At the new Westfield Stratford last week, I was excited to see an iPad discovery zone within the new Topman store. It consisted of four iPads, two on each side of a wooden table, with the words “Touch Screen to Start”.
I touched the first iPad, ready to be amazed, and after a short delay was greeted with the following message:
“Destination host unreachable. Please check your server and network settings and try again”
This is not the brand image you were looking for
There was no one around to help me, as there never seems to be in these certain clothing stores. So I moved onto the next iPad and touched the screen. This time I got the message:
“Welcome to wi-fi. Please choose your service provider.”
And that was the end of my experience. Not really the captivating experience I was expecting, and definitely not much of an advertisement for Topshop.
This type of broken experience happens all the time, particularly when technology is involved, and planning to recover from these types of errors is the difference between being loved by your customers and being labeled as “rubbish”.
When designing experiences or looking at existing processes, it is good to do a disaster recovery workshop where problematic scenarios are thrown at the process, and a recovery manual is built around around the process.
Failure is an option
For the above, it could be as simple as a backup system: when there is no wireless access, have some parts of the experience stored locally so the user still gets a limited experience. Also, as part of the process, there should be a notification to staff that the wireless is down so that it can be repaired or the iPads turned off.
Planning for failure is key to creating seamless experiences, and it can be a really useful learning process as a team to try and find all the possible failure points, and plan to blow customers away by how you deal with it. A seamless recovery is always more impressive than getting it right in the first place.
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