The Web Tools You Know

My recent job change has got me thinking about the tools I choose to do common tasks, and how these can influence customer experience.

The clever amongst you are probably already doing this, but it dawned on me recently when I needed to produce a quick sitemap at work.

Usually I reach for OmniGraffle, then spend the next two hours getting increasingly frustrated because it doesn’t do what I want.

It’s not fair of me to blame the tool¹ but I can blame my inexperience with it.

I remembered a blog post I had seen ages ago, and after a little time spent with Google I found just what I needed.

SlickMap is a clever little CSS file that takes semantic HTML lists and turns them into great looking sitemaps.

It took a few tweaks to the CSS but within half an hour I had finished the sitemap. It was quick because I know HTML and CSS really well, much better than I know any other tools.

Web Based Documents

The next example of this occurred the other day. I needed to produce a work proposal for a possible client.

Usually I would use Pages, because it’s designed for making documents. It makes sense, but I still end up wasting time floundering with something I don’t know well enough.

This time I decided HTML and CSS were the right tools for the job. Instead of messing with header styles I wrote semantic HTML and then styled it with consistent CSS. It does the job a Pages document would.

The type is set to a baseline grid, the document is viewable on mobile devices, it has a “clickable” table of contents and I can even see how many people have looked at it using Google Analytics.

These are bonuses, things that wouldn’t be possible with a normal document, but I get for free, by using the tools I know. It’s also going to be easy for the client to pass this single link around. It’s got a good looking print version and a link to a PDF version so hopefully everyone will get a better experience from it.

The Bigger Picture

We spend a lot of time thinking about the web and how to provide the best possible user experience.

Just recently I have also been thinking about how to provide a fantastic customer experience.

It’s becoming clear that we all need to take advantage of the web, and our knowledge of the former to improve the latter. Customers are users too.