Do you travel much? A friend, Alan Weiss, became frustrated during a recent flight to Europe. Consider this:

I’m sitting in the front of an Airbus A340, and I’m wondering why what I’ve been through is so strange. The plane carries 240 people, but we all go through the same bottleneck, one by one (blaah, blaah, blaah) to get on board.

Planes should really allow people to board through the entire side, so that everyone can get on in three minutes. But the new A380s, which can carry 800 people when configured completely for steerage, will have the same bovine boarding. Who thought this was the way to do it?

When we land, we walk a good half-mile or more, through winding corridors, to reach immigration. Here, at least, they have a multitude of stations, but still huge backups for those without special lines. Then we have to walk another hundred yards and take two elevators to reach the lot where the limo is parked.

The trouble is that airplanes were not built for passengers and neither were airports. Airframe designers, municipal engineers, and immigration officials don’t care about passenger comfort, they care about their own needs and avoiding litigation. How is “Let them walk a mile so that we save building costs” different from “Let them eat cake so we can save the best for ourselves”? (The “cake” to which the lady referred, was actually bread.)

Some years ago, an executive at Ford, appalled when she found she couldn’t gracefully get into one of her own new car designs, ordered her male design team to wear skits during business hours. She told them if they didn’t improve access for women, she’d also put them in heels. The design improved quite rapidly.

What if consumers, clients, customers and all other relevant alliterative categories were involved in the design of the structures, procedures, and processes they’d be using most often? Would the doctor still press a cold stethoscope to your chest? Would you wear those humiliating hospital gowns? Would the division of motor vehicles make you take a ticket and wait around for three hours? Would subway cars have the same kind of seating?

I doubt it.

I try to design experiences that my clients find attractive and compelling, which is not hard when you ask them. Why isn’t that a universal endeavor for all businesses?