Chuck McKinnon sent me the following review of the new Canadian ePost service.
(January 2000)
Canada Post has begun offering an electronic post office at http://www.epost.ca. The concept is terrific: we Canucks will soon be able to receive all our bank statements, utility and credit-card bills, and assorted other correspondence (all with a Canada Post authenticating security watermark) online. No more wasted paper, and we can access the E-Post site from any 128-bit capable browser. Because I believe this is a worthwhile development and this is the first national electronic post office I know of, I thought a single-user preliminary evaluation might be interesting to your readers.
Unfortunately, it's the same old story: slick looks trumped usability. I highly doubt the site has ever been usability tested. A list of problems follows:
When you register, your username/password comes via snail mail: This seems preposterous for an electronic service, although I suppose they felt this was necessary to avoid fraud; since one can choose to receive e-post exclusively in lieu of paper mail, Canada Post must ensure that Joe Blow really does live at 123 Maple Lane before letting him stop the physical delivery of the gas bill. Each username and password is sent to a physical address so that only the real residents of that address can modify their mail delivery. Still, an interim password that enabled one to look around the site and get familiar with it would be most useful.
The entire page refreshes when opening, closing or deleting mail: Each user gets a mailbox ("My Mailbox") for managing mail. After opening or closing a mail item, the entire screen refreshes just so a cutesy little envelope icon at the end of each message title can appear open or closed. I'm on a cable connection, and the lag time to reload the whole page annoyed me; imagine how their customers on dialup connections feel. Do they think that little graphic is worth wasting our time?
Poor graphic size and colour choice: By making the open/close/delete icons next to each mail item graphical, and by colouring them red, they've been rendered almost unreadable to people using high-resolution displays (I run 1280 x 1024 with a browser window of roughly 800 x 600). If they'd used coloured, hyperlinked text instead of a graphic icon for these buttons, not only would they load faster but I would be able to increase the font size if I so chose. This is the part of the site most of the people will probably use most often, and its usability is atrocious. I'm a publication manager used to reading minuscule type across multiple spreads on my monitor, and even I had to squint and lean closer to make out what the buttons said. Imagine how their older users feel.
No system status when searching for company names: One cool feature of e-post is that users get to choose which companies can send them mail, and even what type of mail (ads, bills, correspondence, catalogs). The e-post system is brand new and many companies aren't yet part of it. Users can go to a "Future Sender Request List" page and select names of companies they'd like to see. I expect Canada Post intends this to use this as a big e-petition when recruiting companies (6,534 of your customers want you here...). The website opens a separate browser window for this page, but it hides the status line at the bottom which provides feedback about the page's download progress. So I searched three times for one company name and got frustrated because the "search results" screen came up blank the first two times. What I didn't know was that the results were still loading. And how could I have known? Everything else on the page loads before the search results do, and nowhere are users told "loading results..."
All OK buttons must be clicked with the mouse: Why? Users have to find the mouse and then aim for a tiny little button instead of just punching Enter. AltaVista and Google know better than to do this; why does E-Post think they can get away with it?
No email link on the customer service page! Believe it or not... on both the Customer Service and Help pages, there are two possibilities: a 1-877 number and a fax. When I called to ask why on Earth an electronic postal website lacked an email address, the customer service rep said surprisedly: "But there is a feedback link -- it's on the first page!" There is such a link, as it turns out -- but from deep inside the site, there's no link back to the homepage, and that's still no reason not to include an email address on the two pages (Customer Service and Help) where people are most likely to look for one.
Canada Post is a world leader in this concept; it's a shame to see it so poorly executed. It took only fifteen minutes of me poking around the site to unearth the above problems (and several others besides); it took another 45 minutes to document my experience. Think of what an exponential gain in usability could have been realized if Canada Post had conducted a one-day test with half-a-dozen test subjects, before opening the site to the public.
Jakob's Comments
Sounds like Canada Post goofed up on several aspects of this site.
Regarding the search response times, the biggest improvement would obviously be to upgrade the server. Just imagine how slow it will be when more Canadians start using the system. But even with a faster server, they still need to respect Web standards and allow users a normal browser window that provides things like a download progress indicator in a well-understood manner.
It is usually wrong to open new windows. It is even more wrong to make such new windows appear without the standard control. (The exception being windows to contain functionality applets that are not really Web content but downloaded software with its own UI.)
Regarding the passwords: I agree that instant gratification is the foundation of the Web user experience. On the other hand, one also appreciates the need for extra security for a system that tries to verify the real-world identity of somebody.
My preferred solution would be for Canada Post to set up pre-defined accounts for all their known customers and to mail them a physical letter announcing the system and informing them of their initial userid and password. Whether they have a database of all addressees is unknown, but I bet that they do as part of their junk mail service.