Two weekends ago I flew up to the Bay Area on Virgin America. I’ve flown VA quite a few times in the past, but I guess it had been a while since the last flight because I had no idea they had started charging baggage fees. At the airport my family was suddenly hit with a $20 fee per bag. When we questioned the employee working at the baggage check-in about the change, he said that VA had decided to lower the ticket price but make up the difference through baggage fees.

I’m sure I don’t know all the factors involved in making a decision like that. I would guess that having lower ticket fees sells more tickets, and that’s what matters most. But to me it seems like an odd decision from a company that has otherwise been very focused on the customer experience. Everything, from the design of the planes’ interior features to the check-in terminals to the website were all carefully designed to craft a specific customer experience in the spirit of the long wow.

Baggage fees are a negativity grenade thrown into the middle of Virgin America’s carefully constructed experience. According to the Peak-End Rule, people judge a past experience almost entirely based on how it was at its peak (either pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended. And the loss aversion behavioral bias says that losses are about twice as powerful psychologically than gains. So when you combine those two things with baggage fees, what do you get?

You bought a cheap ticket, and the experience is off to a good start. Then some long-ish amount of time later—during which the deal euphoria fades—you go to the airport and get hit with a baggage fee that you probably had forgotten about, or as in my case, never realized you were going to be charged. You packed that bottle of shampoo so you’re at their mercy. You’re still annoyed about the bag fees as you go through the never-pleasant security screening. Then when you get on the plane, there’s little to no overhead bin space because everyone else avoided checking their bags. Stress levels go up as the flight attendants desperately try to fit in all the bags and then tell the late boarders that they’ll have to gate check. Hopefully all of this doesn’t delay departure.

Once the plane takes off, all of VA’s previous hard work on the plane’s interior and in-flight experience does some to counter the negativity. In fact, I would bet customers on longer flights report better experiences than those on short flights. For me on my short flight from LA to SF, the peak emotion of my experience was definitely the strong aversion I felt suddenly realizing I was out a bunch of money with no added benefit. And reuniting with my bags at the end of the flight only reminded me of the fees yet again.

Now, I’m mostly extrapolating from my own experience (bad UX designer!). Maybe if I were able to do some research, I would see that the benefit of the cheap ticket outweighs the shock of the baggage fees. Maybe most people aren’t shocked by it. Or maybe the flight experience separates people from the fee enough that it doesn’t impact the overall experience too much.

But what if Virgin America instead added the cost back into the ticket and then gave a rebate to those customers who check zero bags? Just imagine going to the airport and finding out that you get money back. Raising ticket prices is tricky, but wouldn’t that transform the experience of bag fees from horrible shock to wonderful, loyalty-inspiring wow?

Further reading:

• More on Loss Aversion
• More on the Peak-End Rule
• Peak-End Rule illustrated
• Design Ethnography and Mood Maps by Will Evans

The Problem
About two months ago my team got relocated to a new building. My desk is in a great spot, we have fun new neighbors, and the new building is pretty comparable to the old one, with one big exception.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to remember where the conference rooms are.

Contributing Factors
The floor plan seems to have been designed by military strategists intent on confusing hostile invaders. There is a central atrium with windows that are indistinguishable from outside windows, and the interior spaces are configured to restrict any view to a relatively small area. This means the office feels more intimate and light, but it also means that it is very difficult to orient oneself. Views in every direction look pretty much the same.

To illustrate, the first photo below is of a main hallway just off the main entrance, and the second is of the view just inside the employee-only door adjacent to the main entrance:

      
Can you tell that these views are looking in exactly opposite directions?

By the way, none of the doors you can see in those photos are conference rooms. Adding to the degree of difficulty, our conference rooms are named like a particularly challenging game of Memory. The theme for our floor is vegetables, so here are a few of our conference room names: Tomato, Avocado, Potato, Turnip, Parsnip, Asparagus, and Tomato Sauce. They are not laid out alphabetically, they are not grouped in any meaningful way, and the big rooms are not even named after big vegetables.

After two months and a lot of meetings, I still get Parsnip and Turnip confused (among others), and when someone says we have a meeting in Carrot, I have NO CHANCE of finding it if I don’t look at the map. Nor am I alone – wander the hallways on any day (like, say, if you’re lost) and you’ll likely hear someone say, “Wait, where am I?” or “Which one was Cucumber?” or “Can I follow you there?”

My Process
For kicks, I decided to see if I could come find a way to make this situation better. I spent some time studying the map of our floor, which you can see below with all of the conference rooms highlighted in yellow.I saw that they exist in much more predictable locations than I had realized. Every one lies either on the center atrium or along one of the four outside walls, which despite appearances from the inside are basically square. I then determined three main attributes that define a conference room–size, location in the building, and available equipment–and tried to come up with a new naming convention that would convey as much of that information as possible.

After a few iterations of names like ‘South 10 Teleconference,’ I realized that another key component is the ease of saying/typing the room name to another person. I re-focused on finding short, memorable names that somehow reference the rooms’ location in the building.

My Solution
Here is my proposal:I named the rooms with some reference to the compass direction of the outside wall, or to the word “center” for the rooms on the atrium. In addition, I thought we could use this compass reference to help people orient themselves and build their own mental map of the interior. Perhaps we could hang signs from the ceiling:

Or we could try something more subtle:

I’m pretty sure these changes would drastically reduce the number of times I feel lost, and the few coworkers I’ve shared this with were excited enough that they asked me to take it to our facilities manager. But I wanted to share it with you and more of my coworkers to get some feedback first. So please let me know if you have any ideas, questions, or comments!

Let’s see… Phones, calculators, computers, and almost every other number input device have THREE numbers to a row. This machine has FIVE snacks to a row, and they are numbered by the row, column grid. So what are the designers of this vending machine to do but put their number buttons FOUR to a row, of course!

This is the vending machine in my office. Entering the correct number for the snack you want requires an astonishing amount of mental processing. And when the snacks were free, there were always at least two unwanted items hanging out in the bin below.

Perhaps this Noah’s Bagels is built on a singularity in space-time wherein two different groups of people can occupy one space without discomfort or confusion.

I see this place almost every day and am both amused by the poor setup and impressed by the lengths the owners of the dumpster have gone to in order to clarify who should have access to it.

The dumpster is accessed by this driveway, which is the driveway that belongs to the building on the right (behind the van). The dumpster, however belongs to the building on the left (past the sedan).

The fencing was supposed to keep the dumpter more secure, I think, and separate it from the cars in the parking lot in which it technically lives, but it only reinforces the impression that it is actually a part of the driveway.

This is some serious instructional/error messaging. I bet they wouldn’t need it if they were able to fix the underlying design issue.