Are Your Products Rude?
In service delivery it is important to be polite especially when things are tense. Politeness reflects respect and commands respect. Being treated with respect puts customers and employees in a positive and productive mental state. Politeness is key to building and holding effective relationships.
Designing for politeness is good business and is a clear example of cognitive design or designing to create a specific “think and feel”.
Your services may be polite but what about products? Do they treat your customers with respect or are they rude? We don’t normally think about products (versus services) that way but we should or so it is argued in the post, Designing For Politeness, on the Interaction Design blog.
As the author points out:
“Design for politeness is bringing societal norms and agreements back into product design”
They review the universal norms and agreements for politeness (e.g. express interest, be specific/clear and be differential) and do a good job of showing how they are important not only for people-people interactions but people-product interactions. For example, products that give us vague information such as a blinking service light are rude because they are not being specific enough or fail to show real interest in helping us resolve the problem.
Following the general guidelines is essential but being polite and more generally showing respect can vary by group and circumstances. This means we must discover what unique politeness factors are operating in our customer base and create features and functions that support (or at least don’t conflict) with them.
