I love to blame the idiots who created the annoying situation in the first place and take pride in the fact that I know a better way. In college it was the line at the URoom cafeteria where no one thought through how the people at the salad bar where going to fit in the regular line. Do they get to cut in at the end of the salad bar, if so for the price of some rabbit food you would get to jump past all of us going for the good stuff in the grill line. My latest discovery of stupidity is the fact that no one thought through the user experience before putting all the BART station elevators OUTSIDE the pay area. It is truly an honor system that anyone who takes the elevator actually pays. Is no one paying attention???
But I have met my match. I have discovered the process I can't redesign in my head and hope someone will get a brain and some money and fix it in the future. I am trying to get pregnant with number 2 and the process is becoming one of those annoying ones I wish I could just redesign. But I can't. This one is bigger than pushing some pixels, making a flow chart and advocating for a budget. I can't even blame the idiot who thought this one up.
When designing a process, I always think about how to manage user expectations. The process should be obvious, easy to understand and lead the user to success. Keep that in mind when you here about this store. You can only buy a product for 12-24 hours in any given month, but that window can move around. One month is may be on day 14 the next month day 18. You can only buy your product if you purchase it within 48 hours of the window and even so you only have a small chance of being successful. Then you have to wait 2 weeks to find out if purchased the product. During that 2 weeks, the store treats you exactly the same if you made a successful purchase and if you didn't. And if you are not successful they don't tell you why and you have to wait 2 weeks before you can attempt to purchase the product again. While there is a cottage industry around helping you predict the availability of the product, the store provides no transparency into why your purchase was not successful. An oddly, just to annoy the unsuccessful, there are people that somehow managed to accidently purchase the product (leave your credit cards in your wallets people!). Once you are finally lucky enough to make the purchase, it isn't delivered for 9 months. During the first 3 months, the store can also decide not to fulfill the order for whatever reason. And the funny thing is, this is a very popular store. I guess if the product is good enough, no one cares the process sucks.
So, what do you do? I am trying to tap into my inner visual designer. The part of me that believes in creative inspiration and the magic spark that makes great things happen. Wish me luck.
