Ever changing
True. Yes, you’re right (and - almost obviously) I’m wrong. But I have at least a couple of reasons to explain you why I haven’t blogged in a month; at a second look I’d say it’s just one reason: I love a constant change feeling to fulfill my life.
Point one. Professional life: officially speaking I’ll take a new role as manager at Gabetti with a brand new team reporting to me and a whole new task to supervise the whole servers+security+network side of our infrastructure.
If you know me or read this blog since some time you might know that my carrier/experience path (programmer turned web designer turned project manager turned interaction specialist turned researcher turned again project manager) has in the years just lightly touched the “hardware” side of the thing, so it’s going to be exciting finding a way to manage all this new knowledge that will flow into my mind in the forthcoming weeks.
Point two. Personal life: even if in our original path our current home would have been “current” for at least something like 10 years this summer (5 years in our counting) we bought a new and bigger one in the Brianza area near Milan. We’re currently restructuring it from the ground up but you might take a look at how it’s going to appear once ready (caveat: our architect designed the home, but the Floorplanner version and its mistakes are completely mine.
Thesis: I’ll try to post as frequently as I can, but need to suspend my pact with you. For a while at least.
Creating the helpdesk experience
We all have, sooner or later depenging on how you feel lucky, a frightening story about helpdesks: labyrintic menus, looping hold-on messages, and ultra-dumb helpdesk guys (ever felt that strange experience when every guy you talk to asks the same identical question before passing your call to the next one?).
Believe me, I’ve always been kinda unlucky with helpdesks. Unfortunately. So I was happy my first day at Gabetti to discover I would have worked shoulder to shoulder with a small helpdesk team serving our 1000 agencies on IT related problems.
Back in June 2006 the only way to contact the helpdesk was to give a call to a phone number behind which laied an exchange that took care of the call forwarding to the first free operator. In other words the process was something like
- call the number
- stay at least 15 mins (if you’re the lucky boy) on hold
- explain your problem to the operator (other 15 mins, at least)
- wait until the IT team solves your problem
A syncronous helpdesk is a waste of time for everybody: for who has the problem and for those who solve it.
Then we started innovating the technology and the processes below the IT helpdesk; our keyword was “asyncronous”.
The first step was to provide the support team and our users with a web interface, with proper problems sections, to communicate and manage tickets. We’re really really happy with the open source software OTRS which could be managed both via email and web and is plenty with personalizations.
That was an important shift from syncronous to asyncronous assistace which brought some interesting features to our helpdesk structure:
- Our clients wouldn’t have to wait for a free operator to communicate their problems anymore
- We have the power to simultaneously close a large number of tickets in the very moment (that is to say make more users happy in less time)
- We can prioritize problems (both basing on the quantity and quality data of our users’ problems)
With just this change we obtained a huge (nearly half an hour) speed up of the ticket opening. Not bad, huh?
But the we moved fast forward both from the technology and process points of view: we rolled out Gabi, our Virtual Assistant, back in July to manage the whole help desk front-line and, more recently, we choosed to prioritize our asyncronous tools (such has gabi itself and the online helpdesk) by cutting the telephone helpdesk times from 8 to 3 hours a day.
Even if this strong move towards the asyncronous life style hasn’t already showed its entire potential the results are huge: the mean life time of each ticket is now something less than 1.5 days and the monthly helpdesk performance has gained full 44 man hours (which is something more than the Italian equivalent of the work week).
Gabetti site redesign - BETA version online
Just 8 months ago the Gabetti website looked as picted below, starting from July 2006 we worked hard to publish a brand new website with all the bells and whistles a website should have in 2007 (XHTML+CSS, accessibility, cool interfaces, some ajax magic, usability and a little bit of web2.0ness). The first result was a dead-man-walking, low budget version of the site created in a couple of weeks and useful to convey the Group new identity.
I’m now honoured to announce that, after a long & working hard weekend we published this night the redesigned version of the Gabetti Property Solutions Agency website and the brand new version of the Gabetti Group website (disclaimer: Gabetti is the real estate group yours truly works for).
From the very beginning we wanted the interfaces to be user compliant and the whole wireframing and mockuping phases to be striclty user centred: a lot of work both from Nurun (the agency that developed the site) and us was spent into this. Moreover, we performed a full optional eye tracking study on all the interfaces throughout the whole design phase, a tough job that rewarded us with great usability, at last - I’ll talk about the study once we formally publish it.
This is a beta version and a lot of work needs to be done in the forthcoming month. I’ll update you on major releases here, preparing for the official launch by owr very own Marketing department.
Stay tuned. Stay foolish.
Idearium: new season now online
Idearium is the premiere interaction design online magazine in Italy; since year 2001 the site has gathered a strong community of designers, usability experts, managers, programmers and smart people and it has its derivations in the Interaction Frontiers event organized by your truly and Leeander (the founder of Idearium).
In its 6th year Ideairum comes with a brand new site and a whole innovative SecondLife presence on a nice islet with all the things you need to spend some good time among friends.
The islet will be properly open during Turin Barcamp 06, just click on this SLurl and join the party.
Getting things done
Ok. Let’s say I’m plenty with things to blog, so that I’ll have to summarize a little bit.
Research: I had the Innovazione+ technical commitee meeting this wednesday and I have to say we came out with some REALLY interesting ideas to be presented to the next IST FP6 call. One of those is based on something we’ve been researching for the last couple of months to support ageing population (cannot say more, sorry); it’s going to be a tough competition but we’re really working hard to win those funds.
Interaction design institute: I’ve been invited today by Aram Armstrong to attend to the IDI thesis presentations next monday. I’m looking forward to listen to the Open Builder project by Vinay Venkatraman: a prototype of a tactile browser for sight-impaired people.
I’m also going to meet with Fabio Sergio for the second time in the same months, this is a guinness that’ll be partied with a Guinness.
I’m also managing a tough delivery for a whole site redesign. It’s going live tomorrow (let’s say: before tomorrow night). Some serious debug to be done. Damn.
