Start to Notice What is Anti-Engaging to Be Engaging
Walk into Tim’s beach house Airbnb, and you will immediately notice a difference. There is a bottle of wine on the table with a handwritten note. The note gets ignored in the whirl of moving in and unpacking, but the guests exclaim over the amenities. There’s a wicker basket full of beach towels. A beach bag is hanging by the door. A quick look in the cupboards confirms that the kitchen is well utensiled.
Back to the handwritten note, “Over the years, we’ve stayed at LOTS of Airbnbs and got a feel for what doesn’t work, and we’ve used those experiences to create this beach house. We hope you’ll find EVERYTHING you need.” Indeed, Tim and his wife must have used every bad example to create the most well-appointed, seamless check-in and out, and nicest stay most guests have ever had.
There is no long list of rules or even longer list of things to do upon checkout. The house is stocked with more of everything than most vacationers would need—more towels, more dishes, more forks. It is all clean and tidy. All the soaps are available— hand soap, dish detergent, dishwasher pods, and bar soap, so no quick runs to the grocery store are necessary. And extras like a potato peeler and a spaghetti drainer are all there. Even the Teflon pans are new and unmarked.
Tim’s strategy of tuning into what doesn’t work and fixing it can work in any context.
Do you want to create the most engaging research report? Review many research reports and notice where you want to stop reading.
How about putting on the most engaging webinar ever? Attend a handful, and you’ll see patterns where your attention starts to drift.
Maybe it’s time to create a new website, and you want it to be engaging from the Homepage to the Contact Us page. Spend some time scrolling through peer organizations, big brands, and non-related websites and notice all the big and little things are not awesome.
Make a list of these not-awesome things that present themselves again and again. Now, fix them to remove the friction and make the overall experience far more engaging.
