to get your head around.

If the process considers all preferences simultaneously, for each school you are going to produce a ranked list of applicants (the ranking being determined by how far you live from the school, whether you already have a sibling at the school, etc.) with a mixture of first- and second-choice applicants in the list.

But the relevance of those second-choicers in the list depends on the the outcome of their first choice application. If they succeed in their first choice application, they don't need to be in the list for their second choice school. So first-choicers in that school will move up the ranking once you eliminate the second-choicers who already have a place elsewhere. But getting that place elsewhere will depend, in turn, on the continued presence of second choicers above them in the elsewhere-school list.

All parents I've asked about this think that preferences are not considered simultaneously. They think that all the first-choice applicants are ranked first. Then if there are any remaining places, the second choices are considered. If that's true, that would have an important implication: someone who'd otherwise be below you in the rankings (e.g. because they live further than you do from the school) could out outrank you because they put that school first choice, and you put it second choice.

That can't be how it works. And the policy does say:

"all on time preferences will be considered simultaneously"

But it is hard to see how "simultaneous" works, because you don't know how many places will be taken by high-ranking second-choicers until you know the outcome of their first choice. But you can't know the outcome of their first choice until you know the outcome of second-choicers ranking above them at their first choice school. And so on.

The only process I can think of which would work, and which is consistent with the description given in the policy, is an iterative process like this:

1. Rank all (i.e. first choice and second choice) applicants for each school according to the ranking criteria (distance from school, existing sibling at school, etc.). This gives a ranked list of applicants, with a mixture of first-choicers and second-choicers in the list.

2. Review all the lists and remove all those second-choicers who are already successful in their first choice school. Applicants previously below them in the rankings then move up.

3. Because some applicants have now moved up the rankings, they will now be successful in their first choice application, so you can ...

4. ... repeat from step 2 until there are no more second-choicers to remove.

If this interpretation is correct, then it should be explicitly described in the admissions policy and two really important points which should be printed in big, bold letters at the start of the policy:

Including a second choice does not weaken your chances of getting your first choice. Always include a second choice.

Your ranking for a school is not affected by whether you placed it as first choice or second choice. You can never be outranked by someone just because you put a school as second choice and they put it as their first choice.

I am not a lawyer. I am not an education expert. I'm just a parent who has read the policy quite carefully. The process described above, and my conclusions from it, are not described in this much detail anywhere in the admissions policy. They could be wrong. I just can't think of any other process that would work and be consistent with the description given in the policy.

I'll obviously ask the admissions team at Hampshire County Council, but I suspect it'll be a while before I get an answer. They will now be rather busy dealing with all the irate parents who (understandably) didn't spend two entire freaking days thinking about the policy and trying to get their heads around it, and so ended up with their child at the wrong school.

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New in KeepMeBooked: automated emails to your guests

We've just released a new feature in KeepMeBooked called "Automated Emails". You'll find it under Settings -> Automate Emails.

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Offline salesforce: expensive, sometimes intrusive, and not global

"In the offline world, rapport is built up by salespeople - taking customers off to lunch, buying them sports tickets, pestering them on the phone.

But that's expensive, sometimes intrusive, and not global."

From the weekend Financial Times, making me sound like I know what I am talking about.

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