From time to time, I run into an annoying but non-critical issue in my building. For instance, the hot water may only be flowing at half of the regular water pressure, or the air conditioning is a little less effective than usual. I’ve learned not to bother with reporting these problems, since the conversation always goes something like this:

Me: Is there a known problem with the air conditioning?

Building staff: Nope, it’s fine.

Me, the next day: So I guess they fixed that AC problem, huh?

Building staff: Yeah, it was a building-wide outage.

In these cases, maintenance work or a minor equipment failure is typically the culprit. And someone from the building staff usually knows about the issue. Yet this info never trickles down to the customer base — in this case, the residents.

What’s the solution? Take a cue from the high-tech world, and create a system status page on the building website that shows the status of these basic services. Aside from critical issues, this page should also list minor problems that might be affecting multiple customers. Finally, include some sort of notification when something is simply being worked on, since weird problems tend to crop up during otherwise normal maintenance visits.

Even if the implementation of the status page is rather rudimentary, it’s bound to be far better than forcing residents to call the building staff every time there’s a nagging issue. As an added bonus, fewer phone calls reduces the work load for the building employees, enabling them to focus on other things — like actually addressing the problems in the first place.

I just finished reading a great book on personal finance. From what I recall, the author has been publishing this particular book for a number of years. So, the one I read was at least the second edition of that title, and maybe even the third or fourth.

This raises an interesting question: if only a small portion of the contents are updated with each new edition, how do you convince people who bought an earlier edition to keep upgrading over time? I believe the solution involves two steps: conveying the value of the updates, and making the follow-on purchases affordable.

To convey the value of getting the latest edition, the author or publisher simply needs to point out what’s new and why it matters. For instance, a book about taxes would probably be updated whenever there are significant changes in the federal tax rules, and that’s something that readers of an earlier edition would probably be very interested in learning about.

As for making the follow-on purchases affordable, just provide a coupon or other discount that enables owners of a previous edition to save money on each subsequent edition they purchase. The discount might even be greater for those who have bought three or more iterations of that book over time.

However you choose to implement these tactics, the outcome should be the same: buyers of earlier editions will be more likely to purchase subsequent editions of a book. Aside from the obvious benefits, this approach may even lead to a snowball effect, where each new version of the book exceeds the sales thresholds from the previous ones. That’s great for the author and the readers, since it provides the economic incentives to keep producing new editions, and makes it all but certain that repeat readers will get the current and relevant information that they’re looking for.

In an effort to use up a gift card from a well-known but rather stodgy retailer, I picked out a somewhat random assortment of items and headed to the checkout area. After tallying up my purchases and asking for payment, the clerk proceeded to put a price tag-sized sticker on the bottom of each item. What purpose, I wondered, could these additional stickers possibly serve?

As it turns out, the stickers contained special barcodes to be used when processing returns and exchanges. That’s all fine and good, but don’t they realize that customers hate removing stickers from products? No matter which method you use, most stickers leave some sort of pesky residue behind. Adding yet another sticker to every item is a surefire recipe for unhappy customers.

Instead of plastering each product with a return sticker that’s hard to remove, retailers should consider customer-friendly alternatives. Granted, I’m not up to speed on the exciting world of permanent and semi-permanent adhesives. But it’s pretty clear to me that better solutions aren’t exactly rocket science. For instance, a piece of paper and transparent tape would work a lot better than the crude stickers that I came across, thus saving customers a small but significant amount of aggravation for every product they buy.

On Saturday, I walked past a new restaurant, which I believe opened earlier this month. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed not to notice the place, since it had two huge signs in the window. However, I think they went a little bit overboard with the text itself, which proclaims that the restaurant is “Now open for business”.

Sure, it’s a straightforward message. But it’s also twice as long as it needs to be. After all, simply saying “Now open” conveys the same message in half as many words, which increases the chance that passers-by will read and understand it.

If you think about it, this is just another application of the Occam’s Razor principle. By choosing the shortest version of the message and eliminating superfluous words, the restaurant could have produced a much simpler solution for their communications needs. Hopefully they’ll figure this out before spending too much money on other marketing channels, since I’d hate to see a website or print ad that was filled with the same type of extraneous words that made their window signage so disappointing.

There’s a doorway in my building that has gone through an almost comical series of changes over the past year or so. Originally, the door was locked and required a key card to open it. Then, the building removed the lock, insisting that convenience trumped security. And then, after people apparently began opening the door too enthusiastically and hitting passers-by, a large window was installed in the top half of the door.

From the moment I noticed the new see-through design, something seemed off. After a few more trips past that area, I realized what bothered me about it. The window was covered in a matrix of steel wires — just like the kind you’d expect to find in a prison. In an ironic twist, the door remains unlocked at all times, so the building now sports a prison-grade, see-through door which anyone can open and close as they please.

