Pharmacy chains like Walgreens and CVS have gotten very good at automating the process of ordering and picking up prescriptions. But after receiving a recent message saying that a prescription was ready, I realized there is definitely room for improvement. Here is the information that I’d like to see in the automated phone messages or email reminders:

– Number of prescriptions that are ready
– Whether any more prescriptions are still being processed, and if so, when they’ll be done
– Total cost of the order
– Pharmacy hours
– Option to press a key to be connected to the pharmacy if you have questions

By providing this data, the store would be answering most of the common follow-up questions upfront. In turn, customers would save time, and the pharmacy staff would spend less time answering the same basic questions over and over again.

While I don’t shop at warehouse clubs like Costco, I tend to buy a lot of items on a given shopping trip to Trader Joe’s. In fact, I saw an article recently that estimated Trader Joe’s average basket size at around $48. It follows that for every person like me, who buys $80-100 during each visit, there are some people spending much less on each trip. And since Trader Joe’s doesn’t have the usual “express” lanes, everyone ends up in the same set of queues.

This makes me wonder: should certain retailers offer special shopping hours for bulk purchasing? For instance, the store could open an hour earlier two days a week, and invite people who spend more than say $75 per trip to shop during that period. And the great thing is, they wouldn’t have to do any work to enforce that restriction: people buying only a few things would have little incentive to wait in line behind folks with huge numbers of items.

Offering special hours for bulk shopping probably wouldn’t make existing bulk shoppers spend any more money. However, I bet it would encourage some of the people who tend to make frequent, smaller trips to instead buy more each time and consider new products, thus increasing the retailer’s share of wallet. And by shifting more of the bulk shoppers to off-peak times, it would reduce average queue length and make checkout more efficient during regular store hours, which every shopper would certainly appreciate.

For reasons too complex to explain here, I needed to purchase an item from a UK-based website. However, when we tried to place the order, the website said they couldn’t ship the specific item to the US. Confused, I called them up to ask for an explanation. I spent a good 15 minutes on the phone with an inept customer service rep, who basically told me they have no information about why certain products have ship-to restrictions.

I found this interaction even more frustrating than the same conversation with a US website. Why? Because the UK website makes their phone number easy to find, and greets you with the very proper and competent British accent that you rarely hear in the US. For better or worse, the novelty of hearing that accent (or really, any foreign accent) has the ability to alter the caller’s expectations.

From what I can tell, the company is outsourcing their support to a call center in a low-wage country like India. So as an international caller, you start off by hearing a novel and competent-sounding voice in the menus, and then suffer the letdown of the same crappy support that you would normally expect from a domestic company. I’m not sure what the solution is here. Perhaps companies should look at routing first-time foreign callers to their best call centers, to help match those customers’ higher expectations with the companies’ most competent staff.

When I click on the printer-friendly view for a web page, I expect to get a simplified version of the page that will print cleanly. Most sites that offer a printable view do this fairly well. However, some sites add a very irritating feature to the mix: as soon as the printer-friendly page loads, the Print dialog pops up without any warning.

Designers who use Javascript to open the Print dialog surely mean well. After all, they’re saving you the effort of having to choose File > Print, or pressing the keyboard shortcut for it. Maybe some users even appreciate it. But for everyone else, it can easily get in the way of completing the desired task. Personally, I always do a Print Preview before outputting the printable page, to make sure the scaling is right. Or, in the case of something like a Google Map, you might want to type notes and directions into the nifty field they provide. If the site shoves the Print dialog in your face, it interrupts your natural flow and degrades the experience.

Anyone who has enough computer skills to find the printer-friendly view certainly knows how to print the page once it appears. In fact, I can’t think of any good reason to ever show the Print dialog right after the page loads up. It’s much smarter to let users press Print on their own, and if you’re still worried they won’t figure it out, give them a button for “Print this page”. The key is to let the user decide when they’re ready to print the document, rather than making assumptions that will be wrong a large portion of the time.

For a cell phone company, providing coverage maps online is a no-brainer. After all, there’s no point in wasting resources on prospects who don’t live in your coverage area. Cell providers may even require you to provide a zip/postal code before you can browse for phones and plans, to ensure they have service where you live.

However, I am shocked that other telecommunications firms never adopted this approach. Try going to the site of your favorite phone, DSL, or cable company and check if you can search for service in your zip code. And even if they let you search by zip code or address, there’s rarely a visual map that shows where service is offered. That type of map would be hugely valuable to consumers and businesses who are planning to relocate, and want to find out which providers have service on a city, neighborhood, or even block-by-block basis.

I can attest to the value of more detailed coverage maps. My company’s main office is located on a major street, but we never imagined that there would be vastly more options for Internet access on one side of the road versus the other. If we had access to coverage maps from each provider — or a third-party aggregation site that showed all providers in the area — we might have ended up a few hundred feet to the south, with a considerably lower telco bill.

