Part of the Process

I hadn't intended on writing on this subject this week, it was going to be about a personal consumer travel site bugbear and my prediction for the future, but I'm going to look at empathy again. I've written about empathy and solutions with an eye on the development process and buying behaviours and usability looking at how the development and user needs might be different. So, what triggered this post? I like to use the Timehop app, which displays your history on the same day in the past across social media, and I like their mini-features like snow animations at Christmas. This Valentine's day opening up the app presented me with two options, would I like my real life on this day in social media and phone photos? Or would I prefer not to see it? Out of interest I chose "NOPE" and was presented with a fake timeline of kittens and puppies, with the option to go see my real Timehop at the end. There are a couple of things I liked about this. The first was ...

Waiter - B1 by Hartwig HKD If the previous episode that I shared was like a case study for my working life, the this one was like living this blog post on Gross Incompetence Implies Bad Intentions . We began the trip after an early start and arrived after 10hour flight (+5 hour time difference to add to the tiredness!) to find the room "not available" (later find due to problem rather than late checkout of previous guest). A meal was offered at this point on the hotel, but frankly with a body clock all over the place and constant grazing on an long haul flight really not needed. Betsy, the Lady from customer service then made it her mission to make up for various things going wrong, starting with catching us at the bar and converting our free meal into the mojitos and chips (fries) that we had after the complimentary "Welcome Cocktail". I'm not sure which room we should have had, but we ended up in a senior suite that although tired looking had a grea...

Early morning view of Cayo Las Brujas I have recently returned from a trip that was like walking into a living case study into why I have helped 15below produce the software it does for the past decade. I was a on a twin centre trip to Cuba and on arrival our rep gave us the pickup time to leave Havana which was very early (3am!). We queried this to confirm it was correct and simply told "yes, 3 am". What we later found out was that it was the start of pickups and NOT a specific time. In addition, ours was the last hotel. we had no information on flight number or a published flight schedule (later found out it's a very informal timetable, leaves when everyone has turned up!) Now if waiting for nearly two hours, before even boarding a coach to the airport at that time, weren't bad enough the hotel staff weren't that interested and the telephones using the hotel phones couldn't get through to the rep's number - it didn't help that I don't spe...