A few days ago, I came across a gadget that I haven’t used in quite some time. I turned it on to see if it still worked, and sure enough, it powered up just fine. Next, I wondered what kind of batteries it required. After removing the bottom cover, I saw a big battery and immediately knew that the device would need something unusual, like a C or D size. Though I might have one or two of those lying around, I knew that I wouldn’t be willing to buy more just to keep the gadget running.

It wasn’t always like this. In my youth, I remember using all sorts of battery sizes in toys and other electronics. You had AA, AAA, C, D, 9 volt and probably even more that I’m forgetting. But fast forward to today, and it’s quite rare for a gadget to use anything but AA batteries. You see AAA from time to time, but AA is the dominant size. And if a product requires something besides AA batteries, I’d venture to say that people are less likely to buy it. After all, who wants to keep all those different battery sizes in the drawer?

Of course, there’s another trend at work here: more and more products now include rechargeable batteries. These are usually a non-standard size, but most people don’t care, since you rarely have to worry about replacing them. But if you happen to be designing a product that still requires disposable batteries, do yourself and your customers a favor. Stick to the popular AA size and include some name-brand starter batteries in the box, and your product will sell on its merits — rather than getting rejected by potential customers because of unusual battery requirements.

As part of registering for a particular conference call, I was asked to agree to a brief set of terms and conditions. I had a few concerns with the original language, so I sent over an alternate set of text. The conference organizer said my version was fine, and that was that.

Then, during the weekend before the conference call, the organizer sent out a new set of terms for everyone to review. This might have been fine, except that the call was scheduled for that Monday. Plus, the proposed terms were incredibly long and fairly complex. I explained that there was no way I could review and respond to this request in time, and I would thus have to reject the proposed terms.

I ended up working things out with the conference organizer, and they agreed to use the first set of terms I had sent back. But one aspect of this exchange caught my attention. In the weekend message to all the attendees, the organizer apologized for the “last minute” nature of the request. Apparently, he was aware that trying to push this on people at the last minute would be met with some resistance, though he sent the request anyway.

What’s the takeaway here? If you feel the need to apologize for making a last minute request, that’s a good sign that you shouldn’t be making that request on such short notice. Instead, the better approach is to either nix the request entirely, or push back the original schedule so people have a chance to respond properly. In other words, if your instincts tell you that you’re not giving the other party enough time to process something, they’re almost certain to feel the same way, too.

For most people, takeout food is synonymous with a low-hassle, carefree dining experience. In short, you place an order, pick it up or wait for someone to deliver it, and then receive a bag with all the food, utensils and other items that you need. When you’re done eating, you can just toss the food containers and other disposable items back into the same bag, making cleanup a snap.

However, some restaurants are oblivious to the reasons why people order takeout. They forget much-needed items, turning what should be a turnkey meal into a frantic hunt for replacement parts. This is especially problematic for large orders, in which the search for utensils and other items is multiplied by the number of people that you’re trying to feed.

To avoid these problems, restaurants should follow a few simple guidelines when preparing large takeout orders (i.e. those orders containing three or more items):

– Label each container with a description of the food inside.

– Include an ample supply of plates, cups and utensils. For example, you might provide one full set for each entree or sandwich, plus a few extra sets for good measure.

– Don’t forget the condiments and sauces, and always include something to put them in. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ordered sushi and found that the amount of soy sauce was woefully inadequate, or that there were no containers included to actually dispense the sauce into.

In total, these improvements should only add a few cents to the cost of each takeout order, plus a few extra seconds of prep time. If you couple the enhanced process with a checklist that helps employees remember what goes in each bag, you should be able to get compliance into the 95% range without too much trouble.

Given how many restaurants continue to botch their takeout orders by leaving out the items I described, those who take the time to do it right will quickly establish a positive reputation with customers. This leads to larger order sizes, more repeat business, and an influx of new takeout customers via word of mouth referrals. Compared to the small amount of time and money invested, the impact on the bottom line should be substantial.

Nobody likes waiting in line, and there are few places that involve more waiting than the airport. From endless security lines to overburdened bathroom queues to slow-moving boarding procedures, air travel seems to be one frustrating queue after another.

In fact, while waiting in one such line at the Fort Lauderdale airport, I thought of several ways that venue owners could make the process less painful for customers. When designing a queue — or more likely, trying to fix one that causes people grief — here are a few good tips to keep in mind:

– Don’t ask people to form a line until you’re actually ready to serve them. For example, there’s little point in making them wait in line for 20 minutes before you start boarding a plane.

