Of Mice and Hotels

My wife was online the other night and started laughing uncontrollably. I asked what was so funny, and she brought her laptop over and pointed me to a hotel’s homepage, asking if I noticed anything unusual. I looked, and I really couldn’t find anything unusual until she pointed to the dropdown menu list:



Mice?

It turns out that mice is an acronym (Meetings, Incentives, Conferencing, Exhibitions). Who knew? Still, with bedbugs in the news, I wouldn’t expect to see mice on the homepage of a hotel.

I guess for people who know what mice means, this is fine. But I wonder how many people who visit this site are not mice-aware? And then there are OCD visitors like me that start investigating the mice section and forget about the rest of the site.

Just an amusing manifestation of the curse of knowledge.

Thinking like a customer

A request. If you are a business owner and you own a website, and you sell products or services directly to consumers through a physical place (a store, a garage, a car wash, etc.):

Please post your hours of operation.

I am your customer. I like your service. In fact, I like it so much I will travel out of my way to patronize you (maybe a long way out of my way). You have done all the right things: you have enthusiastic employees, you fulfill you brand promise every time I interact with you, your service is outstanding, you have earned my trust and I am an advocate for your business among my friends and social network.

But here’s the thing, your website doesn’t tell me when you’re open. I will drive 20 minutes out of my way to take advantage of your service, but I need to know if you close at 5 or 6 or 6:30 – it makes a difference.

Challenging one’s assumptions is hard. The more you “know” something, the harder it is to imagine that other people (like your customers) don’t. But it’s important, because even the best businesses (like a great car wash I go that’s 20 minutes away) need to continually look at themselves through their customers’ eyes.

Weird Design: Hotels on Weather Sites

I like Weather.com. It always loads quickly, and I like that with two clicks I can get to a radar map of my area. This can be really useful information for planning things like: should I leave now or wait until a really bad storm passes? Should I mow the lawn or can I wait until later? Etc.

But I cannot figure out why, on Weather.com’s interactive radar map, Hampton Inn sponsors a little location finder (a little button you can click to show where the Hampton Inns are in the area). Think about it: why would someone come to this place on Weather.com? If I’m looking for local radar weather, on the web, what possible reason would I have for knowing where there are Hampton Inns? To get out of the rain? To seek shelter from a tornado? What? I just don’t get it.

Now, I’m all for advertising and sponsorship – it’s why Weather.com can provide cool tools like this – I just can’t figure out why someone at Hampton Inn thought “now this would be a good placement opportunity.” It just strikes me as weird, by which I mean: not necessarily well-designed.

(Of course, it did get me talking about Hampton Inn, didn’t it? Maybe not so weird. Nah, still weird.)