Posts by Ali Shahi
How to Reduce Perceived Wait Time
Two things have real evidence behind them. Changing what the waiting area contains, and explaining the wait. Both were tested recently, in hospitals. One on a few hundred people, the other on 23. Neither was tested on how long the wait felt. That gap runs through nearly all of the advice reviewed for this article.…
Read MoreHow to Measure Customer Wait Times
Measuring customer wait times starts with three decisions, and none involves equipment. Name the event that starts the clock. Name the event that stops it. Decide who is inside the count. Only then does the instrument matter. Get one of the three wrong and you still get a number, just not one anybody can check.…
Read MoreWhy Does Queue Jumping Make People So Angry?
An emergency department had a stated priority rule for who gets seen next. Patients were still overtaken in more than 1 in 4 ED visits, and the records show no reason why (JAMA Network Open, 2023). The same skip, done by a stranger in front of you at a counter, gets a different name entirely.…
Read MoreWhat Is Occupied vs Unoccupied Waiting Time?
An illustrative scene. A tyre-fitting bay on a Saturday morning: six chairs, a coffee machine, and a wall-mounted screen playing the news with the sound off. Nobody looks up at it. It’s there because a wait with something in it is supposed to feel shorter than a wait with nothing in it. That idea has…
Read MoreSingle Queue or Multiple Lines: Which Is Faster?
Picture a counter with two service points. Before opening, someone has to settle the layout: one queue feeding both tills, or a separate queue at each. It gets decided once and then lived with for years. It’s easy to assume one of the two is simply faster. It isn’t. With the same two staff working…
Read MoreHow Long Will Customers Wait Before Leaving?
No published study measures how long a shop, café or salon customer waits before walking out. Leaving gets counted in hospitals and on phone lines, and almost nowhere else. So the honest answer has to be built from those places, and what they measure turns out not to be the same behaviour. Where leaving is…
Read MoreWhy Does Waiting Feel Longer Than It Is?
In a 2023 study at a Chinese eye clinic, how long people thought they had waited predicted how satisfied they were. How long they actually waited had no direct effect (P = .365, Medicine (Baltimore), 2023). Two clocks run in every waiting room, and only one of them reached the survey. That split is the…
Read MoreHow to Send Updates to a Tour or Event Group
Take an illustrative wet morning at a rural outdoor event. The field marked for parking has gone soft overnight, so arriving cars have to be sent round to a second entrance on the far side of the site. Forty of them are already on the road. The organiser holds nobody’s phone number, because nothing in…
Read MoreHow to Track a Flight for an Airport Pickup
The word to stop trusting is “landed”. On a tracker it can mean wheels on the runway, and on some airport boards it means the aircraft is already parked with the doors about to open. An airport pickup planned around the wrong one goes wrong quietly. This page won’t give you a number of minutes,…
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