Visualize usage from start to finish for a complete customer experience.
The auditors
were at a remote site auditing the books of a client. Work was going well the
first day until one of them had to use the restroom. He recoiled at the messy,
moist bar of soap in the restroom, and resolved to never go there again. Interestingly,
it was the first thing he checked before attempting to use the restroom.
Handwashing
workflow wasn’t something openly discussed socially or professionally except
perhaps by those looking for clean restrooms during road trips or on consulting
gigs. Some entities like Buc-ee’s and Busy Bee anchor their value proposition
on clean restrooms. It was only a couple of decades later that touchless
designs for restroom fixtures became the expectation when the Covid19 pandemic
hit.
Washing
hands to prevent infection was not a highlighted design feature of customer
experiences until then. It was probably limited to surgical theaters and the
medical establishment, with, as I recall, a chapter devoted to handwashing and
infectious diseases in a book by Dr. Atul Gawande.
When an
establishment promises a certain experience, it behooves them to think through
every step of the experience to ensure that the promise holds until the
experience is complete. Understanding the context in which a product or service
is used is thus important.
A touchless
soap dispenser with a touchless faucet is pointless if a customer is trapped
behind a door that can’t be opened in the same touchless manner. The whole
point of washing one’s hands is to be able to leave the place with uncontaminated
hands.
There is an
important lesson in this simple, yet serious design flaw that can be applied to
any industry, product or service.
When a
completely knocked-down furniture packaged is picked up, if the promise is that
all required tools will be inside the package then every piece of the puzzle
must be thought through. Better yet, designers must personally experience it to
know how to offer completeness to that anxious student assembling her furniture
the midnight before the start of the school year.
When a
product is shipped with instructions for assembly, but one part or tool is
missing, it’s not just the missing piece, but rather the frustration and
helplessness felt that gets attached to a brand.
Dr. Atul
Gawande’s also wrote about checklists. Working with a checklist of design
elements in ensuring that a customer experience is fully visualized from
beginning to end will separate a winning product from the ones that result in
causing a customer deep regret.
A product
must not only be complete, but feel complete, and a customer must know that it
will be completely ready for use. Customers do not pay for a work-in-progress. Checklists,
dry runs and visualizations of a complete customer experience help. Even
better, until the process is perfected shadow the customers as they use your
product or service and tweak it to perfection.
