Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By David Aronchick

How is it possible that driving a car, a thing you do EVERY DAY could be so difficult? You find your car, you turn the key, and presto you’re running. Yet somehow rental car companies manage to make this seemingly trivial task beyond all but the most advanced students of modern engineering. Somehow, in the infinite wisdom of these companies, they manage to both talk down to their customers, and totally miss providing some of the crucial information through confusing signs, unusually billing and inconsistent design. And what does it result in? Frustration.
 
How does this happen? Let’s look at some of the failures:
Navigating the counters: I know that every airport is different, and there are some limitations that each company must work within, but the level to which rental car companies make it convenient for them and inconvenient for customers is virtually unparalleled. In the terminal? By escalator? By bus? Premium counter? Secondary counter? Shared counter? They are always totally inconsistent and the general marker “Rental Cars” plus an arrow is supposed to explain everything. Here’s a hint, IT DOES NOT EXPLAIN EVERYTHING.

 

Source: http://www.mjanimations.com/Michael%20Jackson%20Make%20It%20Games.htm

          The cars are complete mysteries: You’d think the majority of the items in a car would be pretty straight forward, yet, somehow, you get in a rental car, and, a part from the steering wheel and the gas pedal, just about everything is different. It reminds me of a joke about MS:

A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft’s electronic navigation and communications equipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter’s position. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, and held up a handwritten sign that said “WHERE AM I?” in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.”

The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to the airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the copilot asked the pilot how he had done it. “I knew it had to be the Microsoft Building, because they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer.”
 
Knowing the light switch and the radio on/off buttons are in the car does not really help, let alone help when I’m doing 75 down the I-405. As a microcosm of this: Why can’t there be a consistent indicator for which side the gas tank is on? Maybe put the gas gauge on the same side as the indicator? Or an arrow? Would that be so hard?
A Charge For Not Showing Them a Receipt: This last one is priceless. I was threatened with a charge, recently, that if I didn’t bring back the car with a receipt proving that I had refilled within 10 miles, that I would be charged for a gallon of gas. You can practically hear the accountants doing this in their head – “Well, if each customer brings us back a car with half a gallon, and 10% of the people forget their receipt, we’ll be richer by roughly a hojillion dollars!” How about using the old standard – if the fuel meter looks full, it is, and everything else is just a wash to make your customers feel better.
 
 

Source: http://ireallyhateourdebt.blogspot.com/2008/03/this-weeks-total.html

While this just seems like a litany of complaints, there’s something fundamental here that you can walk away with – clarity and consistency are king. Every time you introduce a new concept, color, style, button, language, etc., your users must spin up a part of their brain to address it. Rather than focusing on what you really want – purchasing CDs, sending emails, not ramming into the SUV that’s stopped in front of her – you have them retraining themselves for something which is already muscle memory. This is about as bad as you can be when it comes to product design.

The cure? You need to go through your business as a NEW customer. At each step in the use of your product, try as hard as you can to think about what the customer is looking to do next, and how they would expect to do that. And if all else fails, do whatever is the standard technique, as measured by how the majority of your competitors and parallel companies do it.

 A few years ago, Airbus, back in the days when airline manufacturers actually shipped planes instead of just delaying them, made a brilliant decision to standardize the cockpits on all planes, greatly simplifying the process of training pilots. Let’s just say if someone whose job it is to understand the controls of the system they work with still have trouble doing it, your users are about six parsecs behind them. Work towards consistency, and any time you break with your consistent model – TELL THEM IN LARGE CLEAR LETTERS.

You MUST look at your product as though you knew nothing about cost savings, or organizational dynamics, or the fact that Bob in accounting doesn’t work that well with Aaron in product design. Revealing these kinds of fissures is a perfect way to give your customers an inconsistent and terrible experience. While this may not always be measureable in crystal clear metrics, the distributed improved joy your customers feel will be tangible.

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