Harvey’s Restaurant – Correctly Prioritizing Presented Information

Hey there everyone, I have something to show you: it’s something that absolutely everyone has seen, hundreds if not thousands of times (tens of thousands, maybe? maybe more?). It’s so common, that a lot of people don’t notice when it’s done really-really well; and sadly, don’t notice when it’s done really-really poorly.

But don’t worry Harvey’s restaurant, I noticed how well laid out your takeout receipt is.

If you have a receipt from anywhere laying around, go grab it so you can have something to compare it to.

Prioritizing the Information

Take a look at the receipt you see on the left here. This is an actual scan of my receipt from the other week, December 7th. As you can see from the top portion of the receipt, the girlfriend and I had the following very-healthy food choices:

• 2 Poutines
• 1 Double Original Bacon-Cheddar Burger
• 1 Double Original Burger
• And that payment for this healthy meal was though Visa, and it cost me $18.82

After that information, there’s some white space, then we see that:

• The subtotal was $16.66
• I paid the Canadian government (GST) $0.83
• I paid the Ontario government (PST) $1.33
• Then again that my total was $18.82

Why did they break it up that? They prioritized their information based on what the person who has the receipt needs/want to know.

The average person looks at a receipt and needs to know basically 3 things:

1. What did I order/buy?
2. How much did it cost me?
3. And how did I pay?

And Harvey’s showed me exactly that, right away at the top of the receipt. I found this very helpful because I personally never care what my subtotal is, since it’s not what I’m actually paying; I only care about the bottom-line, what it actually cost me.

Due to great prioritizing of information, I didn’t have to search around to find the information I was looking for. Does the receipt you grabbed prioritized the information for you?

You did grab one, right? If not, I’ll forgive you, just remember to take a look at the next one you get.

Preventing Errors (Preventing Complaining Customers)

There is something else that prioritizing the information prevents: complaining/angry/upset customers.

I remember back when I used to work for the food service industry (I was a butcher/service clerk for 8 long years), that customers used to complain because many thought they were being overcharged and ripped off.

Why was this? This is because their receipt was presented like this:

• Item 1
• Item 2
• …
• GST
• PST
• Subtotal
• <white space>
• Total

The very-easy-to-make mistake that customers were making, was that they quickly looked at their receipt after checking-out, and mistook the subtotal line for their actual total. And since most people always assume the worst has happened, the customers assumed that they were overcharged and became angry.

Angry/upset customers are not good.

People Read from the Top-Down, Not the Bottom-Up

This happened because people read from the top down; not the bottom up. The average customer would scan the receipt from the top, working their way down trying to find their total, when the first thing they see is the subtotal.

This is a common mistake in receipts; the total is often the last thing on it (except for advertising).

It’s easy to assume that since the total is at the very bottom, bolded, centered, starred, and underlined, that the user must be able to see it. But this is not always true.

It may be a great idea to place the total at the very top of the receipt, before the items are listed, as well as after: especially if the receipts tend to be long (much like the ones from grocery stores).

Where Can I Use This?

Now that we know how important prioritizing presented information is, and how it helps the user, and prevents misunderstandings; how can we use this?

1. On your eCommerce store’s checkout pages.
2. In your newsletter emails (try putting the links at the very top of the email as well, right after “hello”, and see if you get more clicks).
3. To re-organize your navigation bar on your websites or blogs (put the most-common/popular sections first).

Can you see another way to use this concept of prioritizing your presented information?

Cheers, and see you next post,
Corrado

PS: Don’t forget to rate this article, you should be able to one-click rate it below. It’ll only take you 0.59 seconds.