New QuestionPoint Flash Interface: LiB's Review

Over a week ago, I took a look at the new QuestionPoint Flash interface for their web-based chat product.  This is supposedly rolling out in February to all of us using the QuestionPoint 24/7 software for our web-based chat reference services.  I sent my responses to the new interface, at QuestionPoint's request.  I also asked for a response, and never got one.  I wanted to wait for one before I posted my thoughts on the new interface, but I think that 10 days is ample time to expect at least a "hallo, we got your message" response.  So, without further ado, here's what's wrong with the new QuestionPoint Flash interface:

Librarian-side
1. Lettering throughout the librarian-side interface is cut off at the bottom (the librarian’s user name, patron's last message, time, text).
2. There was a huge delay between when I send in the patron question and when it appeared on the librarian’s queue (2 minutes).
3. When first picking up a patron, there is a long delay (30 seconds) between the time I pick the patron up and the time I see the patron’s question in the chat window.
5. There is a noticeable delay between the time I type and when those letters appear on the screen.
6. The tab where all your current sessions are taking place (My Active) needs to in some way be highlighted—perhaps with a different font color.  This is where we’ll be doing most of our work, so it needs to be obvious that this is the important part of the screen.
7. You cannot use “Enter” to send a message.  This absolutely must be fixed.
8. I was sending messages and they took about 2 minutes before they showed up in the librarian-side "live" transcript.  They seemed to appear in the user’s live transcript faster.
9. No IP address showed up for me as a patron.  Is that a problem that is going to be fixed before launch?
10. When I clicked on Console (the co-browse feature), nothing happened.

Patron side
1. If there is no one available for chat, the message window the patron gets has a broken image in the upper left.
2. You cannot use “Enter” to send a message.  This absolutely must be fixed.
3. The time codes next to each chat message are not only useless, it’s distracting and potentially confusing to the user.
4. The name for our library is abbreviated to “MARIN CNTY FREE LIBR” in what the user sees.  Is there a character limit?  Is this why it’s so abbreviated?  If this can be changed, I think it should be.  Very bad form to mangle your customers’ names.
5. I have some serious problems with the message the user receives via e-mail.   QuestionPoint automatically creates a brand new user account for the patron.  I didn't see anything on the patron intake form that would indicate this would happen.  Our patrons will not be happy if a new account is just created willy nilly for them without their consent.  This would be a major customer service issue.  Why does an account have to be created?  That has never been the case before.  Also, the message began with junk characters ().  Why?  Furthermore, this message said my chat transcript had been sent to the e-mail address, but it had not.  Only this "new account" e-mail.

Other
1. Transcripts now kept for 90 days—used to be 30 (when we were using 24/7 software).  I don't want to keep patron data for 90 days.
2. Problems like “you can’t use the back button on the browser” have not been fixed.

I also attended a QuestionPoint user forum today using LiveMeeting, and here are some interesting things that came out of that:
1.  They're testing it for browser & OS compatability.  The speaker didn't know for sure, but it sounds like they're only testing for Mac, Unix, and Windows (not Palm or Linux) and for IE, Firefox, and Mozilla (not Safari, Opera, or any other browser).
2. It was said that they "working toward" accessibilitly and ADA compliance.  I asked which standards they're using (508, W3C) and didn't get a response.
3. Co-browsing can still only be done in Internet Explorer.

So, what was right with the new interface?
1.  The new librarian-to-librarian IM is integrated into the chat console
2.  It's unicode compliant
3.  Simplified queue selection (right now I'm  picking and choosing from a list of 15 different queues).

All in all though, I'm really disappointed.  I know they're still working on it, but these are huge massive problems and if it launches as-is, there's no way I'm using it as a librarian or promoting it to our patrons.  No way in Hades.