If you’ve ever been to Minneapolis, you have probably heard of Nye’s Polonaise Room. It is perhaps the most famous bar in the city, home to a long tradition of live sing-a-longs, gold-flecked vinyl booths that remain somehow perpetually shiny, and most significantly the Ruth Adams Band – an outfit billed as the most dangerous polka band in the Midwest.
Just across Hennepin stands the Kramarczuk Sausage Co, also a family-run restaurant, bakery, and deli established over five decades ago by Wasyl and Anna Kramarczuk after moving to the United States from the Ukraine in 1944. They sell over forty varieties of sausage. In fact, they sell so many varieties of sausage, it has it’s own place in the main navigation of their website. Organizing, displaying, and interacting with that much sausage no doubt requires a good deal of taxonomy in and of itself. But there is another creative exercise happening at Kramarczuk’s – the intersection of customer experience design and architectural planning.
From a small deli, the business has created partners in adjacent spaces. They offer services not normally associated with – well, sausage. The Book It Travel Agency provides charters to Europe; destinations frequently traveled by families whose roots extend back to Eastern Europe. Across the other side of the room, a door leads to a Baltic gift shop, carrying imports from the region. On weekends the deli becomes a venue for Baltic music, with balalaika orchestras and fiddlers. It sounds simple, and obvious. And it is. That is precisely the beauty of the experience. The organic evolution of the business and it’s environment has grown directly from it’s community of customers, out of their preferences, needs, tastes, and desires.
It is an expression of community-centered environmental design, and a model approach for the design of many kinds of interactive experiences. When we approach the design on a human level by following a clearly articulated UX strategy, we can build in the same kind of organic value to our work as Wasyl and Anna Kramarczuk built into theirs.
No Comments