Some would say the answer is obvious. But it’s always worth remembering that processes seemingly designed to frustrate the customer are not limited by sector or organisation. Here’s a tale of convoluted customer service with rather a surprising punchline. Though here is another, more seasonal, story which shows another approach altogether.
The skill of a pilot is in bringing vertical speed to zero just at the landing point. The skill of a bell ringer is in bringing rotational speed to zero just at the balance point. The skill of managing change is in making the rate of change as close to zero as possible at the [...]
Many years ago, I used to work with somebody who in a previous life had been a restaurant manager. One of the lessons she had taken from that experience was how to say goodbye. At the beginning of a restaurant meal, people are where they want to be. They are there for an experience, and [...]
When I was 17, my first proper paid job was in the public library just down the road from the Elephant and Castle. It was the first time I had come across large print books. They had their own section, and there was a huge demand for them. But though it was much more intensely [...]
This apparently ordinary station on the Berlin U-Bahn is remarkable for two reasons, one visible and one not visible at all. The first is fairly apparent. The typeface of the station name and the brown tiles give a clue, though the full splendour of the orange ceiling doesn’t really come across in the picture. This [...]
Sitting in a meeting on user interface design, which might or might not have tipped over into being about user centred design, but seemed at little risk of drifting into user experience design, my mind began to wander. Unaccountably, a passage from the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy drifted to the front of my [...]
Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat – what will make people happy – is to ask them. And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people [...]
The old streets of Saltaire Village / Paul Stevenson / CC BY 2.0 As you triple the number of employees, their productivity drops by half.* That arresting fact is the starting point for a superb blog post by Dave Gray on the connected company, in which he explores the question of why companies appear to [...]
Yesterday, in a moment of distraction, I put the wrong password into my office smartcard three times, causing it to lock up. There are two ways of sorting that out. One is to go cap in hand to the IT support people, and wait while they do mysterious things on phone and screen, feeling mildly [...]
Yesterday, as I was going down the stairs on the bus, it jerked to a halt and I nearly lost my balance. It often happens and, as usual, it wasn’t a sudden and necessary reaction to traffic: we had simply arrived at the bus stop. There are some bus drivers whose driving style is calculated [...]