Blog: What is your user trying to accomplish?
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This month we have some humorous commentary from Menlo's good friend, Mark Rosenthal, around how important it is to understand your users. Enjoy!
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A few weeks ago I was checking into a small boutique hotel that had an automated kiosk key box in the lobby.
After a few rounds of having the passcode they had given me get rejected, followed by an automated voice repeating, "Please identify yourself", and then calling the phone number to find out they had given me the wrong passcode, I encountered this screen (shown in the photo above).
I'm trying to check into the hotel. I encounter two options:
Neither of those seems to work. I'm not returning(?), and I don't want to check out.
To make things more interesting, the arrows seem to point in the opposite direction. "Check Out" has an arrow pointing up, "Return" has an arrow pointing down.
Feeling adventurous, I pressed "Check Out".
AH!
"Check Out" means "check out your key" not "check out of the hotel", though the arrow seems to show what I (the guest) am trying to do, go "in".
I'll just say that the rest of the process was about as intuitive as this step.
Speculating a bit, since this system is about key management, the people who designed the user interface were probably taking the perspective of someone who wants to either check out or return their keys, and built that UI accordingly.
But the task I am trying to accomplish is to check IN to the hotel. Only part of that process involves getting my key.
Menlo's High-Tech Anthropology® process begins with context—asking what the user, the primary persona, is trying to accomplish, and then designing a user interface to guide them through accomplishing that task.
Each story card is written to specify what the user will be able to do, not what the software does.
In your business systems, how much of your systems training involves words that describe what the words on the screen actually mean in that context?
If it isn't obvious, it isn't a training problem, it is a user interface problem.
In this case, it was a good laugh. But words mean things, and our choice of words and symbols can make the difference between a smooth interaction and a tragic mistake. |
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Everybody Needs a Pizza Tracker!
The importance of transparency for your customers
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We’ve always believed in giving our clients transparency and visibility into their projects, and we’re not the only ones! In the early 2000s, Domino’s Pizza (also founded and headquartered here in Ann Arbor!) was not known for having very good pizza (taste tests had them tied last with Chuck E. Cheese). A new CEO, Patrick Doyle, was soon appointed to try to improve Domino's ratings. He came in with a radical idea: admit their pizza sucked and show customers how they were changing.
From the start of their transformation, Domino’s realized that giving customers visibility into their pizza making process was vital. This led them to create the pizza tracker, a seemingly simple innovation that played no small part in helping the company turn around. Customers were given unprecedented visibility into the status of their order, so all mystery of what was going on disappeared at a glance. The impact of the pizza tracker was huge—we’ve had multiple potential clients come in and ask us to help them build a pizza tracker, but for their business!
We’re not surprised that Domino’s saw massive success after prioritizing transparency. While we don't have a pizza tracker at Menlo, we value being as transparent as possible. When it comes to our clients, we work in tight feedback loops, meeting weekly or bi-weekly to allow the client to interact with the work completed in the last iteration, as well as visually plan the work for the next iteration. We extend that same openness to our visitors as well. Through our tours and workshops, we invite people to experience how Menlo works firsthand, and we’re always happy to answer questions and share the thinking behind what we do.
If you want to hear more about the lessons learned from Domino’s impressive turnaround and how they got there, check out the article linked below from The Hustle!
Read the full article here!
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Dancing Robot Gone Rogue
An unexpected AI issue...
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This month, we’re sharing a lighter (and slightly chaotic) AI moment: a dancing robot gone rogue!
You may have seen this on the news, but if not, please enjoy this video of a robot at a hot pot restaurant getting a little out of control with its dance moves. Restaurant workers had to restrain this dancing robot after it got too close to a table and began knocking items off while dancing. Words can’t quite describe this robot’s passion and determination to the performance.
Watch the video here!
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Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
Author: Charles Munger
Recommended by: Andrew Muyanja, Head of Sales and Principal High-Tech Anthropologist®
If you’re looking for a book recommendation, my favorite so far this year is Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charles Munger.
There’s a lot of wisdom in this book, but the two things that stood out to me the most are:
1. Inversion as a problem solving technique. Charlie borrows this from German Mathematician Carl Jacobi.
2. A section at the end that Charlie calls The Psychology of Human Misjudgment. He discusses several “psychological tendencies” that lead to bad outcomes. I found these helpful to ponder.
Enjoy!
Grab a copy here!
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We recently ran an experiment to improve one of our project’s kick off meetings. In a typical project iteration, we have a weekly kick off meeting to discuss issues and make sure we’re on the same page before starting work for the week. For this project, we realized we were focusing too much of our time on fixing small, weekly issues, but not addressing any of the root problems.
For the last couple of years, we have been using EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) to better organize our business functions and business-level issues that need to be solved. We realized we also could pull from this structure to better organize this project’s kick off meetings!
Earlier this year, we held a kickoff with the broader team to discuss project direction at a higher level. We identified Menlo’s EOS experience with rocks (quarterly priorities set in a concrete goal) as a model to follow, and created a rock for the project. Once the rock was created, project direction quickly became much clearer. We had regularly scheduled kickoff meetings where instead of talking about a set of small, disparate issues, conversations centered around how we could achieve the goal set by the rock. We also came up with, then acted on, a series of experiments that could help us push towards completing the rock.
You may be surprised with what you can learn from other parts of your business when you look carefully! Opportunities may be hidden in plain sight.
Stay tuned for more updates on this experiment!
Have you recently ran an experiment? Email us!
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