Some time ago, I came across an information booth for the Clear registered traveler program. In case you’re not familiar with this service, you basically pay a fee to have a background check run on you, after which they issue you a special card that gets you through airport security faster. Anyways, I spoke to a fairly helpful sales rep who said they would be bringing the Clear program to Chicago in the future. So, I gave them my email address and asked that they contact me once they were getting closer to launching in Chicago.

Well, about a year has passed since I signed up. Have I heard anything from Clear about their Chicago launch dates? Nope. But they have been kind enough to send me updates on their new cities and other benefits about two or three times a month. I’m fine with them keeping in touch, but I find the whole approach a bit misguided. After all, I can’t use their service in my home airports no matter how much I would like to. Until they add Chicago to their program, Clear is of limited value to me. Yet they continue to send emails touting the benefits of a product I can’t have.

When I think about it, the use of email marketing (or any other form of promotion) to push a product that the recipient can’t buy just ends up being a tease. In fact, customers are likely to perceive it as obnoxious, since you’re just rubbing the lack of availability in their face. It’s sort of like sending out weekly emails to people all across Europe reminding them how great your new US-only product is.

With all of this in mind, it makes sense to think about whether the people receiving your marketing messages can take action should they wish to. If there’s something beyond their control and yours standing in the way, one approach is to tone down the intensity and frequency of your emails about that forbidden product. Even better, provide an option for recipients to opt-out of the general email blasts, while still being notified when the product is available in their market. This gives your marketing campaigns a better focus, without needlessly teasing people who are waiting patiently for your product to come to their market.

It’s amazing how low some websites will stoop to monetize their traffic. Take weather.com, for instance. This site features a fairly incredible amount of untargeted, generic advertising. When I last checked, they were showing ads about “cash for gold” and “psychology degree online”. These offers have virtually nothing to do with the topic of the site and provide little value to users.

This leaves me wondering: does the small incremental revenue from these low-value ads make up for the loss of brand equity? Do users even notice how sketchy the ads are? I’m well aware of the issue, yet I haven’t switched to another weather site. But I do know that my overall impression of The Weather Channel, both online and offline, has declined considerably since I started visiting their site on a regular basis. And when repeat usage of a product makes a customer like it less and less, that certainly spells trouble down the road.

I really don’t understand businesses that are cash-only, yet charge premium prices for their products. I’ve seen restaurants that sell $12 omelettes but refuse to take credit cards, even though the average meal for two can exceed $30. Who carries that kind of cash around anymore? It’s one thing if you’re a bargain-priced shop with a $3 breakfast special, but most places engaging in cash-only practices are anything but.

Sure, these businesses may think they’re doing fine because the register keeps ringing. But I suspect that the number of people carrying around big wads of cash is on the decline, and reality is eventually going to bite these ignorant business owners right in the ass. One day, customers will start dropping off like crazy, and they’ll lament where they went wrong.

Here’s a hint: lots of customers want to pay with plastic, whether you like it or not. Start accepting credit cards today, or get ready for the day when many of those customers stop coming through the door.

If there’s any offer that should have a conversion rate of 75% or more, it’s the renewal. In other words, the customer has been doing business with you and likes the product, but their existing subscription period or term is almost over. To extend this relationship, all you need to do is get the customer’s consent and verify their payment info.

Despite how easy this sounds, companies screw it up all the time by asking for tons of extra data. As a buyer, these hiccups and annoyances make me think the company doesn’t value my business, and I start to look elsewhere. After all, if renewing with the existing vendor doesn’t save any time compared to finding a new vendor, what’s the incentive to stay put? In many cases, there simply isn’t one.

How can you prevent this? Start by paring down the list of things that you’re asking renewal customers to provide. Do you really need the password they chose when they first created an account two or three years ago? Is it critical for the customer to recall the exact way they typed their mailing address before they moved to a new home or office? Probably not. Yet companies insist on this meaningless data all the time. And when customers can’t provide it, the companies just send them packing with the ever-familiar “Sorry, you’ll have to create a new account.” Next stop: a competitor who sucks less.

Ok, now for the solution: If someone has an existing relationship they want to renew, but they don’t have the other account credentials like the old password or mailing address, then just take their payment info and be done with it. Sure, they shouldn’t be able to change any of the terms of the deal without verifying some other info (e.g. resetting their password), but it’s foolish not to take money from those who just want the existing service to continue unfettered. Since the real loser in the overly-complex renewal is the buyer whose time gets wasted, your customers will thank you for acting sensibly, too.

I tried a new breakfast place on Sunday. The server was friendly, the food came out quickly, and everything tasted right. But nobody offered a single refill of coffee after the food arrived, so we sat there with empty coffee cups for quite some time. During that span, our server was apparently on break, but at least two other servers walked by several times each. One of them even sang Happy Birthday to a customer in the table next to us.

From what I can see, the management and staff at this restaurant have yet to recognize the value of teamwork in a service business. With a small amount of extra effort, the servers could fill up other tables’ coffee cups as they walk by, rather than being blind to these other customers. Sure, it wouldn’t increase the tips for their own tables, but more customers would leave happy. Ultimately, that means more tables filled and more revenues to go around. But as it stands today, I’m certainly not going back.

