There are certain situations when time matters more and where lack of information causes unnecessary annoyance and waste of time. In the last week and a bit I’ve experience two such situations where simple alerts could have more or less avoided them.
The hospital situation
Last Tuesday I spent my morning and lunch first over at the Charing Cross hospital’s combined A & E and walk in service and then over at the Western Eye Hospital. I arrived at the Western Eye Hospital just before 11 to a waiting room filled with people. The procedure is, as in many places, that you get seen by a nurse first to assess the severity of your case and then called in later on by a doctor. But there is no real information or notice on when you’ll be called in. As a result you sit down on your chair afraid to leave the room and miss first the nurse calling you and later the doctor. That means no visits to the ladies/ gents or the kiosk to get a drink or snack. Instead what you have is a waiting room full of people with a majority who don’t actually need to be there for quite some time. But they don’t know that.
The airport situation
This February and again yesterday my flight was delayed and it was a delay the airline was aware of in advance. The lack of information about this delay meant that I showed up at the airport for the normal departure time only to find out that I could have spent more time with friends and family rather than being sat waiting at an airport.
Our time matters
When we aren’t told things we get annoyed. When we have trouble finding things we also get annoyed. Perhaps we should get annoyed less but the bottom line for our annoyance is that we have better things to do with our time than it being wasted on something that is not meeting our expectations. Particularly when we’ve been told one thing and that turns out not to be correct.
The shared theme behind the products we’re working on at byflock is “Cutting through the noise”. It is about doing our bit to make sure you get as much out of your time as possible by either empowering you with the relevant information or distills what’s relevant for you.
But silence can also be a noise when there is too much of it. If the silence is related to information that you rely on it’s causes you to repeatedly check for an update, or like in the above two situations, it can result in you being in a place where you don’t need to be, at least not yet.
Though the above two situations aren’t simple to implement and execute it’s easy to see how a simple notification or alert system could avoid the above situations and improve the situation for all parties. Lack of information causes people to ask questions and complain. That takes up time, energy and affects people’s moods. And there are definitely certain situations where a loud and unmissable alert would be much appreciated. Like when I look at the clock, quickly hug my dad goodbye and jump on the bus so I don’t miss my plane. The plane I don’t know is delayed.
Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/jox1989/6627709643