I’m probably blowing this way out of proportion. After all, the door in question is located inside an area that you can’t get to without using a key card or checking in at the security desk. However, the fact remains that most people are going to associate a metal grate on top of a window with jails and prisons. And that’s hardly the type of message that you want to send to people in a building that’s supposed to feel like home for its residents.

Although I’m sure it’s been that way for years, I recently noticed that some companies strategically include the word “daily” in their product names, or otherwise prominently feature that text on the packaging. For instance, they might call a product “Daily Shower Cleaner” instead of just plain “Shower Cleaner”, in the hopes that this subtle hint will make consumers use and repurchase the product more often.

Is the “daily” strategy effective? I don’t have any data either way, but my guess is that it may help, and almost certainly won’t hurt. For example, if consumers ignore the “daily” labeling, they won’t use the product any more or less than if it lacked that attribute. If they pay attention to the label and only planned on using it once a week, then they might end up using it more frequently. In fact, the only time when this might backfire is if someone intended to use the item more than once every day, and the name makes them reconsider whether such frequent use is really necessary.

On the balance, the benefits of including a usage reminder in the product name probably outweigh the risks. And when you think about it, it’s not much different than the “lather, rinse, repeat” instructions that reportedly have been helping to promote more usage — and thus greater sales — of shampoo and other items for decades. With such a proven pedigree, it’s no surprise to see “daily” and other frequency reminders appearing in product names. But there’s a limit to how far you can take this before the suggested usage pattern becomes absurd. For instance, an “Hourly Face Wash” or “Daily At-Home Oil Change Kit” probably wouldn’t generate anything besides a few chuckles and confused glances from customers.

While calling to schedule a doctor’s appointment, I was greeted with a rather long recorded message that I imagine contained their most frequently asked questions. However, one segment of the recording really baffled me. In between a variety of potentially relevant info, the recorded voice said “Our phone number is…” and proceeded to read out the digits.

Why on earth would you take the time to tell people your phone number when they obviously just called it? That’s like putting your driving directions on the wall, where they’re only visible to people who already managed to find the place. No matter how you look at it, the takeaway is the same. If the context dictates that customers already know something, don’t waste their time by restating the obvious.

A few days ago, we experienced an outage with one of the Internet connections at the office. I remembered reading about some scheduled maintenance on the line, so I checked out the provider’s system status page. Sure enough, they had a confirmed issue with the entire metro area, but the status page said that all services were up and running again.

So, if the problem was already fixed, why was our line still down? It turned out that we needed to reboot the modem. This wasn’t exactly a huge logical leap on our part, and it only took us a few extra minutes to come to the proper conclusion on our own. But if the provider had done their job, no guesswork would have been needed.

What am I referring to? It’s really quite simple. Any time that customers need to take action to recover from an outage, then you should convey those tips to them in your status emails, network status websites, and similar communication channels. Nobody enjoys service disruptions, but customers will be a lot more understanding if you make it easy for them to get up and running again afterwards.

While I certainly haven’t conducted any sort of scientific study, it seems like a surprising number of the signal strength indicators on wireless devices consist of the familiar 5 bar layout. Why not 4 bars, or 6, or 3? I believe the answer lies in our natural desire to place things into just the right number of categories.

To see what I’m referring to, pretend that someone asked you to describe your cell phone’s performance in standard terms. You would probably end up with statements like this:

– Really bad

– Sort of bad

– OK

– Pretty good

– Really good

Regardless of the exact terms chosen, I bet that most people would pick about 5 descriptive phrases when faced with this task. If you limit it to 4, there’s no longer a choice right in the middle. Up it to 6 or 7, and it’s hard to distinguish between the degrees of good or bad. 5 is just right.

In case you’re wondering, I haven’t forgotten about 0 bars. Technically, the presence of a 0 bar value adds an extra choice to the mix. However, since this value is usually used to indicate that something is completely off, broken or unavailable, it really doesn’t compete with or take anything away from the benefits of the classic 5 bar design.

I got a new mobile phone last week, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at some of the smart choices that the user interface designers made. Among these decisions: the digital clock on the top of the screen doesn’t say AM or PM — and no, it’s not set to military time. For instance, the clock reads “2:30” instead of “2:30 PM”, and assumes that the user can easily figure out whether this refers to the afternoon or the early morning.

Is this a safe assumption? Yeah, I think so. And it saves space on the screen, which is always at a premium on mobile devices. But what about the alarm clock and other areas where the AM/PM distinction is important? I actually haven’t tried out the alarm feature yet, but I’m guessing the choice for AM/PM appears when it’s needed.

As this example illustrates, virtually anything can be simplified if you keep an open mind and challenge even the most basic assumptions. I probably would have never thought about taking away the AM/PM on a clock, but I’m impressed that the people who designed my new phone were willing to give it a try.