Designing for before, during and after
I’m currently staying in a hotel in an area of London I don’t know very well. I woke up early today and have spent the morning preparing for three days of consultancy I’m doing here. There’s no coffee in my hotel room and hotel breakfasts are notoriously low in value and nutritional attributes, so I decided to head to a Pret I noticed half a block away. Pret (or Pret a Manger) is a chain that’s particularly popular in the UK, though they do have stores in other international locations. It’s a good place to go for a coffee, a light breakfast or a fresher-than-the-pre-made sandwiches in the grocery store lunch.
All Prets pretty much look the same and carry the same line of products. I chose them because I know how they work and thought it would be fast and easy so I could get back to work.
I went in as a very typical user. It was about 8:30am and I needed coffee and a light breakfast to go. I was paying with cash. It’s cool and rainy in London (as it often is!), and I’m heading to work so I was bulked up with a raincoat, umbrella and my backpack. I picked my breakfast from the heated display case and went to the counter to order my coffee and pay.
Easy peasy.
Except it took a few minutes for them to make my flat white and there was nowhere for me to wait for it. Initially I stood over to the side, but then another register opened and I was in the way. I stepped back and a lady bumped into me on her way to grab one of the snacks in front of the register. I moved right and I was blocking someone’s access to service. I moved left and I was all but on top of a woman who was trying to securely enter her pin into the machine and wanted space.
“Is there somewhere I should be standing that’s more out of the way?” I asked.
“No, just in this area,” the Pret cashier responded with an apologetic smile.
This would have been much more awkward if Pret had been busier. I was the only person waiting for coffee and people were still being forced to maneuver around me. I felt like I was in the way and that somehow taking up space was my fault. It wasn’t a positive experience to have first thing in the morning.
It occurred to me when I finally had my coffee and got out of there, that this is a classic design problem caused by a failure to think through the entire experience. We see this failure in digital products all the time. You sign up for a service, you’re thrown into a blank start page and you have no idea what’s next. So you flounder about and maybe you figure out what you’re supposed to do, or maybe you get annoyed and stop using the service. If you’re like a lot of people, you probably feel like you’ve done something wrong or you’re just not clever enough to figure it out. It’s a sucky feeling.
Pret didn’t want me to feel like I was in the way, but they didn’t think through the experience. They didn’t put themselves in the shoes of being a customer ordering coffee during the morning rush. They didn’t ask themselves what happens after I’ve ordered my coffee. Just because they have my money doesn’t mean the experience has been rounded off.
Thinking about where your customers came from, their state of mind, their concerns, and where they go next is a critical part of designing connected, useful experiences.
Here are some questions to ask yourself next time you’re building something for humans to use, whether it’s online, in an app, or an experience that exists out in the physical world:
- Where did this person come from? / How did they find us?
- What need are we serving? / What task are they hoping to accomplish here?
- What are the steps they need to take to accomplish their task? Do these steps make sense? Can we simplify?
- What are their main concerns and how do we address them?
- When does their experience with us end and how can we make sure it ends on a positive note?
Thinking about an entire experience helps you identify edge cases, opportunities for delight, and mitigates the potential for disappointment and confusion.
Easy peasy.
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