Tag: user experience

Are you with me?

If you’re talking to someone, you have to pay attention to make sure they’re understanding you. This goes one-on-one, as well as speaking to a group. Communication is two-way.

Saw a nifty feature of meetup.com, a site that gets helps manage group meetings, from programmers to political rallies. I go to a PHP meetup in Orlando that organizes through them. Kevin is presenting the Zend Framework tomorrow, and I wondered what happened, since I usually get reminder emails about the meetings.

I logged into meetup.com, and was immediately greeted with a message saying that they’d had problems delivering mail to me recently. It asked if I’d changed my email address, or marked something as spam; as well as options to change my email address, or confirm that I was still using the same one.

Given the number of apps that just spamjaculate messages from a “no reply” address, it’s nice to see that at least one is listening back.

The answer is Simple.

Let’s take the average person. They want to go into Burger King and order a Whopper. They don’t want to order 4 oz of ground beef (precooked weight, tolerance of +/- .2 oz, stored above 140F for no more than 2 hours); a bun with sesame seeds (gross weight 5 oz, between 50-70 sesame seeds evenly distributed across the top of the bun); a slice of tomato no thicker than a quarter inch, but no thinner than an eighth of an inch… They don’t care about the process, only the result. Is it tasty enough? Is it filling enough? Does it meet the requirements of a burger?

The exception, of course, is the builder, or the engineer. The person who is designing the burger (not the employee cooking it; the person at corporate who actually formulates the blueprint for the company’s food) wants the burger consistent. They want to know all of the details. They care.

So, when dealing with “I don’t care”, the answer is simple. Yes, or no (with a simple reason why not). Handle everything for them, and they’ll love you for it.

When dealing with “I care” — jump in the deep end, and pull them in too. Show them everything you’re handling, and they’ll love you for it.

Of course, the trick is telling the two apart.