– Give people an easy way to verify they’re in the correct line. This might mean showing the flight number and destination on an overhead screen, or providing static signage for something like “Returns and exchanges only” in a retail environment.

– Keep the queue far away from hot or cold areas. People get annoyed enough just from being in line, and you’re not doing them any favors by forcing them to wait next to a hot window or drafty doorway.

Some of these suggestions may require more planning than others, but the overall concept is the same. Make waiting in line more enjoyable (or at least less onerous), and customers will be happier. In turn, they’ll probably be more polite and less impatient when dealing with your employees, which leads to happier and more productive staff. Ideally, there would be a way to eliminate all lines and waiting. But short of that, it’s worth investing the time to make your queues a little bit more pleasant.

I don’t use public restrooms very often, but in my limited experience, the overall quality of these facilities seems to be improving. Amenities like motion-sensing faucets and paper towel dispensers — which were once a rarity — have become quite common. There seems to be more attention to cleanliness, as well.

With this in mind, I was quite surprised to hear what my wife had to say about the restroom in one of our favorite restaurants. In less than a month, the restaurant had removed all the paper towel dispensers and trash cans, leaving only an air dryer in their place. This is the sort of cost cutting I’d expect from a business that positions itself as an ultra-cheap, no-frills, almost punishingly stripped-down merchant. But for a well-respected restaurant to remove such basic amenities? That’s just unacceptable.

I don’t know who made the ill-advised decision to reduce the bathrooms to highway rest stop level, but they surely weren’t thinking about it the right way. In essence, customers are like your personal guests. You’ve invited them into your business just like you’d invite a friend into your home. If you had a lot of guests visiting, would you remove all the consumables from your bathroom in order to save a few dollars on paper towels? Would you feel comfortable sending a signal to your guests that you don’t care about their comfort or convenience? I doubt it.

So, the next time you have the chance to save a few cents here or there in your business, ask yourself whether you’d be comfortable making that same tradeoff when it comes to guests in your home. If you wouldn’t treat your personal guests that way, then it’s probably best to rethink those plans and come up with a more customer-friendly alternative.

As I walked into the grocery store on Saturday, I immediately noticed a proliferation of fall merchandise. Between the large displays of pumpkins and the fall colored flowers, it was quite clear that the summer items had started making way for fall products.

As luck would have it, I planned on buying some canned pumpkin that day. With fall merchandise abounding, I figured it would be a cinch to locate canned pumpkin and other seasonal items. But after looking all over and finally asking a store employee, I learned that they hadn’t received any canned pumpkin yet. What’s more, they had no idea when it would arrive, aside from the generic answer of “soon”.

This brings me to a seemingly obvious recommendation. If you’re going to make the effort to carry seasonal merchandise, you should place all of those items on the sales floor at the same time. Otherwise, the presence of a few seasonal products (like pumpkins, in my case) makes customers expect that you’ll have all the other seasonal products (like canned pumpkin) available, as well.

How do you coordinate the seasonal products? Either order all the inventory to arrive around the same time, or hold the first few items in the back room until the other products arrive. Sure, you might miss out on a few early sales. But there’s a lot of value in introducing the full seasonal assortment at once. Customers will recognize that you’re a one stop shop for their seasonal needs, and will respond more favorably to seasonal messaging that highlights relevant cross-sells and up-sells. Taken together, these benefits should more than outweigh the small effort that it takes to kick the season off right.

A few months ago, I decided it was time to replace the carry-on bag that I had been using for more than a decade. The old bag served its purpose well and was still in reasonable shape, but I really wanted something more compact, with better wheels and more pockets for storing smaller items.

So, I went online, read some reviews, and compared the measurements of several rolling carry-on bags. I found one that seemed to be a great match, placed the order, and waited patiently for it to arrive. When I opened the box, though, I was rather disappointed. The new bag was actually quite a bit larger than the old one that I was replacing.

I went back to the website to see if perhaps I read the measurements wrong, and discovered the problem. The product dimensions listed on the website did not include the handles, which added 2-4″ to the length and width. Since the handles were fixed in place and couldn’t be folded down or removed, the bag was actually considerably bulkier than the product description suggested.

Though I wasn’t expecting a refund, I contacted the retailer to explain the problem. They agreed that the product measurements on their website were very misleading, and took the bag back for a full refund. This experience made me think about how manufacturers and retailers can better describe the dimensions of products that have a handle, stand or other attachment. For instance, they should:

– Provide one set of measurements that includes the handles, stands, and other attachments, and another set of measurements that excludes these items.

– Specify whether the attachments can be folded down, removed, or otherwise modified to reduce the footprint.