The fitness center in my building is pretty decent. There’s usually enough equipment for everyone, and it sure beats paying for gym membership and having to venture outside in the winter. But there’s one thing that really annoys me: some mysterious overlord controls the temperature, and you can’t adjust it. Why not? Because they put a locked plastic cover over the thermostat.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen that approach. In fact, an office that I used to work in had the same brilliant idea. And just like the fitness center, the temperature was never confortable for the people inside the venue. This isn’t just a climate control issue: the same type of thinking is what leads certain coffee shops and airports to cover up their power outlets, thus preventing patrons from plugging in laptops.

In each case, the people running the venue are trying to prevent what they perceive as a problem by taking control away from customers. But this always backfires. In the gym, people open the windows to cool off — but on hot days, it ends up raising the temperature even more. In airports and cafes, people publish online maps showing where the best outlets are hidden, or might even resort to prying the covers off.

See the trend here? When you take away control from customers, the worst offenders find a new way to cause trouble. Meanwhile, the vast majority of customers — the well-behaved ones — suffer through a lower-quality experience. Instead of polarizing people by taking away all their control, try a compromise. For instance, a fitness center could install a digital thermostat that lets people control the temperature within a set range, while preventing them from leaving it extremely hot or cold. A coffee shop or airport could label certain outlets for customer use and put up signs asking that people limit their usage to one hour at a time. Show your customers that you trust them to act like responsible human beings, and I bet they’ll surprise you with their good behavior.

Southwest has a neat feature on their website called “Shortcut to low fares”. Basically, you select the departure and arrival cities, and it shows you a calendar view with the lowest fares for each day. This works great, except for one problem: there’s no way to display nonstop flights only.

Why does limiting the search to nonstop flights matter? First, many travelers only want to take direct flights. The availability and pricing for connecting flights is extra data they don’t want to see. And second, the lowest priced flight on many routes will be a connecting flight. So if you’re looking at the fare calendar for the lowest price and then see that only the connecting flights are that cheap, it can be a big letdown that ultimately leads you to abandon the transaction.

What’s the solution here? Southwest should add a checkbox on the fare calendar for “Show nonstop flights only”. In fact, they could really use this option across their entire website, since none of the search tools I’ve seen allow for that type of filtering. In doing so, I bet their conversion rates would increase, i.e. more of the people who start a flight search would actually continue on to purchase a ticket.

While researching a fairly boring IT product, I ran into a site with a product picture labeled “actual size”. Making that sort of claim online is always a bad idea. You see, the image has the same number of pixels whether you’re viewing it on a regular desktop monitor, or a small laptop or netbook screen, or even a mobile phone. But the size of those pixels will vary widely on each platform. Smaller screens tend to squash more pixels into a given amount of screen space, thus making each pixel smaller. As a result, the size of an image on the screen (measured in inches or centimeters) may be a lot different from one person’s computer to the next.

For similar reasons, it’s a good idea to avoid absolute claims about color, texture, and other physical attributes. Instead, show the item next to a common reference point that conveys its attributes no matter how good or bad the online picture looks. The people who sell small gadgets like cell phones know all about this approach. That’s why you’ll see size comparison tools — like showing the phone next to a deck of cards — on their sites. By giving people a familiar and tangible reference point, you provide the data they need to make a decision, without introducing any uncertainty about the product’s size and other key attributes.

It should come as no surprise that having annoying people right outside your door is bad for business. For instance, I tend to avoid one store that always has an obnoxious beggar on the corner, only a few feet from the entrance. But when I think about the various types of people that can scare away customers, it’s not just the homeless or crazy types. Instead, there’s another group to contend with: clean-cut people trying to raise money for charity.

You rarely see anyone asking for charitable donations or even selling girl scout cookies in the city, but I understand they’re quite common in the suburbs. Before I lived in Chicago, I remember walking past those people who had set up camp outside Walmart, Target and other big stores during the holiday season. Whether or not a store approves of them being there, one thing is clear: anyone who stands near your store and harasses customers is going to hurt your sales. You can rationalize their right to be there all you want, but make no mistake: you’re paying them out of your bottom line.

I see a lot of articles and blog posts that end with “stay tuned”. This phrase drives me crazy, although I’ve probably used it once or twice myself in the same context. There are several things that bother me about it: it’s vague, it’s overused, and it seems to take control away from the reader, who is reduced to the role of passive observer.

Here are some alternatives that might work better:

– Subscribe to our RSS feed or email newsletter so you don’t miss the next article in the series (with each of those hyperlinked).
– We’ll be writing about this more in the coming weeks, so let us know if there are certain angles you’d like us to cover.
– We’re planning a lot more research on this topic, so be sure to forward this link to your friends and colleagues who might be interested.

Although each of these statements is intentionally vague about when the next piece of related content will be released, they do have one thing in common: they all feature a call to action. In doing so, they give the reader a tangible action they can take beyond the obvious “stay tuned”. By providing options for those people who really want to engage with the content, you help them spread the word about the content and grow your audience for when the next article on that topic is published.