I’m looking forward to seeing this in its finished state. The filmmaker is a student and is looking for donations to keep the project rolling.

StopBadware.org, the university-based consumer protection initiative developed to combat badware, announced today that Mozilla, creator of popular free and open source software such as Firefox, will become its newest sponsor. Mozilla joins Google, PayPal, Lenovo, VeriSign, AOL and Trend Micro in supporting the initiative led by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

“Firefox was developed through the collective knowledge of a community,” said Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of StopBadware.org and author of The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It. “We look forward to applying lessons of Mozilla’s open development process to our own efforts in fighting badware.”

Those efforts include research into how badware spreads online, an active community of users helping each other to keep their websites and computers protected, public alerts about new badware applications, and a clearinghouse of dangerous websites reported by StopBadware.org’s partners.

Canceling Netflix was as easy as signing up for Netflix. The feedback mechanism was spot-on, as well; the cancellation page included a survey to provide feedback on why I was leaving, and the reasons listed were clear and well thought-out, as well as being actual weaknesses with the service. For example: “I am disappointed with the technical quality (i.e.the software doesn’t work on my computer or I am a Mac/Apple computer user) of the “Watch Instantly” feature of the service where I can watch movies and TV episodes instantly on my PC.” Even the closing message was kind and well-written: “From all of us at Netflix, thank you for your patronage and we hope to have you as a customer again in the future.”

End result: I did cancel the subscription, but I still have positive feelings about Netflix, and would be willing to re-subscribe in the future.

But then, Rhapsody. Sigh. I assumed I could cancel online. I was wrong.

I did call, and the office was closed. So I had to call back from work, which meant either bugging my office-mates or holing up in conference room. So imagine this scene — I’m sitting in a cavernous, echo-y conference room, calling the Rhapsody people, going through a phone tree, waiting on hold, and then finally getting connected to a human. And, not surprisingly, this was a very unhelpful person. I don’t think it was necessarily her fault — she had to work from a pretty bad script. For example, she asked me why I wanted to cancel, and I explained that the Rhapsody website is very slow, that my libraries and playlists kept disappearing, and that there were consistent problems with the sign in process.

Rhapsody employee: “So… the service is not interesting to you?”
Me: “No. The service is broken.”

She either had to make a selection from a limited number of items, or her English wasn’t up to understanding what I meant. Either way, this would be filed as a Bad Customer Experience. I wanted to give my feedback and they didn’t want it or didn’t have a way to get it.

And then I got an email from Rhapsody, with a link to fill out a survey. I didn’t have time to respond immediately, so had to wait a couple of days. I really did want to let them know about the technical problems I was having as I thought it could be useful to them.

Alas.

I know they’re lying when they say they value my “time and opinions,” since they 1. wasted my time and 2. clearly aren’t enormously interested in my opinions.

End result: I will never re-subscribe to Rhapsody and would dissuade anyone else from joining. I had been on the fence about it, but no longer.

Subscription services generally see a large percentage of their subscribers cancel and return. Why antagonize people who are canceling? They are a lot more likely to return as customers than the average web user. Making customers jump through hoops to cancel won’t keep them leaving, but it sure will keep them from wanting to come back.

Oh, and the vegetables we’ve been getting every week from Terra Firma Farm are amazing.

Here’s what he had to say about how the winners used usability research to build superior products:

Usability Methods: Cheap but Contextual

The winning designs are revolutionary, but there’s nothing revolutionary about the usability methods employed to ensure their quality. The teams used well-known and long-established usability methods that I’ve advocated for decades.

These winning methods deviate from most companies’ usability efforts in two key ways:

• Most winners used a very rapid approach to usability, emphasizing small-N user testing and paper prototypes to generate user feedback before investing in coding. Several teams squeezed a large amount of usability work into a budget of only 80 hours. This is perfectly reasonable, and proof that good results can come from small investments — as long as the designers actually follow the user research findings.
• Many winners conducted field studies or other forms of contextual research in the workplace. After all, when you’re designing mission-critical software for print shops, you need to move your precious behind out of the office and into some real print shops.

Vote early! Vote often! And if we make it, come prepared with good questions!

Said friend writes: “That’s a charmingly normal distribution… I love it when, every now and then, data turns out exactly like you want it to… I actually know what’s going on in the data, and what X and Y represent… I just can’t talk about it.”

I’m intrigued.

(Another great find from Kristin.)