Five Star Restaurants, Public Feasts and User Experience
We all want to provide our customers with a great experience. A perfectly smooth, premium experience to remember. Something equivalent to a Five Star Restaurant.
But for early stage start ups it is often tough to achieve that. We don’t have enough money or resources, we have a shortage of time and a lot of dependencies we cannot control. And more often than not we are competing against the best, the real Five Star Restaurant Experience.
When I look at my Product, I feel sad. A lot of broken end points, a lot of unfulfilled dependencies. I can imagine users looking at their screen, trying to figure out what to do next. I try my best to provide clues, specific instructions but it is not intuitive as I would like to be. Ever since my childhood I have been the guy who would move tables by inches to ensure there was enough space for people to move comfortably and here my own product is full of so many flaws.
While I was struggling with the guilt of sending out a poor quality of product out in the market, I remembered a story of my own. For my masters, I went to Pune and the hostel mess had terrible food like every hostel mess in my country. I have had boiled eggplants and I hated eggplants.
In those times we yearned for public feasts. We went to random places, sat on floors ate in woven leaves plates with our hands. We were to reach by a particular time, wait for our turn and then be told that we have to finish everything on our plates. And yet I remember every one of those feasts vividly as compared to any party we had in different restaurants.
I realized when you are solving a problem for a user, then it is the solution that matters. Putting good food on the plate is important when your user is a hungry college student. The five star experience is desirable but providing shitty food in metal plates and cutlery doesn’t help in achieving that.
It is OK if your platform is a bit broken and clumsy to use but it must deliver the customer with the value promised.
If you can’t be a Five Star Restaurant, be a public feast.