Teamwork is a huge asset when you’re trying to deliver a consistent experience for customers, as others on the team can compensate for one person’s off day. Experiences like mine, where teamwork is nonexistant, serve to illustrate just how powerful this impact can be.

When working with any type of software tool, the ability to quickly test and refine your work is usually a given. In other words, you can typically preview what you’ve created on your computer screen and make any desired corrections before it goes live. We see this all over the place, like in the form of your browser’s Print Preview option, or your blog software’s choice to Preview a Post. With this in mind, I was quite surprised to come across an email design tool that provided absolutely no way to send a test copy of the message.

Let me provide some context. The tool I was using is intended to let you write email messages in both HTML and plain text format, and then send them to one or more contacts. It gets most of the basics right, including showing you a preview on-the-fly. But when you’re ready to test out your email by sending yourself a copy, you’re out of luck. There’s no button to Send a Test Message or anything like it. Alas, the only workaround is to add yourself as a contact in the system, and then send yourself the message. By this point, you’ve wasted an awful lot of clicks to accomplish what should be a straightforward task.

In the end, the best approach is to think about your typical customer’s workflow. Once they finish with tasks A and B in your software, what do tasks C and D look like — even if they’re performed outside your product? Can you add a preview or testing feature to save people time or hassle when completing the overall process? Maybe the answer is as simple as letting them send a test email, or showing how a banner ad looks in various website designs. By asking the right questions and helping users streamline their workflow, you can increase customer satisfaction and drive greater usage of your products.

Say you’re designing a list of features that people will access from a menu on the left side of the screen. When you only have a few items to include, ordering them by popularity or frequency of use probably makes the most sense. But as this scales beyond ten or so items, it becomes cumbersome for users to find what they need.

At this point, many designers would switch the list to alphabetical order. The downside, of course, is the lack of priority for the most popular or useful items. The compromise I suggest takes a little bit of each approach: start by listing up to five tools that are used most often at the top, in whatever order you like. Then, provide a subtle separator line of some sort, and place all the remaining choices below that in alphabetical order. You could also make the text style or accompanying icon a bit different for the first set of options versus the second set.

With this method, you help users quickly find the things that they use most often, as well as those things that might be more obscure. And it’s way better than the approach that I see on most sites, which is simply putting every choice in a giant list with no logical order at all.

While making some configuration changes in Salesforce.com, I ran into a truly puzzling set of buttons. At the bottom of the page I was editing, I saw the usual buttons for “Save” and “Cancel” — plus another button for “Quick Save”. I don’t have a clue how you can save something faster than normal, and I didn’t check the documentation to see what this is supposed to do. To me, having the extra option is confusing, since users have no frame of reference for what a “quick” save refers to.

More generally, the “Quick Save” button is an example of placing useless modifiers on an otherwise straightforward action. To show what a bad idea this is, here are a few more examples:

- Instant Delete
- Fast Insert
- Power Search
- Smart Clone
- Quick Preview

I think the takeaway here is obvious: don’t cloud the meaning of your buttons and other design elements by including superfluous words before or after the text. If the modified term is so ambiguous that users can’t choose between the regular and the modified version, you should probably remove the extra choice or rephrase it to avoid any confusion.

There are many anecdotes that teach us to be wary of unusually low prices. In my experience, this is especially relevant when you’re buying something that involves an ongoing or recurring relationship with the seller. Regardless of how you scored the deal — whether by taking advantage of a novice sales rep or using questionable negotiating tactics — someone at the provider is eventually going to re-evaluate your account. And when they see how grossly unprofitable it is, they’ll either raise your prices, reduce your service level, or terminate the relationship altogether. In each case, you’ll probably be worse off than if you had just struck a fair deal in the first place.

From what I’ve read, modern elevator design generally focuses on how to make elevators more efficient. In other words, engineers try to group passengers by their destination floor, reducing average wait times. With that said, I came across a design blunder in Chicago’s John Hancock Center that makes me wonder if elevator designers have really mastered the more basic aspects of their trade.

The stage was set as follows: my party wanted to get from the lobby level to the Signature Lounge. Depending on which sign you believed, this was either on the 95th or 96th floor. When we entered the elevator, the designers seemed to have done all the work for us. There were two separate buttons, one for the Signature Room and one for the Signature Lounge. Great, I thought, they’ve made it easy, so I pushed the appropriate button. However, nothing happened: no lights, no beep, no elevator action.

Figuring the button was just broken, I tried the one on the other side of the door. Same result. Another person in the elevator tried as well, to no avail. Finally, I figured it out: you had to press the button for the Signature Room first, and then after it lights up, you could press the button for the Signature Lounge. Nowhere did the facility provide any tips for navigating this counterintuitive process. Perhaps most ironically, the two venues are connected by a series of staircases once you leave the elevator, so it really doesn’t matter which one you select in the first place.

This experience tells me that at least one set of elevator designers has a lot to learn about making easy-to-use interfaces. Prior to today, I didn’t think anyone could screw up a simple “choose your floor” menu, but now I know better. Of course, if the designers had done some user testing after those buttons were installed, or even asked their friends to try out the button layout, the process for getting to the 96th floor — and taking in the spectacular views — would be a whole lot easier.