White-hat design lessons from a little bag of screws
Can unethical tactics become blueprints for ethical success? DLB dumps out that little bag of screws to find out.
I spent Monday griping about those little bags of screws that come with Target DIY pressboard bookshelves and their like. I also intimated then that the (if not flatly unethical) lame strategies behind them have a couple of lessons to teach us all: WordPress template factories, real estate agents, Etsy store proprietors, and big three automotive companies alike. As promised:
Be generous
If you make design and logistical decisions using a mentality of maximizing profits, the logical conclusions will all have zero tolerance for error. Case in point the bag of hardware: There is no doubt that sending exactly the correct amount of hardware is the most cost-effective option for these companies, which is why that’s what they do. However, when the factory screws up, it costs them huge, leading to frustrated customers, employees, and balance sheets. If they had just planned to throw an extra washer in every bag, they wouldn’t have any of these problems.
And the same goes for you: If you sell WordPress templates, your customers are going to be a lot less likely to gripe at that inadvertently non-semantic bit of XHTML if you just so happened to unexpectedly give them a really great plugin for free as part of the transaction. If you sell used books on Amazon, and you ship them with awesome homemade bookmarks, people are going to remember you, and buy from you again. And when you make a mistake, they’re going to be a lot more likely to forgive you. People want free schlock. It makes them feel great, which makes you look great. It also goes a long way toward assuaging their frustration when something goes wrong. So be generous, and it’ll pay dividends.
Standardize
Secondly, where standards apply, use them. Again, I can’t find a fourth super-cool Sweedish-designed 15/16″ septagonal bolt to make up for the one you failed to send me. And if I buy a template or a library or some vector graphics from you, if they’re built in non-standard ways, I’m going to be pretty ticked off. So lesson number two is to practice some restraint. Unless it’s critical to the design of your thing, use a standard part where it’s possible to do so.
| Tagged with: | Business, Design Ethics, Restraint, Standards, Think the Opposite, Web Standards, White Hat Design |
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