– Make sure to use the right set of dimensions when determining compliance with third-party size guidelines. For example, if the bag has a bunch of bulky handles that are fixed in place, and the size of those handles puts the bag outside of airline size requirements, then don’t claim it’s suitable for carry-on usage.

This may seem like a lot of work, especially for companies that are accustomed to only providing one set of measurements for each product. However, providing the extra information that people need to make the right purchase decision is good for revenues and customer satisfaction. Buyers will be more confident that they’re choosing the right product, which should improve conversion rates, and they’ll be far less likely to return the product because it’s not the size they were expecting.

My apartment building is holding a vote regarding some proposed policy changes. As part of the voting process, the members of the relevant commitee have been manning a table in the lobby to tell people about the matter at hand and get them to fill out a voting form. They also made a smart decision about how to attract people to the table: keep it well stocked with food. When I walked by in the morning, that meant an ample supply of coffee and donuts. And from what one of the committee members was telling me, traffic was even higher the night before, when they had bottles of wine on hand.

I don’t know how much they actually thought about the strategy, but offering food and drinks is actually a great way to get people to slow down, take notice, and maybe even take the action you’re requesting. The free food works on severals levels:

– It stimulates people’s curiosity: “What sort of special event is going on here?”, they might think to themselves.

– It makes them stick around longer, so they’re more likely to hear the message. “I might as well finish this donut or grab another cup of coffee.”

– It encourages reciprocity, thus increasing the chance that they’ll take the desired action: “These nice folks gave me some free food, so I really ought to repay the favor by at least thinking about what they’re asking me to do.”

Granted, not everyone will have the same internal monologue when they encounter a table with food and beverages. Some passers-by might even be less trusting if they think you’re trying to buy their attention. In practice, though, most people should respond positively to an offer of free snacks, or be indifferent at worst. So when you want to grab their attention for a matter that’s important to you, allocating a small portion of your budget towards food and drinks is a very smart investment, indeed.

Let’s say you just placed an order on amazon.com. You didn’t feel the need to print a receipt or confirmation page, since they always email you a copy of the order anyway. But after you receive the product, you decide it would be a good idea to have a printed receipt on file. So you go back to the Amazon site, locate the right order, click the appropriate button to view the order details, and print out the page. In a matter of seconds, you found all the info you needed.

However, not every website makes it easy to reprint order receipts and other types of confirmation pages. For example, I recently paid a utility bill and wanted to print the usual confirmation page. But since I hit the wrong button on the screen, the bill payment site went back to its main menu. I looked far and wide, but there was no way to print a confirmation page for a previous payment. You could sort of see the payment in a list of past activity, but the detail screens only let you change or cancel the payment — not simply show when and how it was made.

To correct this problem, designers should follow a simple rule. Any time that your website generates an important confirmation page that customers might want to keep for their records — such as an order receipt, payment confirmation, or change to a billing plan — then you should provide a way to retrieve that same confirmation page again later. One approach would be to provide an “Activity History” or similar list, with a link to view the original confirmation page that accompanied each transaction.

Regardless of which format you select, the important thing is to give customers better access to their past activity within your site. By making it easy for them to reprint confirmation pages and other important documents, you’ll provide customers with added peace of mind. Plus, even if the typical user only accesses these documents once or twice a year, having the info available shows that you’re readily anticipating their future needs, and turns an otherwise frustrating search into a quick and efficient interaction.

While perusing the frozen foods area at Trader Joe’s, I noticed a new frozen pizza that looked quite interesting. The signage indicated it was a new product, and I decided to give it a try. But to my dismay, virtually every box of the pizza was open on top. I finally found two pristine specimens to purchase, though I was still a bit puzzled about the large numbers of open boxes.

A few minutes later, I asked the cashier about it. She said that some box designs aren’t quite right, and the flaps just open up for no reason. Perhaps they used the wrong type of glue on the ends, or the box wasn’t the right size for the product inside. Either way, I would expect that open boxes tend to scare customers away from the product, which suggests that the store needs to take action when this occurs.

In particular, you might deal with this in a few different ways:

– Re-seal the boxes (assuming the product is separately sealed or wrapped inside of the box, and there’s no regulations or policies against doing so).

– Add a sticker to each box, or a sign on the shelf, explaining that the contents are fine, even though the boxes opened up by themselves.

– When all else fails, offer a discount on each of the open box items.

Granted, such a widespread problem with package design seems to be quite rare. But when it does occur, it pays to have a plan for restoring your customers’ confidence in the open box items. Otherwise, the product may sit on the shelf until it’s expired, and you’ll have to throw away what was otherwise a perfectly good piece of inventory.