Month: April 2006

User Experience – Travel Guide

Why you need a travel guide in the first place ? You probably wanna know where to go, where to shop, and where to eat, don’t you ? In addition, you probably want to know as well about when would be the best time to visit those interesting places and what is the best way to travel to there.

More importantly, you will like to know where shall you go first place in the morning. And then where shall you go after that, in the most time and cost economically way. Then the third place, the fourth etc. etc. Until you end your day with a good meal or a good show …

Now what if your favorite places are museums ? Or churches ? Or shopping centers ? Will that make your trip planning a bit complicated, if those places are scattered all around the city ?

So a travel guide is not a shopping guide, not a dining guide and not a guide about transportation !! To make it truely a useful guide, it has to be able to help you to plan all the above. I have close to a hundred travel guides but only very few of them provide good maps, good suggestions and tools to help me to plan a trip. In essence, I have close to a hundred unusable travel guides ! (many of them are famous and popular travel guides, you know …)

Solution ? See below …

Lesson Learnt: Check it out … http://daytripsbooks.com/daytripsbooks.html

User Experience – Supermarket

There are two supermarkets around my place and I visit there around twice a week. So, let’s see my grocery list (basically essential items for everyday’s living) … yogurt, juice, fruit, canned food / soup, ice-cream, meat, eggs, vegetables, bathroom tissues, beer, newspaper, magazines etc. etc.

So as a typical supermarket wanderer, I spend around 20, 30 minutes in the shop and seems to me the ideal “line up” of the goods in the aisles should be:

  • Non-frozen food and products (e.g. canned food / soup, eggs, bathroom tissues, beer, newspaper etc.)
  • Fresh items like meat, vegetables, fruit, juice
  • Lastly, frozen food like yogurt, ice-cream etc.

The idea is rather straight forward (at least to me) because I don’t want the ice-cream to melt, or yogurt get warm, or the fresh food get “un-freshed” in my 30 minutes shopping time.

But then, how these two supermarkets placed their products ?

  • From the entrance, you will first see ice-cream freezer … then, fruit, then vegetables, meat, yogurt …
  • In fact, the goods closest to the cashier are the bathroom tissues …

And further complaints … why can’t they put TV foods (i.e. chips, cheese balls 😎 just next to the beer section ?!

Lesson Learnt: Oh yes, I reckon even a supermarket needs to improve the “Usability”.