Product Adoption @Home — Feature — Dining Table 🍽

Problem statement: The family 👩‍👩‍👧‍👧 wasn’t sitting together to have a meal together. Meals 🍽 at home were happening in front of the television or on the couch. The dining table had become a bit obsolete, only to keep things like Amazon deliveries on it.

My Mom always complains and requests to have at least one meal together, and I am sure that might be the case with many families reading this one, especially now as everyone is working more hours and there’s no specific time for lunch or dinner.

Action Taken: For my Mom’s recent birthday 🎉, my wife Ramya, changed the location of the dining table and moved it from the dining area to our balcony. She decorated the ambiance of our balcony with beautiful flowers and dim lights giving the perfect setup of a garden restaurant. All of us really enjoyed it.

Post the event, we never moved the dining table back to the dining area. What we realized that we actually started having more meals together than ever before. Over the last 20 days, since we shifted the dining table we had 80% of the meals together. The utilization of the dining table has never been this good ever before.

This is how it looks during the day and night.

Dining table at Day and at Night

Metrics:

1. Dining table adoption improve more than 200%
2. Family time ⌛ increased > 100%
3. My daughter started eating food not sitting in front of the TV ( at least sometimes 😉)

Deep diving 🤿 into why wasn’t the utilization good earlier, the reason we could think of retrospectively are below —

1. The dining table position wasn’t good. It wasn’t convenient to sit and get out of the dining table.
2. Access to 📺— If you could bend and peek while sitting on the table you could see the TV and hence you preferred to move there. Now, that wasn’t possible.
3. The ambiance in the dining room wasn’t supportive enough to have a meal together. Now, the ambiance is so great that we sit for a while together and chat for a long time.

Takeaways for Product managers:

→ Sometimes a simple repositioning of a button or a CTA brings out fantastic results without the need for a design overhaul.

→ UX plays such a crucial role, not only in tech products that we build but also for everything that we do on a daily basis in our life. Small changes can bring great results.

→ Sometimes you have to make things not so easy for customers in order to get your desired result. In my example — The table position was changed in a way that you can’t see the TV at all, thereby removing the possibility of distraction hence spending more time together.