I am working on my masters in Human-Computer Interaction in CDM at DePaul University.

At the moment I’m taking HCI 445: Inquiry Methods and Use Analysis, with Dr. Cynthia Putnam. The class focuses on observing user experience, and though it’s just getting started, so far it has taught me quite a bit about observing how people go about their daily work. One of the really informative exercises we did in class recently involved a visit to the reference desk at a bookstore chain located downtown.

From Flickr

For about twenty minutes, two other students and I observed, with consent, employees at the reference desk as they interacted with customers and performed their duties. The task was to observe the workflow of employees as they performed their various job duties. As I watched the employees perform certain tasks, I noticed inefficiencies both in the system the bookstore chain had implemented and also in the order in which employees performed the micro-tasks that made up larger tasks. Many of these inefficiencies could be addressed with minor modifications to the employee workflows or the technology systems.

One example that stuck in my mind was an employee who was responsible for calling customers who ordered books that were now available for pick up.

This employee first picks up the book, which has a slip of paper rubber-banded around it, and enters an identifying code into the computer. The employee waits for the computer to return a phone number and then picks up the phone sitting to the left and enters the number from the computer screen into the telephone. If the customer picks up, the employee politely says, “hi, I’ve got your book; it’s ready for you; can you come by to pick it up,” hangs up, and makes a note on the paper.

If the customer doesn’t pick up, the employee hangs up, writes a note on the paper, and repeats the process until all the books that are ready to be picked up have had their customers called.

There are many ways this interaction could be made more efficient but here are three solutions, one low-tech and easy to implement, one “mid-tech” but relatively easy to implement on a larger scale, and one high-tech and potentially difficult to implement:

1. The employee could take the stack of books and retrieve the phone numbers for an entire stack of books all at once. This would reduce the amount of task switching the employee needs to do and free the computer for other employees to use.
2. The slip of paper that is rubber banded onto the book, which I believe is a digital order slip, could have the name and phone number for the customer on it alongside the other routing and title information. This would take typing a long number into the computer out of the mix.
3. The bookstore could implement a digital system to send an email, send a text message, or place an automated call to the customer informing them their book is ready for pickup.

All of these solutions reduce or eliminate the need for the employee to interface with the computer which not only makes the entire interaction quite a bit faster and therefore more cost-effective in terms of payroll and staffing costs, but also reduces the need for the bookstore to maintain a piece of technology that is costly both in terms of physical space and up-front monetary investment, training costs, and software development costs, not to mention devaluation of the physical hardware over its lifetime.

And these are just ideas from a quick brainstorming session after less than twenty minutes of quiet observation that cost half a sheet of bond paper and a Bic pen. Considering how little of what this employee does on a day-to-day basis was observed and how much inefficiency was involved in this interaction, the implications are pretty staggering.

Some truly massive inefficiency might be quickly taken care of if attention were focused on task improvement rather than task completion.

I learned a term for this many moons ago while working at Trader Joe’s: Kaizen. Kaizen is a Japanese term for “improvement,” and according to Wikipedia, ”refers to philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, and business management.”

Now let’s think about how we can apply this Kaizen philosophy to our own work.

Consider taking five minutes today to sit and observe yourself as you’re performing a common task either at home or at work. Notice where the inefficiencies lie and think about how you would change those inefficiencies to make your task just a little bit easier.

If you find a task you can make more efficient, please let me know the comments.