Apple's Mac App Store: Licensing info: needs improvement!

This post is about something specific, but the concepts are general:

When presenting a license to an end user, make it fully accessible.

What does this mean? A couple things, at least:

1. Allow text to be selected. I'd like to be able to copy and paste either sections or the whole content to another format, for easier reading, making notes, bookmarks, etc.
2. Make it easy to print. Sometimes, it's just easier to read things in hard-copy. Especially if one wants to take notes, read things somewhere quiet and distraction-free, or the like.

There are probably more, too. And certainly Apple has other issues with the way they do licensing. For example iTunes. Every single time an update to iTunes comes out -- or at least it seems this way to me -- the user is forced to agree to a license again.

Presumably, the license has changed only a little bit, if at all. So why do I need to read pages and pages of license agreement each time?

Well, why do I, you may be asking? Because in theory, clicking "agree" means that I have done so. If they would provide me a summary of changes, this would be so much easier to do. Better yet, stop presenting it except when it's changed, and try not to change it often.

I could go on and on, and it's not just Apple... but Apple being a company that I'm a frequent customer of, and having some poor policies in my mind, they're the top of my list right now of annoying licensing practices.

Steve Jobs or someone: Please put some attention on this, and get your lawyers to work on making this more user-friendly. Don't worry, they won't mind too much: it's more work for them. :-P

Why skilled support staff is better than outsourcing

A lot of places are outsourcing support, these days, or so I keep hearing (and from time to time having evidence of).

And I just recently had a support experience where the software to support my on-line real-time chat was outsourced, even though the actual support person was not. But as it happens, the experience was problematic in other ways, that I won't bother going into -- another person at the company was able to clear things up quite nicely. My point of telling you all this, though, is just to point out why I came to the following conlusion:

Skilled support staff is better than non-skilled support staff

This probably especially applies to outsourced support staff, as I imagine they're most likely to be following a script, rather than actually understanding the problem(s) that customers are facing.

And here's the reason:

Someone who actually has a chance of understanding the customer in detail, is going to be achieving "habit 5" from the seven habits of highly effective people[1] -- and most importantly, in my mind, not even just the understanding part of it, but that the customer feels understood. Because feeling understood opens you up to then having a good interaction with someone, instead of just battling to try to get your point understood. (Granted, the customer can try to apply habit 5, but in my experience, it's really really hard to do with someone who's trying to read from a script.)

So yeah, to my mind, having scripted support (outsourcing or no) is a recipe for frustrated customers... which of course means customers who are that much more likely to become former customers, and that much less likely to encourage others to become new customers.

So, hire the best in your support staff, and train them well -- on the tech side and on communications. It's better for the customer, and, in the long run, better for your organization, as well.

At least that's how I see it.

[1] Note: I'm linking to the wikipedia article, instead of a direct link to the book, because, while I think Covey's material is great, I'd really prefer that you didn't buy his book. He's an active member of the LDS Church, which presumably means he tithes to (or otherwise financially supports) that organization, and I have a strong desire to avoid helping them out in any way (which is the subject of another post -- I'll try to remember to update this post with a link to it, if/when I ever write it).