I was in Macy’s the other day buying the girl some earrings. The jewelry department at Macy’s (or any department store for that matter) consists of a number of scattered island, each one of which has a cash register that you can pay at. On this particular day, one woman was handling all transactions in the department — sales, returns, etc. I got in line, and there were two people ahead of me, the first with some complicated purchase, and the second with a return. It was taking forever, and after 5 minutes or so in line to pay, I become impatient. I spotted two sales people at a jewelry counter across the way, so left my place in line and walked over there and asked to pay. “Sorry, we can’t do that here,” one responded, and turned back to chat with his co-worker. Another joined in. They had a nice conversation.
Obviously, I was dumbfounded. Why not help me? You’re the jewelry counter — you sell stuff with the personal touch, and then wrap up the goods and ring up the customer. Why not me? Whatever — I marched my ass back over and waited in line another ten minutes to ring up my purchase, and then trudged out of Macy’s fuming that it took so long.
It wasn’t his fault, of course. The failure was Macy’s departmental design, which followed a system implementation model rather than a user needs model. Either there was no point of sale system in place at that particular counter, or the system was limited to certain SKUs or other product type that limited them selling goods from other departments (in this case, I discovered I had walked into the “fine jewelry” department, but I had goods from the regular jewelery department.) In any case, their reason for failure was systems-based, but could have easily been solved with some usability testing. New system rules could say “hey, when there are a lot of people line line, leave your station to go help them and ring them up elsewhere.” Or, “enable the ability for anyone in the store to ring up any type of item for anyone.”
The latter rule is probably already in case… you can usually buy anything anwhere at department stores. The culprit was likely a rule that said you can’t cross departments to help out in another when that department is slammed. You must always man your station, which is stupid. Inflexible systems are bad design.
Posted by Shoebox 
