The Buffet and your Website or App

It may be a while (okay, a long while) before conferences in five-star hotels come back. But, indulge me for now…

As anyone who’s been to a conference knows, there are three kinds of attendees:

1.    The eager-beaver who arrives well before the scheduled time and grabs the first available seat after the ones reserved for sponsors and speakers. You’ll find this gent clutching his own, well-worn notebook (not the cheap spiral-bound one in the registration kit) and pen. He’ll be focused and cross-eyed; after the third session, he’ll also be uncomfortably cross-legged warding off that desperate urge to take a comfort break in case he loses his place.

2.    Then there’s the shaker-of-every-hand, the inveterate networker who still carries printed business cards and hands them out like a credit-card-marketing agent distributing lead-gen forms in a mall. He seems to know most people and is usually found outside the conference hall, stalking the aisles to pump the palms of anyone who will reciprocate. And yet he insists on exchanging business cards.

3.    Finally, there’s the lunch-lover: him of the protruding paunch whose belly turns a corner before he does. This prandial pro knows exactly when to leave the last pre-lunch session so that he can beat everyone else to the queue at the lunch buffet (and the coffee breaks, too).

(You could replace ‘him’ with ‘her’ if you’re so inclined but that’s a moot point.)

To get to the point (yes, I hear you mumbling) this piece is on the buffet, actually.

Until the rise of the speciality restaurants, Indian eateries have tended to play it safe and be secular in their menu: so, they offer a generous (and boringly similar) selection of Indian, Chinese and Continental fare. Ditto with our conference menus.

Starters, main course and desserts will usually be available in all three cuisines: there will be a Russian Salad along with Raita, Papad and Khimchi; a Paneer dish is a must as is either a Mixed Vegetables or Aloo Dum along with a Dal (bright yellow or dark brown could be determined by the chef’s mood during the morning ablution); some Noodles, Steamed Rice, a Chicken Biryani; Sweet and Sour Fish, Chilli Chicken, Veg au Gratin… and to round these off, Ice-cream, Gulab Jamun, Truffle Pastries quartered economically. Keep everyone happy, they were briefed.

If you try and make everyone happy, you'll disappoint them all.

 Now, while this sounds good and probably makes you salivate, consider the following aspects of this meal:

The food is guaranteed to induce a level of sleep that is characteristic of a long, lazy, liquid Sunday lunch followed by an undisturbed nap. Which is why India is where the first post-lunch speaker mandatorily begins his address with that line about valiantly trying to keep the audience awake.

The plates stacked by the hotel are heavy. Horribly heavy. With a thick napkin and a steel fork whose centre of gravity appears to have a mind of its own. Not conducive for stilettoed, sari-clad women who have to ensure their dry-cleaned garment doesn’t get stained even as they precariously balance their plate and purse. All the while, unaware that the ends of their saris are dipping into the raita of the person right behind them.

Social distancing has never been practised at buffets and is unlikely to be in the times of COVID19: you can cook my goose if I err.

But what truly makes our buffets fail is that our hoteliers refuse to print a menu and place it upfront at the start of the queue. So, one never knows what’s coming next… and we Indians have a certain method to the madness with which we gobble. At home, you will first heap some rice on to your plate and then pour the dal into it, park the vegetables alongside and so on… the rice acts as a support system in a multi-dish meal. Rotis are either taken last or not at all – depending on where you come from; though I had an uncle who’d eat the rice with his roti (eyeball roll here). But our buffets start with the salad and end with the rice and rotis. The bowls for curries are usually not to be found where they’re supposed to be and so one simply sloshes various items onto the plate without even trying to choose from one of the cuisines because you really don’t know what’s coming next (and you can’t quite crane your neck around the luncheon-lover and his ample anatomy). So, you could end up with a forced fusion of Russian Salad, Gobhi Manchurian, Dum Biryani and Chocolate Ice-cream… the world on a plate, as it were. 

Indigestion can be caused by buffets. And some websites, too.

The result: indigestion.

It’s the same with some of our websites and apps… only if you make the connection.

Like the conference buffet where disproportionate attention is paid to the layout of the tables and the dishes (including a pumpkin-and-carrot sculpture of a swan that some procurement manager gleefully negotiated so that he could report it in his annual appraisal), the User Experience of buffets tends to be anything but satiating. Business owners whose existence depend on digital commerce often mistake User Interface for User Experience and will happily use both terms together in the very desi manner you find elsewhere: “UI-UX” is akin to “AI-ML”, “this-that”, “dish-vish”, “chair-shair” etc… Unfortunately, that’s like assuming the pumpkin swan will fill a conference attendee’s stomach.

And yet, we miss the wood for the trees so often.

I tried booking a medical check-up on an app the other day: it simply wouldn’t tell me if I needed to fast for 10 hours before a particular blood test. Basic but forgotten.

A search for ‘toilet paper’ on a groceries app threw up a mango drink… why? Because the search string had ‘paper’ in the brand name (Paperboat).

A trial download for a software wouldn’t happen because it will work only on desktops and not mobile phones – but they won’t spell it out.

In all three cases, I gave up. And moved on. My business also moved. And the brands remained blissfully unaware that they’d lost a customer because they wouldn’t fix the buffet.

So, the next time you’re redesigning your website or setting up an app, revisit the buffet in the last conference you attended. 

And connect the two. 

Bon appetit!