What working in the service industry taught me about design

Great businesses show the customer they are welcomed and valued

This article is part of a series based on a talk I gave at Adobe Max and WebVisions last year. To read the other articles in the series, check out Bringing the Humanity Back to Digital.

Before discovering design, I held the following jobs: fast food drive thru attendant, receptionist at a skydiving center, waitress at a pizza place, and front desk clerk for several hotels in the Orlando area. In each of these companies, this was the gospel:

From greetings to handling complaints to encouraging repeat service, every action was rooted in this belief. Fail to make a customer feel welcome or valued, and you were penalized; the failing could be not smiling, not restocking the toilet paper, or not taking feedback seriously. Our training taught us who our customers were, what made a great experience for them, and how to respond to their needs so they felt good and kept coming back. Customer experience was the bottom line, because it impacted our bottom line.

As a 21 year old I found little satisfaction in helping people have a great meal or a fun vacation. People are often hard to please, unpredictable, emotional, and complicated. I was delighted when I left the service industry to avoid people and serve my love of Photoshop instead.

I believed becoming a designer meant I no longer had to understand what nuanced responses and actions would help people feel welcomed and valued. Instead, I would create interfaces that were as streamlined, controlled, and consistent as possible. I loved having this digital wall between myself and the people I was serving. Now instead of looking an upset father in the eye and telling him we were oversold on hotel rooms, I could build a form for him to submit a complaint in a concise and efficient manner.

It would have been easy enough to stay in this mindset: we take the human messy unpredictability out of life by putting buttons where they need to go so things get done without emotion getting in the way. In many ways this is the mark of a junior designer, and the level many designers remain at.

Well, crap. Turns out I’d learned the most important lesson of my design career years before I became a designer, but I’d ignored it. After all, understanding the subtleties of what makes people feel welcomed and accepted is the very thing I hid behind computers to avoid.

But slowly I saw and delighted in the impact I could have when I embraced this lesson all over again. As a good waitress, I could help couples have a nice date. As a front desk clerk, I could help families create lasting memories. But as a dedicated designer who is deeply invested in the people behind the screen, I could help thousands transform their lives.

While I now strive to be mindful of this responsibility and to do no harm, I also enjoy thinking about the other little lessons I learned in the service industry: have a warm greeting and a welcoming personality; as a representative of your company, be cheerful as long as it’s appropriate; speak in a genuine, personable manner.

We create interfaces that are representatives of our companies; the dashboard replaces the accountant, but that doesn’t mean it can’t incorporate aspects of humanity that will help customers feel welcome and keep returning.

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