A great example of offline usability and other customer experience thoughts.

This picture is a snippet of the wine menu at District Wine Bar in San Francisco. You can download the full menu here. The reason I am showing you this is because it is a phenomenal example of a user friendly menu; and a great example of how usability is not just about websites. It is about making anything that is intended for people to use, usable.

The genius menu designer at District Wine bar was thoughtful enough to group the wines by flavor, grape and region. This helps us novice wine enthusiasts who know what wine we like tastes like, but finding it by name is like an impossible treasure hunt.

This menu makes it easy for many different users to search for a wine

1. The advanced wine connoisseur who is looking for their wine by brand name and year
2. A general wine enthusiast who knows the wine they like by grape or region, and can wing it from there
3. And the beginner–we know what wine we like tastes like, and we’ll know we’ve found the taste we are looking for once we see it.

Phew…I made it! One of my resolutions for March was to write just one blog post. Luckily I was inspired enough last night to make it in time. Actually, I have had many thoughts about customer experiences this month that could have been realized in a blog post, Like:

1. The New Yorker: It turns out that the website for the New Yorker does not provide an option to contact them about their website. They do not have a webmaster email contact, anything that asks you to give them feedback on their site; their general contact form gives an error page every time, and when you call the 800 number the person answering the phone has not been given any information regarding the website. Message received New Yorker: “DO NOT CONTACT US ABOUT OUR WEBSITE!”
2. Serenade Your Customers: I got to thinking (randomly), I have never had a company serenade me when I leave, telling me how much the love me and want me to come back. A serenade is a performance in someone’s honor. So, how about a good ol’ fashioned serenade to win your customers back. Like, Cyrano’s love letters or John Cusack in Say Anything. Here are some ideas on how to win your customers back: email them a win-back poem, or when they call to cancel play the song “baby come back”.
3. If you are not on facebook, you do not exist.I may just get to this next month.