Challis Hodge’s UXblog

gapingvoid.com

I’m sure this story will be blogged to death before I can hit publish but I just can’t resist! Some things just never cease to amaze me.

FORT WORTH — The missing clock didn’t stop postal customer Al Cunningham from noticing the amount of time spent waiting for service.

“It’s always long here,” said Cunningham, 49, an insurance adjuster and former postal employee who was standing in line at the Watson Post Office in Fort Worth.

The Watson Post Office is one of the nation’s 37,000 post offices in which clocks have been removed from retail areas as part of a “retail standardization program” launched last year. The effort is designed to give the public-service areas a more uniform appearance, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in Thursday editions.

“We want people to focus on postal service and not the clock,” said Stephen Seewoester, Dallas spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service.

At the Fort Worth post office, the hook that once held up the small battery-powered clock now protrudes from a plaster wall. The clock was taken down months ago.

A customer-service expert at Texas A&M University was not impressed with the decision to take down the timepieces.

“It’s silly,” said Leonard Berry, holder of the M.B. Zale Chair in Retail and Marketing Leadership. “I guess they think people don’t have watches.”

Now to be fair, removing the clocks will likely change the perception of wait time for some folks. For others they may miss an appointment because they waited in line too long or simply skip the process all together.

Time has certainly become a precious resource for most people. Unfortunately the business community has been slow to respond–at least in a balanced way. Take your local family medical practitioner. They expect their patients to arrive promptly for their appointments yet they feel completely comfortable leaving the same patients sit in a waiting room for 45 minutes past the appointment time without an acknowledgment or explanation. The message they send is simple. Our time is important but yours is not. No I’m not bitter ;-)

The Hand Hygiene Voice Module mounts on a restroom wall, reminding you in a “non threatening, non-intrusive” male or female voice to wash your hands after using the toilet.It says, “Hand washing reduces the spread of germs. Thank you for washing your hands!”

The manufacturer, Kimberly-Clark, claims it increases hand washing by 12%.

George Orwell would be proud!

Scientists studying the mental processes of chess grandmasters have uncovered clues that suggest how people become experts in other fields as well.

Their evidence reveals that chess grandmasters rely on large amounts of stored knowledge of game positions. Some scientists have theorized that grandmasters organize the information in chunks, which can be quickly retrieved from long-term memory and manipulated in working memory.

To accumulate this body of structured knowledge, grandmasters typically engage in years of effortful study, continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond their competence. The top performers in music, mathematics and sports appear to gain their expertise in the same way, motivated by competition and the joy of victory.

What’s fascinating here is the suggestion that experts are made not born when we tend to think just the opposite.