Web sites are like restaurants

It’s all about the hospitality

If you have a bad experience at a restaurant, do you go back?

No. Not unless they have something on the menu that you can’t get anywhere else.

The term “user experience” has only been applied professionally to Web sites for maybe the last decade. It had other names before that, like “human factors” or “human computer interaction”, but it wasn’t a primary ingredient for success.

How do you explain the value of the user experience to someone not innately familiar with the term? Web sites are like restaurants.

Everyone has eaten in a restaurant, so everyone can form an opinion of that restaurant, and that opinion usually dictates whether or not they will go back. If the experience is stellar, they will tell their friends to try it too. If the experience is terrible, they will advise their friends to avoid it.

Sound familiar? If you are a Web professional, you know this is how Web sites organically gain visitors. Or lose them.

The restaurant industry has a term for this: hospitality. People go to school to learn how to do it well.

hospitality: the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers.

If you run a Web site, you want visitors to your site. Just like if you ran a restaurant.

These visitors have come for something you are serving. Just like a Web site.

You don’t know their names, and you don’t know their expectations. They may look at your home page and leave. Just like people who look at a posted menu and choose to dine elsewhere.

If you are lucky enough to have them stick around, you had better make sure their experience is delightful, otherwise they won’t come back. And they certainly won’t tell their friends about you, either.

See what I did there? Can you even tell if I’m talking about a restaurant or a Web site?

Let’s use the fundamental principles of the hospitality industry to examine what we are doing right or wrong when it comes to designing a Web site experience. As you’ll see in subsequent stories, it’s easy to find analogies between the two.

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