Downtown to be part of a breakfast panel discussion at AIMS yesterday, one of the snowiest days of the year. Good thing I left early -- the roads were empty, but I got lost in the underground parkade of a major office building.
I had a heavy box of handouts to carry, and knew I wanted to be at the East end of the lot ... but my plan quickly became stalled by the ridiculous signage. Arrows were directing me to letters of the alphabet, like "J" and "K", instead of something useful, like "East Tower". Naturally, I emerged at the wrong end, and had to haul my stuff the better part of a city block.
Okay, what the heck does this have to do with customer experience, you may ask? Well, it's all about directional signage.
- Directional signage needs to be designed for people who have never been there, wherever "there" might be
- They need to be simple enough to grasp in a hearbeat
- There can't be so many signs that you are overwhelmed with them
- Signs need to be positioned at eye level for the target group
I would have had no trouble navigating my way into the car detailing operation in the same parking lot -- their signage was completely clear.
You may be thinking that this is nonsense, and not worth the trouble, and only idiots get lost in parking lots. Well, I crave to disagree with you there, dear reader.
Because most days we have choices about where to park, and if I had not been carrying that box, I would have used the nice, clean, easy to navigate parkade at another major building right across the street.
It's not that we all go around making rational decisions about the million small decisions we have to make every day. It's that we DON'T make those decisions that way -- we make them instantly, WITHOUT thinking.
Blink (see my previous entry) was a good reminder of that phenomenon.
Customer experience management is about taking the St. Francis of Assisi approach to details: accept the things you cannot change, focus obsessively on changing the things you can, and learn to tell the difference.
