Technical woes

So when I think of Switzerland, I think of everything working well; I guess I expected everything technical to run like the fabled Swiss watches. And many things do work extremely well. Especially the public transportation which runs all the time and can take you anywhere. And of course, all of the rules mean that things are pretty neat and tidy here. The place we have endless aggravation is online. The Swiss seem to be embracing the trend of charging for telephone or in-person service and turning customers toward internet services. However, the websites don't work like they do in the US. Even Markus is finding the websites very hard to navigate, and it is not uncommon to come to a website which never seems to link you to the promised service. For example, one should be able to buy all sorts of train and transport tickets online, but getting from the schedule of trains to the buying of a particular ticket is really difficult. Unlike customer websites in the US, the websites here don't take you directly from what you are looking at (the schedule or products) to a shopping cart when you can proceed to a pay point and be done. Instead mostly you have to go to a separate link to buy something, which means somehow remembering what it is you wanted. Unlike US travel sites where you can pick and choose various alternate destinations or routes or carriers, the sites here make you add the parts of travel up for yourself. We have found this sort of clunkiness to be the same on lots of German websites as well.

So, of course I have a theory about this! Markus tells a story of how he has worked with websites in different cultures that support different kinds of cultural-internet norms. For example, he says that Google has been less successful in South Korea because its search page is so plain. Apparently the cultural norm that South Koreans prefer for their websites is lots of flashing lights and pictures and music. In otherwords, they seem to like the web to look like the nighttime lights in Seoul. (note, this is my own interpretation of Markus' comments!)

So maybe Germans and Swiss prefer their interactions on the web to feel more like living in Germany or Switzerland: constrained by rules and less subject to wild individualism. Ok, I'm joking here. But maybe Germans and Swiss like to safeguard against making mistakes online, and so they don't want their interactions there to be subject to a quick click, and "you're done!" Maybe what feels like clunkiness to me (savvy shopper that I am!) is reassuring in a culture where commercial decisions are made more carefully, less impulsively. Perhaps six months here will have the same effect on my shopping habits. Certainly I have yet to make any impulse purchase!