In preparation for an event that I’m attending this week, I decided to look up how to get to the meeting facility. But no matter how many ways I typed the address into Google Maps, nothing came up. Figuring that I must be typing the address in the wrong format, I did some web searches and found a few companies in the same building. When I copied and pasted their info into the maps page, I got the same result: “Address not found”. Finally, I tried the search with Yahoo Local and managed to locate the building.

Since I needed to travel to this specific building, I had no choice but to commit the time required to deal with their stupid address. But in most cases, prospective customers are easily flustered by this type of obstacle. Being unfindable on popular mapping tools can certainly hurt sales for places like stores and restaurants.

With this in mind, I offer just one tip: when you’re thinking of opening a new location for your business, always make sure the address shows up on the popular mapping websites. Otherwise, you may be setting yourself up for failure when your new location has a weird address that nobody can find. Sure, you can take steps to help them find you or petition the local government to fix broken street names, but wouldn’t it be easier to just avoid these traps in the first place?

Many grocery stores have started to place complementary items together, e.g. all the components you need to create a certain meal can be found in the same area. Perhaps the most common example of this is putting salsa near the tortilla chips, even though salsa normally appears in a different section entirely. Generally, this is helpful for shoppers and motivates them to spend more as well.

From what I can tell, these special food pairings are in addition to the usual organization of the aisles, so you can still find the items in their normal location. But it does present a problem: what if a shopper thinks the small display of a product is all the store carries? This is exactly what happened to me in a Trader Joe’s last weekend. A staff member pointed me to the chocolate chips that were displayed near the walnuts and pecans, and it was unclear what other sorts of chips they had elsewhere in the store — if they carried them at all.

It’s really easy to eliminate this confusion. All the store has to do is locate each place where a certain item is displayed outside its normal location. Then, put a little sign there that says something like “Find more chocolate chips and baking supplies in Aisle 4”. Aside from preventing any misconceptions about the larger selection available elsewhere in the store, this also provides a subtle motivation for shoppers to check out those other areas. With this simple modification, today’s meal and theme-based displays become even more productive, helping shoppers buy common food pairings and pointing them to broader selections when necessary.

YouTube seems to do a good job remembering which audio volume you’ve chosen. In other words, if you turn the volume way down for one video, the volume slider will start in that same position when you watch other videos. This is helpful for users and probably encourages them to spend more time on the site, since you feel like YouTube is adapting to your preferences.

However, I’ve noticed one problem with remembering the last volume someone used. If they turn the sound all the way down, other videos will start off muted too. Some users might forget they ever made this choice, and just assume the video they’re watching lacks sound entirely. This scenario is bad for users, video creators, and YouTube itself.

To remedy this, I propose a simple rule: if the user loads a new video but the audio is muted from their last session, show a gentle reminder near the volume slider, e.g. “Click here to turn the sound on”. This should be subtle, but more noticeable than the usual speaker icon with no bars next to it. The same approach can probably be applied to any website that remembers user preferences from one session to the next. Specifically, if a customer has chosen settings that might confuse them later, be sure to give them a friendly reminder about that at the start of future sessions.

Windows is a really obnoxious piece of software. Lately, the situation has gotten worse, with more and more software updates being forced upon users. Perhaps you’ve seen this on your own computer. The system suddenly says “Your updates have been installed”, and then shows a dialog box where the only option is “Reboot now”. A threatening countdown timer reminds you that you have no choice in the matter. In my most recent experience, the update also broke all Internet access, without any explanation or even an error message.

I won’t even get into all the problems here, since they’re quite obvious. But to sum it up, treating your users like morons and taking away their free will is a good way to ruin their experience with your product. People usually don’t need hundreds of options and preferences to fiddle with, but reducing their role to that of a passive observer is clearly taking it too far.

Merchants like Amazon.com will often fulfill a larger order in several shipments. Sometimes the items come from different locations, or one is ready before the others. Either way, this means the customer receives more than one box and sees separate charges on their credit card for each of those shipments.

The problem, of course, is that the credit card charges can be hard to reconcile against the original receipt for the full order. Sure, you can total them up, but what if you placed several orders at once and the mini-shipments overlap? You quickly lose the ability to do a quick, at-a-glance verification of the charges.

