The view from my desk of the line at my favorite lunch spot, The Sentinel.
One of the perks of having our office in downtown San Francisco is the selection of nearby restaurants we can go to for lunch. According to Yelp, there are no less than twelve sandwich shops within a five-minute walk of our office with at least four stars, to say nothing of the many taquerias, salad bars, and other specialty lunch locations. But despite the surfeit of dining choices, I choose to exclusively go to The Sentinel for my lunches. I’m not alone in my enthusiasm; every day customers line up at the side door of this tiny, grab’n’go sandwich shop to order and pay, and then patiently wait again in a small mob on the sidewalk to pick up their lunches. How does an alley takeout stand with its claustrophobic confines, its lack of tables and chairs, and its limited operating hours manage to thrive in such a competitive environment? And what can we apply from the Sentinel’s success to the successful management of user experience research?
Turns out this tiny takeout offers a few valuable customer insights worth chewing on:
Targeting the Customer
Above all else, The Sentinel serves food that both sounds and tastes delicious and it serves it fast. Here’s a quick sampling from their menu: pork loin with figs, frisee, havarti; fresh tuna with green beans, fennel, spicy dressing; barbequed beef shoulder with caramelized onion. This is not your typical sandwich shop. In our part of downtown, there are a lot of people who need to eat quick lunches crammed between meetings, even back at their desks while they continue to work on topline reports and qualitative video highlight clips. And a lot of these people, despite their tight eating schedules, really love good food, and are willing to pay a premium or make concessions to get it. The Sentinel understands these customers and is specifically geared to attract these Fast Foodies. It doesn’t overextend itself and try to go outside of its sweet spot. It does its thing and does it well.
Zappos is a great example of a company that successfully built and grew a business around a target customer. It realized that many more consumers would buy shoes online if they could receive them quickly, and return them easily, even if they could find the same shoes cheaper at a different site.
Understanding Customer Needs
Ordering lunch at many other lunch places can involve a lot of decisions. What kind of bread do you want? What kind of meat? Any cheese? Mayonnaise? Other toppings? If you’re ordering a burrito, what combination of meats, beans, salsa, cheese, and other add-ons would you like? Giving the customer variety and the ability to customize can be very empowering, but it can also be overwhelming. The Sentinel maintains a seasonal menu with around seven distinct sandwich choices and a daily special. It manages to strike a balance between variety and simplicity so that customers feel like they have several different appealing options to choose from, and won’t have to eat the same lunch twice in the same work week, while keeping their decisions simple and fast. This is crucial for high-end takeout food, as it minimizes the potential for errors and the overall time for ordering and preparation.
One of the biggest challenges that businesses and websites face is how to strike that balance, because answers will vary based on their products and customer needs. The contrast between two automotive brands, MINI and Infiniti is a great example of two extremes. The MINI online configurator is a six-step, interactive process in which the user can customize everything down to the side-mirror covers and door handles. MINI is trying to immerse its visitors in the configuration step, hoping that they’ll form an attachment to their unique virtual cars. Character, uniqueness, and individuality are all qualities that customers look for from MINI, and these qualities shine through their website.
Infiniti, on the other hand, bundles features and options into a few model trims and packages, minimizing the number of steps and choices that visitors have to make in its configurator. As a luxury brand, Infiniti is catering to more affluent customers who may have less time to spend on the website. By bundling popular features, Infiniti is able to save time for customers so that they can get the information they need as quickly as possible, and save money for the company by simplifying production complexity and selling options that may not have been purchased ala carte.
Trusting the Customer
The Sentinel changes its menu every 1-2 months, swapping in some new regular sandwiches to reflect seasonal availability and whatever the chef feels will be popular. In the weeks leading up to a menu change, however, The Sentinel will test out a new sandwich or two for a short trial period and see how it does. Sometimes, the new sandwich will stick around and make it onto the next menu. Other times, it will evolve: the turkey meatballs becoming lamb meatballs, or arugula supplanting the frisee. A few trial-sandwiches just disappear, never to be seen again. The Sentinel is involving its customers in the sandwich innovation process. How well does the new sandwich sell? What are the customers who tried it saying? The Sentinel uses this information to help determine the next iteration of its menu.
Many of today’s most innovative internet companies regularly involve their customers in their product design decisions. Sometimes, it’s completely invisible to the end users, such as in A/B testing, when a set of users are diverted to an alternate site experience and compared to the rest of the users. Other times, websites are more forthcoming, encouraging users to try beta versions or even creating a dedicated area for users to play with the next generation of tools and features and provide feedback, such as googlelabs.com and Microsoft’s officelabs.com. In order to stay innovative and competitive, businesses, products, and websites should go in new, bold directions, listen to the voice of their customers, and keep innovating – even when some ideas don’t work.
