Total Customer Experience (Read 2566 times)

I used to work for a small company, until EMC bought it back in March. During the orientation/assimilation process, they pointed out to us that EMC has a lot of abbreviations and we only needed to know two. One of them is "TCE" and I had forgotten about the other one. So much for being a good worker bee. TCE stands for "Total Customer Experience". It represents EMC's general attitude toward customers; that we should do everything we can to ensure their satisfaction. While my budget for this site is not even a rounding error of EMC's postage costs, I still need to treat the site as a business, and you as my customers. As I add more features to the site, I neglected some other areas. Starting with the update that added avatars, I tried to rectify the situation. One of the areas I failed to improve is the online help. Although I tried to make everything intuitive, I'm sure it's still not as obvious to some users. Some of the pages used to have question marks in blue circles next to certain data fields. When you hover over one, a little help box appears. The main disadvantage of this type of help is that their location may not be ideal, or they might interfere with the text and controls in the area. They are also somewhat unsightly. On the forum preferences page, you may notice that certain words are underlined with a dotted line. When you hover your cursor over it, the cursor changes to contain a question mark, and a tooltip style box appears with an explanation of the underlined text. I borrowed the idea from Google map's API documentation. I find it less obtrusive, as well as localizing the help. Now you know exactly what the help is for, instead of guessing it by its proximity to other text in the area. The plan is to add this type of help to every page on the site. Another idea for user hints that I played with also appeared in the forum options page. Instead of telling the users that they have exceeded the maximum character limit when they save the page, the character count will be displayed next to the text box. I do like the way it looks and works, so I'll be adding it to other text boxes on the site. Writing web pages and being a webmaster are still relatively new for me. I intend to smooth out the rough edges on the site to reach that supposed TCE. If you have suggestions on how to make this site easier to use, or how to make it look more professional, I would love to hear them. eric

Writing web pages and being a webmaster are still relatively new for me.

It does not show! You have a great site! Awesome work!!! T

Seriously Eric, I've become addicted to this webpage. I love everything you do to it!! You're great!