I propose an easy solution. When shipping part of an order, the merchant’s charge should show the total order amount in the notes. For example, a charge for $19 of a $48 order might say, “Shipment 1 of 3 for your order totaling $48”. This quickly conveys the progress of the shipments, and helps customers match up each charge with the original order receipt from the website.

It’s very convenient to have a program notify you automatically when a new version is released. Typically, the program asks if you want to perform the update, and then completes the process on its own. In fact, security programs like antivirus software are designed to do this every day. As long as I don’t have to waste time fussing with the update, that’s fine by me.

Where developers get into trouble is with the ever more frequent updates that require manually downloading and reinstalling the whole program. I hate that. It wastes time and effort, since my settings are usually wiped out too. I went through this very fiasco today with my instant messaging program, and it took me almost an hour to install the update and fix my preferences afterwards.

If you’re designing a program that requires periodic updates, my advice is to keep the manual upgrades to a minimum. Once a year is fine. But requiring a time-consuming upgrade every few months is definitely going to piss people off.

Yesterday, I helped a family member troubleshoot why her Internet connection suddenly got a lot slower. It turns out the problem started right after she switched her phone service to one of those digital phone products from the cable company. The trouble is, she’s still using dial-up for her Internet access, which relies on an analog phone line. In my experience, analog modems don’t play nice with any sort of digital phone or VoIP service, so I pointed to that as the culprit.

Technical issues are a dime a dozen, so my point here goes beyond the technical side of things. I’m interested in the lack of responsibility on the cable company’s part. In particular, when she called to order the digital phone service, nobody at the cable company thought to ask my relative if she was using her old phone line for Internet access. Clearly, this is an important thing to do. Whether she was using dial-up or DSL, those services simply aren’t going to work over the cable phone service.

The takeaway here is that every business has some degree of responsibility to ask customers the right questions. If a customer is ordering a product and you know of several things that it might conflict with, you need to ask about those upfront. Sure, you might lose a small number of sales if people back out. Other times, you can upsell them on a value-added solution. In any event, giving people fair warning ahead of time helps them avoid surprises. For the seller, this means fewer problems and cancellations after the delivery date.

Like most people, I have low expectations when calling a company’s customer service department. And when you limit this to notoriously bad industries like travel, cell phones, and healthcare, the bar is set even lower. So, I was quite shocked when I called my doctor’s office to ask about an error on my bill, and received an incredibly helpful response.

In particular, the customer service rep listened to what I had to say, acknowledged they had made a mistake, and corrected it immediately in their billing system. I didn’t have to repeat the same information three times or plead for them to do something about the issue! When prompted, the rep even gave me her name and encouraged me to ask for her personally if I ever needed help in the future. It’s amazing how few organizations act like this, but the rare example of how to do things right helps strengthen my hope that others will eventually do the same.

During a recent trip, I walked by a particular restaurant several times. It’s located right on the town square, so it’s rather hard to miss. A few things struck me as odd, though. First, the building had lots of windows, but the shades were closed all day long. Second, they didn’t have a menu or hours posted outside for people to see — not even a sign to indicate what sort of cuisine they offered. This scenario held true on weekdays and weekends as well.

Maybe they expected everyone in town to know what the place looks like inside, and to be familiar with the food, prices, and hours. Even so, this is a surefire way to kill your new business efforts. Potential customers look to these data points to make a quick judgement about whether a given venue is a suitable option. If you fail to provide this information, you might as well post a sign on the door that says “Repeat customers only”.

Of all the types of spam emails, the ones I find the most annoying are the self-referential ones. These emails start off with a fairly pathetic plea, such as “We’ve been trying to contact you for weeks but you won’t do us the courtesy of replying”. Then, they include a forwarded copy of each message they supposedly sent before. Maybe they’re trying to take advantage of some sort of reciprocity principle, but the tone comes across as arrogant and accusatory. Since very few people will remember getting the prior messages in the spam chain, let alone feel guilty about ignoring them, I think this is a particularly ineffective way to peddle products. After all, simply pretending you have a business relationship with somebody doesn’t automatically make it real.