The Strange Thing Hotels Do To Keep Customers

For the past two years, I’ve traveled for about 100-150 days per year.

This means I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels.

There’s this one thing that I’ve noticed about nearly all hotels:

It’s the indoor pool.

Here’s what’s weird about it:

Almost no one uses it.

It’s smelly, loud, and there’s always a risk of someone else getting into that tiny hot tub with you, too.

So why does this still exist?

It’s a serious cost for hotels to install and maintain.

Yet, basically, all hotels continue to offer this as a feature.

The feature isn’t the pool. It’s the feeling you get when you know you could use the pool. It feels like a luxury to have access to a pool with fresh towels.

How is an indoor pool related to anything?

Whether you’re building software, teaching students, taking care of patients, or growing an audience, you are developing and revising your “features.”

As you look at user behavior, you have to decide what features to keep, which ones to remove, and which ones to build from scratch.

I’m not saying the indoor pool is a great idea.

What I’m saying is that you have to find out what’s really valuable about what you’re doing and make sure you’re focused on that.

It’s up to you to decide whether the ends justify the means.

Just think what would happen if the hotel removed the pool. Pools are so ubiquitous that customers could look at this and feel that they’re being ripped off of a standard feature!

By having the pool, you’re now on par with the guest’s expectations for what features a hotel should have. You’re not adding anything. You’re just keeping up.

This is just the unique context that will help inform decisions.

And honestly, that’s the easy part.

The hard part is identifying that it’s not the pool that’s valuable, it’s the feeling of having access to a luxury that’s valuable.

2 Minute Action

What’s something you do that is valuable?

It can be as small as the holiday card you send to clients or the tissue box you put in the grieving room for the families of patients.

Now ask: how do you know what’s valuable about that?

Don’t make this hard. You only have 2 minutes.

Just ask the user. Write an email asking for feedback. Monitor website clicks to see behavior.

Your action can be small and still have a big impact.

The Unlikely Lesson My Bike Taught Me About People

I just bought a new bike computer.It’s the little gadget that sits on the handle bars and tells you your speed.Anyway, I opened the box and look what I saw:Do you see this huge piece of paper?Look at the size of it compared to my bike.These are the setup instructions.It took me 10 minutes to read this thing and figure out how to program it for mph, and a 24hr clock.But wait, it’s not rocket surgery.

So why all this reading!?

This is a classic example of how frustrating documentation is.This documentation is here instead of the developers of the bike computer just building something that makes sense without instructions—this is called “intuitive.”I’m paying the price, as the end user, for bad design.But, Chris, how is this relevant to me? I’m not a designer of any kind.The point isn’t about the mechanics of the computer, the point is about how the designers weren’t focused on the end user. You can take this approach in ANYthing you do.Let’s take writing an email for example.Most people read emails on their phones and most busy people get hundreds of emails a day.

How does this translate?

Write in quick, easy to read sentences. Use bullets. Hit the return key a lot and avoid big blocks of text.Reply here if you have more ideas of how to put this into action.The more we share our approaches and examples, the faster we can improve.

2 Minute Action:

Who is your end user?Students? iOS users? Chefs? Painters? Cyclists? LEGO enthusiasts?Thinking about how painful the experience is for your end user, how can your interaction with them easier?How else might you improve your interaction with them?Hit reply and let me know.