I fly into the east coast the night before a big client meeting. I land at around 11pm, check into the hotel, and immediately crash, setting my alarm for 6:30 am. I'm one of those people who uses a shower to wake up in the morning, even before my coffee.
I get up, bleary-eyed, walk into the bathroom to take a shower, and I'm immediately hit with a terrible case of friction. How the hell do I turn the shower on? Adjust the temperature? A string of curse words comes out of my mouth as I burn myself trying to adjust the temperature, and figure out how to control the water pressure.
That's two minutes of confused, wet, mostly-naked guesswork in a place I'm paying $280 a night to stay. My day is off to a great start.
Approaching This Problem With My CRO Experience
After my day of client meetings, I sat down in my hotel and worked out the problem, using the same principles I use for website CRO. What can I say, I live an exciting life. This is what I came up with:
Every hotel has solved the same problem in a different way. Some have one knob. Some have three. Some have a digital panel with a little screen. Some have a thermostatic valve where you set the temperature first and then turn it on, which is genuinely brilliant and used by approximately 4% of properties. It's fine to have a custom interface for your home shower — once you learn it, you'll use it for years — but as a road warrior, I have to start from scratch each stay.
The fix is obvious if you've ever done CRO: standardize the front end and make it intrinsically understandable, and let the back end be whatever it needs to be. The plumbing under the wall can stay proprietary and weird. The user-facing layer should be the same in a Hyatt Place in Tulsa as it is in a Park Hyatt in Tokyo.
It should also be designed and user-tested so most travelers can immediately understand it. If you want to differentiate for your luxury brands, you can use higher-end finishes while keeping the interface practically the same.
Once You See It, You Can't Unsee It
The hotel shower thing isn't really about hotel showers. It's that once you spend enough years fixing friction on websites, you can't stop seeing friction. It becomes a permanent overlay on the world.
A few other examples from a recent week:
Restaurant Menus
Most restaurants bury their best-margin items in the middle of the second column, where thirty years of eye-tracking research has proven nobody looks. The top-right corner is the highest-attention zone on a printed menu. Your 7-course tasting menu belongs here. Not the lobster bisque appetizer.
Parking Garages
Every parking garage in America places the exit sign at exactly the angle where you can't see it until you've already driven past it. There is no excuse for this. It's a one-time signage decision and they all blew it.
Microwaves
Why does my microwave have a dedicated "Popcorn" button but no "Add 30 Seconds" button? The use-case ratio there is something like 1:50. I'm being given a one-tap shortcut for a thing I do once a year, while the thing I do five times a day is buried four button-presses deep.
Airline Boarding
Boarding by zone from the back of the plane forward is mathematically faster. Every airline knows this. Most still board by status tier from the front, because status is a revenue product and boarding speed isn't. That's not a usability failure — that's a deliberate prioritization. I actually respect it more than I respect the shower thing.
The Principle, Stated Cleanly
Every interaction is a funnel. Every funnel has friction. Every piece of friction either has a business reason behind it — like airline boarding — or nobody bothered to fix it. Most of it is the second one.
My job is to help brands remove this friction, particularly when there's no business reason for it to be there.
Why This Matters for Your Business
The hotel shower is a 100% conversion-rate event — eventually you do figure it out, because you're committed to the funnel (you're wet) — but the experience drops. Trust drops. Likelihood-to-rebook drops. NPS drops. The hotel paid for the room, the cleaning, the soap, the towel, the front desk smile — and then ate ground in the last ten feet because the shower handle is a riddle.
If you're running an e-commerce site, a SaaS funnel, a lead-gen page — anything where humans have to do things — your job is to remove riddles.
The brands with the highest conversion rates usually don't have the prettiest sites. They have the most boring, predictable, easy-to-use ones. Amazon's checkout is ugly. It also converts at roughly triple the industry average, because it never makes you wonder what to click next.
Doing that thinking up front is hard. It's also the entire job. You build a better experience, you get happier customers, you make more money — and the brands that won't do the work get beaten by the ones that will.
If your funnel has riddles in it, that's what I fix for a living. Better call CRO Sol.
P.S. If you know anyone who might be interested in my solution from the hotel or bathroom fixture industry, let me know!
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