How many queue psychology principles are you optimizing for? They should factor into any queue management. These are equally applicable to physical or online waits. In his article “ The Psychology of Waiting in Lines” Maister outlines 6 cornerstone principles that determine customer experiences when waiting in a queue. The 6 revealing rules of queue psychologyįrom our experience, Harvard Business School professor David Maister has compiled the gold standard overview of the psychology of queuing. Similar hacks have since been used everywhere from airport baggage claims to doctor’s waiting rooms to supermarket checkout aisles.Īll this goes to show that “often the psychology of queuing is more important than the statistics of the wait itself,” says MIT operations professor Richard Larson, also known as Dr. The solution? Add floor indicators showing people the progress of the elevator and add floor-to-ceiling mirrors near the elevators to distract people while they waited. Rather, it was the perceived waiting time. As Queue-it CEO and co-founder Niels Henrik Sodemann explains in his video “ Breaking Down the Psychology of Queuing” building managers realized that the problem wasn’t the wait duration itself. The problem of waiting in line had materialized in the elevators of the city’s newly built skyscrapers. But they paid little attention to how people felt when standing in line.įast forward to 1950s New York City. Early researchers focused on improving the efficiency of queues, serving as many people as possible within a fixed company budget. Erlang founded the field of queuing theory in the early 20 th century while analyzing telephone waiting times. RELATED: How Do Virtual Waiting Rooms Turn Queuing Into a Positive User Experience?ĭanish engineer A.K. What is it about waiting in line that tends to raise our blood pressure? What is it that differentiates a positive queuing experience from a poor one? The key is rooted in the psychology of queuing. The risk is ignoring queue psychology and delivering a negative experience that loses customers and damages your brand. “People often say, ‘My customers need to access my website at all times it’s a risk to put them in a queue!’”įor businesses, the risk isn’t putting people in a queue. But at Queue-it, “we still hear the misconception that applying a queue page to your website is negative,” says Ley Valentin. We’ve written before how, done well, online queues harness social proof to boost conversion rates. For businesses, it’s critical to make the experience a good one. What queue psychology shows is that the waiting experience makes all the difference. “Yet many are willing to wait for their favorite Black Friday item or the latest Apple gadget.” “People claim to hate wasting time,” says Queue-it CCO and co-founder Camilla Ley Valentin. Given the technical challenges of peak website traffic, lines serve the same useful purpose online, and aren’t going away anytime soon. Lines are a fair-if disliked-way to deal with high demand in the physical world. Many are startled to find that queues have moved online. But the Internet era has created assumptions that we can access whatever we want on-demand, 24/7. Everyone stands in line in the physical world. These two simple words can send an otherwise rational person into an uproar online.
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