Taking a 9-Year-Old Out for a Beer

By Jason Carmel | 5 Comments | Posted in in User Experience | Permalink

In exactly three days, my nine and seven year-old nieces will be visiting me and my wife in Seattle, and I'm terrified.

I should explain further that I'm not terrified of the girls themselves, who are about as fun-loving, well-mannered and adorable as you can get. This isn't the problem.

The problem is that I am expected to entertain said nieces for a period of several days and, after considerable reflection, I really have no idea how to do that. As an interesting point of contrast, I hosted a bachelor party for a friend last weekend and was able to pull that off without hesitation. The secret for the bachelor party was good food and lots and lots of beer. Since these map to my interests inherently and I was similar to the other attendees, I had a good chance of overlapping with the wants and needs of my guests. This is patently not the case with my nieces for whom (I'm told) beer is out of the question, and "good food" means, in all likelihood, a hot-dog and go-gurt. What do girls in elementary school like to do? How do I talk to one for longer than six minutes? I'm starting to panic here.

The ironic thing is that I see websites confront this problem all the time, and one of the things in my job description is to help them deal with it. A website gets 10 visitors- half of them are attendees at a bachelor party and the other half are 9-year-old girls. Make sure each of them is happy...and...GO! There are many different ways to approach this challenge, but the one truism is that an experience that proposes to serve both simultaneously will almost certainly fail, unless you are basically a blank, purely transactional page.

My User Experience colleagues will (rightly) suggest that I do a bit of research to understand why my nieces are coming to Seattle in the first place before I attempt to design an experience for them. Based on feedback from their parents, I think my nieces are coming to hang out with us (primary goal) and to do cool things (as defined by young girls) in Seattle (secondary goal). This is decidedly different from my bachelor party colleagues who came to Seattle to do things that will embarrass and endanger the groom (primary goal) and to not get arrested (secondary goal).

So I am on the lookout for places in Seattle that are unique and kid-friendly, while allowing for the primary goal of spending quality time with us, and I am thankful that I don't have to cater to my bachelor party friends at the same time, as I fear it would have failed to meet their expectations. That being said, if you have any ideas about where to take my nieces, please comment below. Please. Seriously.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with an intellectual exercise: How many customer types do you think you have and who are they (then ask three of your co-workers to see if they agree)? And is the experience offered on your site targeted to each customer type? Or are you trying to take a 9-year-old out for beer?

Wish me luck this weekend.