The power of 'other' - paving the paths your customers prefer

In Universal Principles of Design, a desire line (or design path) is a trace of use or wear that indicates "preferred methods of interaction with an object or environment". On the face of it, a very esoteric concept but in practice it is quite simple.

Many years ago, I read of a case where a new college campus was built and there was a central grassed area. Instead of laying down cement paths, the area was left for a year without marked paths. At the end of that time, paths had been worn by pedestrians taking their most preferred paths across the grass. After that it was a simple matter to lay paths over those already worn by the pedestrians. These paths, of course, perfectly matched the needs of the pedestrians.

However, the principle is not limited to physical settings. A recent example I am aware of was where a new web-based system was put in place for customers to submit a form on-line. In designing the form, the company only wanted the customers to choose a reason for submitting the form from a limited number of options preferred by the company. In order to force this, there was no 'Other' option. This was done in the belief that the customers would just select from the available options. Instead about 30% of customers couldn't find the option they wanted and so just chose a random option and then put their real reason in the text box provided. In effect, they worked around the constraints imposed by the system and in the process made it more difficult for the company to analyse the reasons why customers were submitting the form (which had flow on effects for training and work allocation.)

A better alternative would have been to provide a limited range of the most common reasons expected but also to provide 'Other' as an option. This would have allowed the 'Other' options to be analysed to see if they yielded a further set of explicit options to add. In effect, adding the 'Other' option would have allowed the customers to wear their own 'desire path' which could have then been 'paved over' by providing the additional options they desired.

Too often our preconceptions about customers blind us to what they really want. The power of 'Other' is that it gives your customers the opportunity to tell you!

As Tim Halbur puts it:

...the human element is going to find its own way.... The people who disobey the beautiful logic of smart growth and urban design are trying to tell us something, and we need to watch and listen. We need to go back to the places we create and see how they work in real life. We need to plan for opening day, but make sure we’re also there a month, a year, five years later to adapt and refine based on how people actually use the built environment. The desire paths are there for the finding, if your eyes are open

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If we let our customers wear their own preferred paths and we then build over them, they are happier and we end up with more efficient systems.

It may not be what you think

Here is a story from Raymond Smullyan's book "This Book Needs No Title":

Once upon a time there was a man. This man had a dog. This dog had fleas. The fleas infected the entire household. So the man had to get rid of them. At first he tried to get rid of them individually using a fly swatter. This proved highly inefficient. Then he tried a flea swatter. This was also inefficient. Then he suddenly recalled: "There is such a thing as science. Science is efficient. With the modern American equivalent, I should have no trouble at all!" So he purchased a can of toxic material guaranteed to "kill all fleas," and he sprayed the entire house. Sure enough, after three days all the fleas were dead. So he joyously exclaimed, "This flea spray is marvellous! This flea spray is efficient!" 

But the man was wrong. The flea spray was totally inefficient. What really happened was this: Although the spray was inefficient, it was highly odiferous. Hence he had to open all the windows and doors to ventilate. As a result, all the cold air came in, and the poor fleas caught cold and died.
 

Another story, this time from my own experience:

A manager is worried about the backlog of work that is piling up. An employee looks back over the previous three years, does some analysis which shows that there is a regular pattern of workload every year and that the current year matches that pattern. They show this to the manager. The manager still pushes staff to get more done even though it is a proven fact that the workload will drop without any additional effort. If the backlog reduces, does the manager think:

a. The backlog has dropped because I pushed everyone to work harder
b. The backlog dropped because it always drops at this time of year

A third story:

Many years ago when I was studying epidemiology, we were given a hypothetical study to analyse in which test subjects who were suffering from a particular illness were put on a diet where they had to eat 200gms of chocolate a day. When I did my analysis I raised the following point: whatever was to happen from such a study, the result would not necessarily be because they ingested the chocolate. The result could equally have been what they had stopped eating as a result of having to eat the chocolate. Without knowing what their eating habits were prior to the study you can't determine what if anything was eliminated from their diet that could have caused the improvement in their health.

These stories illustrate three points:

• Sometimes an improvement doesn't come from an action you deliberately took, but is due to an unnoticed side-effect.
• Sometimes an improvement would have happened even if you had done nothing.
• Sometimes it isn't what you have started doing but what you have stopped doing that has resulted in an improvement.

Managers often think that they have to DO something to improve a situation. But sometimes things will improve if they simply let the situation be or STOP doing something that is causing the problem.