Here in Illinois, we have some arcane law that restricts the sale of alcohol on Sundays until after 11 am. Not surprisingly, stores have placed signs near their wine aisles to let customers know about the restriction. This cuts down on repetitive questions, so the signage makes sense. But what if you’re shopping there, and you don’t have your watch or cell phone handy to check the current time?

The obvious solution is to put a clock on or near the sign itself. It doesn’t have to be fancy: just something easy to read, so customers can determine if they’re allowed to buy the product yet. It’s a cheap and simple upgrade to what’s already there, and should increase sales as well. Why the sales lift? Some customers might not realize that it’s really close to (or just after) the time that the product can be purchased. Give them this info, and they’re more likely to add wine (or whatever the item is) to their cart.

Whether it’s the weak economy or a more fundamental change in the way people do business, it seems like more and more companies are embracing telecommuting. In the process, these firms end up reducing the amount of office space they lease, since fewer employees are parked at a desk in some office building. Of course, this is a bad thing for the real estate companies that own office space and make money by leasing it out. So why aren’t these landlords taking steps to hedge their bets in the office market?

With a little bit of creative thinking, corporate landlords could certainly position themselves to benefit from the telecommuting trend. They could seek out tenants like Regus, which provides on-demand office suites and meeting rooms that decentralized firms and their workers can rent by the month, day, or even hour. They could allocate a certain amount of space in their buildings towards smaller, turnkey offices that appeal to companies who don’t need lots of real estate — and don’t want to be bothered with costly buildout and complicated leases. Or they could make an effort to attract tenants whose core business involves helping other firms telecommute more effectively, like software-as-a-service companies.

On a conceptual level, it’s easy to see how corporate real estate owners can hedge against a long-term decline in the demand for office space. But it’s much harder to convince them to take action. In my experience, corporate landlords are stubborn and inflexible, and couldn’t care less about what their current or prospective tenants want. Thus, I suspect the majority of landlords won’t take the telecommuting threat seriously for a long time. And by then, things will have changed so much that adapting to the new rules of the market will be a costly and painful process.

It’s hard to pick the most frustrating aspect of trying to fix the email functionality on my Dell printer/scanner. However, perhaps the most insulting thing was realizing that Dell spent lots of time and energy on all sorts of obscure features that I doubt many customers use. Meanwhile, the core features that a large portion of customer rely upon are poorly designed and implemented, and it feels like nobody tested them at all.

Here are some of the features that seem like overkill in a printer targeted towards home and small office usage:

– Settings for ancient printing protocols, such as Apple’s EtherTalk
– Ability to create separate profiles for each employee, presumably to track or restrict usage
– Detailed alerts for notifying different staff members when the printer runs out of paper or toner

Sure, these might be useful to some customers. But the majority of people just want the darn thing to print, scan and fax without too much fuss. Ironically, even if some people really value the advanced features, they might be unable to use them because the core features are so poorly done. In my case, who cares about lots of extra scanner settings if I can’t get the thing to scan in the first place?

No matter what type of product you sell, it pays to get the basics right before developing the more advanced features. When the core features don’t work as advertised, shoving in the advanced stuff just makes things worse for everyone.

About halfway through a marathon troubleshooting session for my Dell printer, I decided to update the firmware. Sounds easy enough, right? I went to the Dell support site, located the model number, and clicked the button for downloads. I found the firmware link, which was supposed to contain a file with a specific name — they even provided the filename on the screen before downloading. However, the file that appeared was completely different, and the right one was nowhere to be found.

I ended up downloading an older version of the firmware, which worked fine. But it took me about ten times as long as it should have to find a usable firmware image. I’m forced to wonder: does anyone at Dell even bother testing their firmware links after posting the files? Heck, even if they can’t test the actual firmware update process, they could at least try downloading the file to a computer to see if the filename is correct.

It’s not very hard to perform basic quality control when posting a file online. After you upload the file, try downloading it just like a customer would. Make sure things like the filename, size and content match up with how they’re described on the website. And if your company deals with a huge number of downloadable files, you should probably have someone go through the list once a month or so to verify that the links still work as expected. This may seem like a waste of time, but the time and hassle you’ll save customers should be many times greater than the effort you put in.

Last week, I had the misfortune of changing the email settings on my Dell multifunction printer/scanner. Long story short, I was forced to go through a bunch of different email accounts until I found one that worked. In total, the troubleshooting took me over 8 hours, which is just horrible. All that effort just to make the scanning features work properly again.

What was the source of my problem? Dell’s miserable software (or firmware, if you want to be exact) only works with certain types of email accounts. Even with the newer firmware, the device simply refuses to connect to many types of outgoing mail servers. Finding an email service it would play nice with was an incredibly arduous task, involving the worst type of trial and error. Why was this so painful? Because the error messages from the Dell printer are totally useless.

The brilliant minds who created the printer included such helpful error messages as “Send Failed (Auth)” and “Send Failed (Wrong Config)”. You can’t get additional details about the nature of the error even by poring over the web-based control panel or printing the email sending log. So the user is left guessing. Did I enter the wrong password? Was there a problem connecting to the mail server itself? Is the authentication method not supported?

I finally tracked down the meaning of these errors, from the user guide of what appears to be an identical printer branded as a Samsung. And the list of what the errors mean is totally useless, too. For instance, the error about “Wrong Config” supposedly indicates your network settings (not the email settings) are invalid. However, all I had to do was use a different email service and it solved the issue — without ever changing the network settings. Lame.

Let me get to the point here. Email is a complex beast, and the constant fight against spam requires that ISPs be quite strict about who can send mail through their servers. That’s why they require modern methods of authentication before letting you send email. With this in mind, any device that has the ability to send emails through a service of your choice will inheret some of the complexity of email in general. And that means things are going to go wrong from time to time.

