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People are Smarter Than Computers (Part 1)
By Cameron Ferroni | December 3, 2007
Now, how did I come to this conclusion? Well, I was thinking today about “Hours of Operation”. It’s a simple concept, right? If you and I are having a conversation , I can simply tell you “hey, that store is open 7×24, or not open on Sundays, or only open M-W until 9 & F-Sun until midnight”. And for a local business, this is pretty much one of the top four empirical pieces of information surrounding a business - Name, Phone, Address, Business Hours.
In the old days (back when I used to walk to school barefoot in the snow) it was simple for a business to let people know when they were open - you took out an ad in the yellow pages, and put your hours of operation in the ad. You had control over whether or not you included the information, you decided if you wanted to spend money for the extra lines of print, and you made sure it was accurate. And, it was easy for consumers as well: They flipped open the yellow pages, found the category they were looking for, looked at the big business listings, found the one that was close by and open when they needed. It didn’t matter how a business listed their hours — people are smart, and they could easily understand what the business was trying to say (in reality they were parsing the data, but no-one outside of your average English teacher really used the word parse back then). Sure, it was a little frustrating that not every business listed this info, but not a huge deal, consumers understood that bigger businesses bought bigger ads, and bigger ads meant more information, and more information meant a better business (or so it would seem).
Fast-forward to today, when I can look up any business I want in an online directory or local search engine. All of that easy stuff that humans used to do has been replaced by machines. And now suddenly, the experience has gotten much worse (slight caveat, some places still do parts of it well - like YP listings - but even those suffer from the problems I’ll describe below).
First off, remember the human’s cool ability to parse various forms of dates/times? Computers aren’t as good at it. Well, they can be, but it takes a lot more work to program in all of the various forms - so for example, let’s say a search engine is crawling the Web for all of the pharmacies in a given town, and trying to figure out what times they are open - now that engine has to recognize that M-Su is the same as Monday-Sunday, is the same as 7 days a week, is the same as Sat-Fri etc etc etc. Seems easy, right? Well, it’s not rocket science, but at the same time, it isn’t as easy as a person looking at it and just knowing it.
Then, let’s assume for a second that the computer has figured all of that out, and normalized it all to display it in one easy, consistent way. Then, what does a consumer want? The consumer wants to see things like ’show me all of the pharmacies open on Sunday.’ Of course, this should be easy too? Hmm, two problems here:
First off, you now have to make sure that your normalization of the data makes it easy to search on things like that. Which isn’t automatic, but it is solveable. Again, it takes longer than the human factor, but that’s OK - computers are fast right? Secondly, the kicker is that suddenly the fact that you don’t have hours information for 100% of the businesses is a real problem for your overall user experience. Let’s say a user searches for all pharmacies that are open Sunday in their town, and they only get three listings back. Now wait a minute - they live in a densely populated area, and they instinctively know that there are hundreds of pharmacies around, and there have to be more than three that are open. Most likely, the consumer will dismiss your product or data as being faulty. But what really happened is that you may have just as much data, if not more, than they did back in the day! Remember that back in the old days, the consumer was programmed - bigger ad, better business - but I understand that most businesses just have phone numbers in the yellow pages and don’t list hours of operation. Now though, this is the Internet, where all data is always available 100% of the time so it must be better, right?
Well, as you all know, it isn’t better. It’s actually worse, and more fragmented. And it’s a really hard problem to solve - since doing so either requires getting more businesses to give more information (hard & doesn’t scale) or educating customers that this way is still better than it used to be, even though it seems more frustrating (hard & doesn’t delight).
At the end of the day, we have to do a little of both - we need to make it easier for businesses to give us this information, we need to develop some standards to make it easier to digest, and we need a way to help customers understand that the additional info is just that - additional, and a bonus - and to have them reward the businesses that provide it, rather than penalize sites for not having it….
Topics: Local Advertisers, Data, Local Search |