From the “Hot off the grill” dept.

Today my team (IA/Usability) hosted the bi-weekly summer BBQ. It’s a rotating responsibility among the departments with proceeds going to the United Way. Being usability specialists, it was all about the experience for us.

By that, my team and I set a new standard in the efficiency of summer BBQs with wait times below 5 minutes. Previous attempts had wait times in excess of 35 minutes. We also raised the bar with food selection as well as food quality.

Here’s how we did it: I found out that OnX was going to match our proceeds (total revenue), rather than profit. Thus, much like a dot-com company burning their seed money—we spent a lot of money getting high quality patties from President’s choice, rather than Cost-co. 100% beef, 100% chicken, Vegetarian patties, no filler, etc. With higher quality food, we also planned our set up much earlier, with food going on the grill 45 minutes before the actual start of lunch. As such, we were able to queue up a large amount of food for the initial wait. No line-ups, good food—how could you go wrong.

Like I said, “It’s all about the experience.”

Unfortunately, I basically burned up about 5 and a 1/2 hours setting up, cooking and cleaning up when I could have been doing billable work. After spending all that time outside, in front of a grill, you didn’t really want to work anymore. All I could smell was meat.

-T