Delighting the customer

A while back I wrote about innovation in elevator technology.  Recently, I noticed the opposite in the heart of innovation: Silicon Valley. 

I was at the San Jose airport car rental center.  The rental center sees a lot of traffic and they have graciously installed what looks like a dozen elevators (it is actually a bank of 8) over a wide area.  There are several locations with buttons for summoning the elevators.
 

What is interesting about this arrangement is that when one calls an elevator, irrespective of which set of buttons you use to summon the elevators, any of the bank of 8 elevators could answer.  Seldom have I seen an elevator close to me answering my call.  What this means is that the user has to walk all the way (lugging their luggage) to the elevator.  Some times, the elevator moves away by the time you reach it, making it even more annoying. 

We all know that large traffic only enters the ground floor at the same time: whenever a flight lands.  The elevators be programmed so that any idle elevator car always comes to the ground floor to wait.  It may be a bit inefficient, but makes the customer delighted.  Imagine walking into the rental center to find one or more elevators with open doors waiting for you!  That should put a smile on anyone's face. 

Another feature that can be incorporated is assigning a bank of 4 elevators to the closest buttons.  San Jose has two banks of elevators and they could be separately programmed.  Paired with the previous suggestion, this will delight anyone visiting the Bay area. 

Design for Assembly

Good designs are always simple.  They are so simple that you don't realize it if you don't think about it.  I recently bought a patio table from IKEA.  As always, IKEA does a great job in packaging and instructions.  It was a complex piece of furniture with collapsible leaves and a glass top.  But, it came with simple instructions, set of fasteners and the tools required.  How many manufacturers think of including the tools needed?

As soon as I unpack the fasteners I usually dump them all into a bowl to make sure I don't lose any.  BTW, what is wrong with including a couple extra screws and nuts with any item shipped?  Have you ever lost a screw or a nut and found yourself running to the local Home Depot to pick a spare.  It is the most frustrating experience.  You are so pissed that you want to return the piece of junk (after an hour of assembly labor, you discover that a bolt is missing), but you cannot, because it is half assembled and will not fit in your car anymore!  Morons.  If the BOM calls for 24 screws, throw in 25.  I know that in the small scheme of things, every piece matters to the bottom line, but in the big scheme of things, customer happiness trumps everything.

Back to the patio table.  Here I am with my bowl ready to pour over the fasteners.  I open the blister pack and tilt it into the bowl, but nothing falls.  I then notice that the clever engineers at IKEA have used a soft double sided glue strip on the packaging (see pic above) so that the washers and nuts stick to it until I pull them apart. What a clever idea.  The cardboard holds the fasteners for me until I need them.  These simple things are what count for immense customer satisfaction and pleasure.  This is what IKEA excels at.

Have you ever wondered why IKEA has the designer's name printed on every product?  In case you have not noticed, all products have the designer's name printed on the packaging.  It achieves two things:  for one, it honors the designer for the work they have done.  And, two, it makes a public statement about you.  Imagine the designer who created the chair which keeps falling apart.  "Inga, your chair is the worst chair I have ever sat on.  You are not fit to be a designer". On the other hand, imagine your pleasure when your fans call to tell you how great your designs are!

Every product I buy, every product I assemble, teaches me a lesson.  It is amazing to see companies like IKEA, Apple and others push the boundaries in customer convenience and satisfaction.  All other companies should follow their lead and design products that are convenient to assemble as well as use.

Why didn't I think of that?

You are in a public restroom and have diligently washed your hands with soap and water after taking care of business.  You are about to walk out and you notice this person walking out of a stall and directly heading for the door ahead of you.  He opens the door with his hand and walks off.

We have all been in this situation.  What do you do now? 

Some of us resort to shrugging our shoulders and walking out the door.  Some of us have used clever means (waiting for another person to open the door, or open the door with a piece of paper towel, etc.) to escape from the restroom without touching the door handle.  These situations always get me thinking about the problem at hand and try to solve it.  There are many ways to solving (preventing) this problem:
- Install door handles that spray anti-bac lotion upon grabbing them.  But, this may not go well with people who dislike anti-bac lotions.
- Install motion sensing doors so there is no need for door handles.
- Install push open (from inside) doors so you can push with your foot.

The prevention techniques are either expensive or not acceptable.  What do you do if you had a door that opens inside and cannot use anti-bac lotion, and are cash strapped?  The simplest solution is generally the best solution. 

That is exactly what I saw at the Delta lounge at DTW.  This solution takes away the assumption that doors are to be opened by hands.  The picture below illustrates how simple it is.  The first image shows the instructions (simple and no words), and the second image shows my foot opening the door.  There are no moving parts and hence no maintenance.  There is no need for electricity or any technology, thus further reducing maintenance costs.  The only maintenance required is regular cleaning.

Elegant and simple solutions like this are what we need.  Nowadays, there is so much technology readily available to us, we start over-thinking the solution.  This is a classic example of a simple solution to a simple problem.

Green Home

Ingenious use of space. Check this video on how a Hong Kong architect converted his tiny apartment into multiple living spaces. Of course, this works extremely well if you are the only person living in the apartment, since you can only occupy one space at a time.

Airport Design

I was looking at the airport terminal maps on a recent flight for various international airports and noticed that no two airports looked similar. I had to figure out a way of transferring between two terminals in SFO in the shortest possible time. Only after I ran through the airport did I discover that I had to go through airport security once again, even though I was just changing planes! That is when I started thinking about airport designs.

Why isn't there a standard airport terminal design that is optimized for airplane traffic as well as passenger traffic?

Airports have been around for quite sometime and there are hunderds around the world. A lot of thinking goes into airport design such as environmental concerns, reuse, use of natural light, efficient heating/cooling, etc. I have seen several contemporary airport terminal designs, each expressing their own style and culture.

But, what is surprising is the fact that the terminal maps and the runways are different in every airport. I had imagined that studies had been conducted and standard designs would have come out of optimizing the operations of an airport. Most airports are built upon a rectangular patch of ground. Of course, some airports will have certain constraints, but none too great to not use a standard, efficient and proven layout.

I am all for unleashing ones creativity when it comes to the cosmetic design of the terminals. But, when it comes to efficient design of the runways, taxiways as well as the terminals, there needs to be a study conducted by an operations research scientist. I am sure someone has already done this, but I fail to see it in use anywhere.

Spurring creativity...

Here is a great design for a multi-purpose container. It starts out its life as a water bottle, and turns into a toy. Great way to encourage people (in this case, children) to reuse the empty container.

Now you have two reasons to buy y-water! What a concept.