With Great Transparency Comes Not Being Pissed Off About Waiting
We Can’t Always Remove Wait Times, But We Can Make Them Suck Less
I spent some time this weekend biking around Philly and even stopping off at a small pop-up beer garden at Philadelphia’a Cherry Blossom festival, which was great. After ordering some drinks, I went back up to wait for a pretzel we had ordered from the kitchen. Unfortunately, they were backed up with a lot of other orders and I ended up standing there for maybe 15 or 20 minutes before my order came out. Not a huge deal, but that’s time I could have spent chatting with friends—if I had known my place in the cue.
This brought to mind a recent discovery:
What’s missing from the most annoying waiting experiences is communication and transparency.
This was my group’s* realization in a recent design challenge at Jefferson University’s UX Gathering. We were tasked with devising solutions that would improve waiting experiences, specifically for patients waiting to see a doctor.
The most frustrating things about waiting usually stem from a lack of understanding about how long you’re going actually going to be waiting. If you’re told ahead of time so you can plan accordingly, the wait doesn’t blindside you. Even better is if you can check your status as you wait.
Improving transparency and communication around a customer’s wait empowers them to spend that time as they wish.
Waiting for that pretzel would not have mattered if I knew it was going to be 15 minutes or so at the start. That knowledge would have given me the freedom to just come back in 10 or 12 minutes instead of standing there like a mildly annoyed dummy. :)
I think this perspective can help designers create systems that remove some of the worst friction from the customer experience.
*Also in my group: Abigail Seligsohn, Babs Hansen, sarika joglekar, Sarah Aranda
