BECOME UNREASONABLE: Designing for Hospitality

As winter is turned into spring this year, I've been doing a whole lot of walking. Most days I do a steady four or five mile lap around my neighborhood. It's a great way to get some fresh air, get some exercise and get some mental space to balance out the hours. I spend sitting at my desk. It's also a fantastic time to listen to some podcasts and audio books. And I got to tell you, one book in particular has taken hold of me. I can't stop thinking about it.

It's called unreasonable hospitality by will. Guidara.

Guidara is a restaurant or in a hospitality expert. He's known for his work at 11 Madison Park, a three Michelin starred restaurant in New York city. Get are also, co-founded make it nice. A hospitality group that includes several other restaurants and bars that you may have heard of. In the book, you'd already talks about the principles of hospitality that he's learned over the course of his career in the restaurant industry.

He talks about the importance of listening to customers and anticipating their needs. Guitars teams are the best in the world at providing a memorable experience. They look for the small details about their guests that they can use to make them feel special. They go above and beyond to make sure that every guest has a great experience. They do this while trimming away the unnecessary of the superfluous and the extraneous. They're not just about making people feel special.

They're about making people feel unreasonably special. One thing I love about the author is that despite working at some of the top restaurants in the world, he describes himself as more cheeseburger than caviar that hits home with me. Although unreasonable, hospitality's largely about restaurants. It's not just for people who work in food service it's for anyone who wants to create a welcoming, inclusive, and memorable experience for their customers.

In other words, it's for everyone who works in product design, if you're reading this, that almost certainly includes you. From his time in the restaurant industry, he talks about the importance of creating a welcoming environment, making people feel special and going above and beyond to make sure that every guest has a great experience. As a designer, I found myself nodding along with a lot of what the author had to say. The principles of hospitality that he talks about.

Like making people feel welcome, anticipating their needs and creating a sense of community our common to some of my absolute favorite end user experiences. The most memorable products I've ever used have gone out of their way to make me feel like I was part of something special. Here's some examples. How we feel.

The gorgeously designed how we feel. App is a mood tracking in journaling tool that is pleasant to use visually appealing and has just the right amount of instruction. The first time I fired it up to log my mood. I was immediately struck by how nice it felt to use. The app lays out a huge number of selections for current mood on a two dimensional axis from left to right is unpleasant to pleasant. And from top to bottom is high energy to low energy.

It's a simple, intuitive way to distill a complex set of feelings into a satisfying two dimensional grid. The real magic comes after the first few times you log your mood, the app gently and progressively presents, short, thoughtful videos to help you understand your feelings better. it's Like having a therapist in your pocket and it's so well done. I'm hooked. Next is to pool. My team uses Tupelo for remote pair programming. The app is fast, reliable, and beautifully designed.

You can feel that it's been made for devs. And it helps my team to work more closely together, even though we're spread out across the country. So what stood out to me about tubal? Well, at the end of most calls, you're presented with a UI asking you to rate the call on a scale of one to five with an open text field for notes. In my experience, most calls are a perfect five out of five, but if I ever have a less than perfect call experience, which is a vanishingly rare occurrence.

At this point, I'll leave a short note about what seemed to go wrong. Here's the thing. The tuple team has never failed to follow up with me about my feedback. Their reps are friendly, helpful, and so knowledgeable. Good customer service is such a difference maker and to pull nails it. Designing for hospitality. So how can we apply the principles of hospitality to our design work? Here's a few ideas. Do an experience audit.

Take a look at your product from the perspective of a new user, what's the onboarding process? Like how is it easy to find the features they need? Are there any pain points that could be smoothed out? Are there moments that you wish you could show them a better experience based on what you might already know about them? Next, take a look at your competition. What is the typical experience look like for your competition's users?

How can you differentiate yourself by offering a more welcoming, inclusive, and memorable experience? Is there a way to identify a niche in the market that you can serve better than anyone else? Finally talk to your users. You just can't beat conversation. Reach out to a variety of your users to see what they like about your product. Talk to your best users, ones who may be at risk of churning.

And if you're able ones who already have churned take note of any commonalities and differences in the conversations you're having with these people. What can you learn from them? Now, take the idea and go parabolic. Once you've done your research. I think it's helpful to ask a more pie in the sky question. In a perfect world. What would you do to blow your users' minds? What would make them feel like they specifically are being seen?

Write down these ideas in as simple of a format as you're able to a sentence or two is fine, then ask yourself, honestly. How close can you get to these ideals with the resources you have available? Move the needle as much as you can and keep iterating. You'll know when you've hit the mark, your customers will too. Check the links in the description of this podcast to get yourself a copy of unreasonable hospitality by will. Gadara. Tara. I think you'll freaking love it.