How my mother’s cafe taught me the fundamentals of working in software
My mother owns a small cafe in my hometown. The Blue Cafe is quaint, homely and in its 14 years of running, has become famous locally for its breakfasts. During our teens and up until we finished college, my sister and I worked every weekend and summer in the cafe.
Besides being taught a fervent work ethic, I’ve come to realise that my mother showed me the fundamentals of creating an excellent customer experience. It was these teachings that I could (unknowingly) use in my future career in UX Research for a software company.
Although I learned many things during this time, I’ve decided to highlight two of the more important teachings in this post:
Knowing your users is crucial for creating a delightful service
This is what changes your business from having a passing-trade where users are disengaged and likely to churn, to a regular trade with active and loyal users. Creating an ongoing, regular trade has become the “bread and butter” of my mother’s business.
It’s not an easy feat to get right but in any business, the way to do this successfully is by being personal. Learn who your customers are. Talk to them. Build rapport. Understand their unmet needs and uncover their pain points. Find out what they like, what they don’t like and everything in-between.
In the cafe, this meant knowing the customers by their order and also by their idiosyncrasies. In a software company, you can begin to learn who your users are just by looking at their behaviour (aka what they do & don’t do within your product).
A regular interaction on a busy Saturday morning between myself (the waitress) and my mother (the chef) would be:
Me: “Um, there’s a man at table six who just nodded and winked at me when I asked him what he would like to order. Any ideas?”
Mum: “Oh thats Tom. He’s double bacon, beans, mushrooms and hash browns. Brown bread, not toast. Make sure he gets a seat at table 6 once that couple are finished — he likes to be beside the window.”
or
Me: “I’m going to get that ladies order now in one sec….”
Mum: “Mary likes an open brown-bread sandwich with curried chicken. She’ll take her coffee AFTER her breakfast. She likes to read the paper after she eats.”
I can look back fondly at these encounters now but this was a real life example of observing user behaviour and adapting your service to give the best experience possible to your customers.
As a researcher, I’m constantly interviewing customers so I can unearth what their pain points and unmet needs are. This is how you can then iterate and improve your products to become more than a piece of software, but a utility in someone’s day-to-day life.
I also spend time observing user behaviour around how our products are used (or not used) and interview these users so that I can understand the motivations behind their actions.
If my mother hadn’t observed how Mary let her coffee go cold when she first came into the cafe, and then briefly talked to her about it, she would have missed out on creating a delightful future experience for that customer.
That’s how I think about research — if you’re not doing it, then you’re missing out.
Having empathy is essential, acting on it is even more so
If you’re naturally empathic, you’ll feel when a person is struggling or frustrated. The issues people face will deeply affect you. In a bricks and mortar business, you can be naturally practicing empathy as you can directly see and interact with your customers. You can observe them, read their body language, judge their facial expressions and intervene to help when needed.
As an introverted teenager who was given a job as a waitress, this was an acquired skill that I practiced over time but my it came naturally to Mum. There were instances where she could sense a customer was struggling (whether it was with reading the menu or otherwise) and simply ask:
“I know there’s a lot on there, how about I tell you what the best breakfast is?”
or
“You look like someone who would appreciate a good breakfast! What would you like on it?”
Although there were not many cases where these types of interactions took place, they did help promote trust and loyalty amongst customers who were feeling vulnerable.
In software, you can’t directly see your users but if you use customer communication software (like Intercom) you can see what they do in your app and go from there. You can treat every failed step in a workflow as an indicator that a user is struggling and then reach out to them to get feedback.
It’s not as easy as if you were to have a physical business but it’s totally doable. If you talk to your customers regularly, the empathy and compassion you have for them will shine through when decisions are being made around your product.
Key Takeaway
It doesn’t matter if you previously worked in the public sector, hospitality or everywhere in between, you can draw upon these experiences and apply them to how you work in software today. Bricks and mortar businesses can teach us more about topics like software and UX then you would think.