The only logical solution is to provide very detailed and useful errors to the user, instead of pointless summary messages that just confuse people. Take these verbose error messages and display them loud and clear, especially in the web interface if your product has one. After all, users shouldn’t have to pay an 8 hour penalty to deal with a 1 hour type of problem, just because you were too lazy to give them the info they deserve.

As I wrote about yesterday, I had a less-than-stellar experience with the Moo online printing service. Once I managed to get through the design process, the website took me to the checkout and payment system. Everything looked normal until I went to enter the info for my Amex card. The drop-down menu had choices for Visa, MasterCard, and a few other brands that I’m guessing are popular outside the US. But as I quickly learned, Moo doesn’t accept Amex.

I’ve written several posts about how stupid it is when local businesses refuse to accept American Express. But I never expected to run into this issue with a fairly large, well-known e-commerce website. Can you imagine the uproar if someone like Amazon or Netflix stopped taking Amex? Customers would be furious, and those websites would see revenues drop almost immediately. I’m guessing Moo never accepted Amex, so maybe they don’t know what they’re missing.

Regardless, I reluctantly dug out my MasterCard and paid for the purchase. But the experience left me wondering what the heck Moo is thinking. I know that I’m less likely to return to the site for future purchases or recommend them to a friend. Heck, I feel sort of cheated since the no-Amex thing came out of nowhere and is completely unexpected for a big online retailer. Maybe Moo has their reasons for leaving Amex users out in the cold, but I can’t imagine their policy is good for business.

A few days ago, my wife decided to order some business card-sized prints from Moo. After we uploaded the photos and typed in the text, we realized that several of the photos were cropped wrong. So, we clicked the button at the top of the screen for “Step 1” or “Step 2” — whatever one corresponded to editing the photos. Sure enough, the system let us change the photos, but when we returned to the text editing step, all the text was gone. Bummer.

Apparently, Moo doesn’t save your work unless you complete the steps in the exact order they specify. To be clear, we didn’t hit the Back button or do something else that normally trips up web apps. We just clicked on the step number. The link worked normally, without any warning. And that’s the whole problem: we never got an error message saying that going back a step would delete all our text.

In a perfect world, your application would let customers navigate back and forth while automatically saving their work along the way. But when that’s not possible, you need to tell them if the action they’ve requested is going to erase their work or have some other nasty side effect. That way, they can decide if the benefit of making those changes is worth the cost.

Many websites are quick to tell you how their system is “powered by” one company or another. The structure of these partnerships and supplier relationships surely vary a lot. But in general, showing that you’re associated with a larger firm can help a smaller website build credibility, while getting your logo placed on a well-known site can drive traffic and build brand equity. Some vendors might even provide significant discounts to larger customers who are willing to put a “powered by” logo on their site.

If this works so well online, why can’t local businesses do the same thing? Here are a few common venues and the type of supplier or partner they could team up with:

– A restaurant could talk up their favorite brand of cookware by adding pictures of the chefs using it to the menu
– A car rental company could promote the brand of tires they put on their cars
– A housewares store could show customers which cleaning products they use to keep the place clean

I’ve seen this done quite a bit with coffee: those signs that say “We proudly brew Starbucks coffee” are everywhere. But there’s definitely an opportunity to take it many steps further in virtually every brick-and-mortar business. Just figure out which products and services make your organization tick, and see whether it makes sense to tell customers why you like those products so much. And if that messaging leads to a formal partnership or gets you discounts with your key suppliers, all the better.

While waiting to meet someone at a restaurant earlier this week, I noticed a curious scene being played out near the restaurant entrance. A decent-sized crowd of people, perhaps four or five, descended upon the area next to the door. Apparently, they were all trying to check out the wall-mounted menu and decide if they wanted to eat there. After sneaking a peek at the menu, they decided to go elsewhere.

When people consult a menu like that, they’re probably looking to answer two questions. First, what type of food does this place serve? Second, is it in the right price range? Yet restaurants tend to put their regular menu on the wall, with small type and little in the way of summary data. There must be a better way.

To improve the situation, the restaurant should have a large and prominent sign next to the menu itself. The sign would say the restaurant’s name, the type of food they specialize in, and the general price ranges for breakfast, lunch, and dinner — all in large text that you can read from several feet away. With this info, potential customers could make a decision very quickly, and more people could view the key information at once. In turn, a higher percentage of prospects who seek out the menu info would decide to eat there, and fewer people would be scared away by a big crowd all trying to decipher the regular menu at once.

I watched “Burn After Reading” the other day, and it was pretty entertaining. As the credits scrolled by, I noticed the usual list of companies who provided assistance or promotional consideration. One of these was a flooring manufacturer, which struck me as odd. But then I remembered that George Clooney’s character always mentioned people’s floors when he walked into their houses. In fact, I think he used the name of the sponsor in one of those scenes.

Fittingly, I can’t remember the name of the flooring company. Perhaps I’d be able to pick it out from a list, but only because I saw the name in the promotional credits. This is a great example of when a product placement is just too subtle to have any impact. Sure, it’s low-key and viewers are very unlikely to have any problem with it. But if nobody has any recollection of the product placement, why bother in the first place?

Striking a balance here is the key. In the case of the flooring company, maybe they could have Clooney’s character mention the company or product name twice during the story, rather than just once. Or, they could provide a visual cue shortly before or after he says the name. Maybe he could drive past a billboard on the way to the location, and that billboard could be digitally altered to feature the same product — without going overboard. There’s a fine line between a product placement that nobody notices because it’s too subtle, and one that annoys viewers by appearing in every other scene. Finding the right compromise can be tough, but it delivers significant benefits for sponsors and viewers alike.