I was talking with someone at #OPTECH and they said they were embarrassed to be using physical business cards at a tech conference, and I could completely relate.  I have struggled with the same question – MFI runs the largest technology virtual conference in the industry in Multifamily Demo Day, and yet here I am throwing around physical business cards – seems a bit embarrassing, right?

However, the more I think about the user experience, I'm not convinced that "old school" isn't still superior, and that may have lessons for all tech adoption.

Even looking at car design, Tesla seemed the way of the future with touch panels in the cars.  Toggles were old school and what our parents used, so they had to go!  And yet, the user experience proved to actually be worse than those old school toggles, and we are now seeing a switch to previous time-tested solutions.

Let's look at the business card experience from a customer experience perspective:

We decide to exchange information, but the process is not intuitive.  Loads of questions suddenly come up:

1. Who initiates the transfer, as someone's "system" is usually chosen
2. What is the system?  It could be tapping phones, tapping a non-transferred card, scanning a QR code, clicking a button on our badges and making them close enough to read, etc, etc, etc.
3. Where does this information go?
4. Do I get notified in some way, in order to create a task or to-do item attached with the connection?

At the end of the day, the biggest challenge of all this is that there is no set protocol for this type of interaction – if there was one set system, such as tapping phones, we could all get used to that protocol and it would be seamless.  But right now the multitude of conflicting solutions create confusion in the process.

Beyond the questions, let's assess how dysfunctional the actual process becomes:

1. We discuss which system to use
2. Instructions must be provided on using that system
3. Now I may need to open my phone and camera app so I can scan a QR code.
4. Often a form needs to be filled out and submitted
5. I probably end up emailing the contact to myself so I have a to-do after the fact.

Keep in mind this is all done while standing in front of someone where both of our motivations is to simply move on to another conversation.  We are done and want to exit, but we are handcuffed to each other by the process.  Even worse, I don't really even know this person, and as this is a professional setting, I don't want to look foolish as I try to understand their transfer system.

Now, let's compare this to physical cards:

1. I hand them my card, they hand me theirs, I put it in my pocket and we both part.

The process is relatively frictionless (assuming the card is easily accessible), clear, and understandable.  Granted, the card is not digitized, so there is an element of transcribing that has to go on, and I get that frustration, but I would much rather have that work done when I'm not standing in front of someone.(And there are surely tech solutions who can easily digitize this information)

Yes, this is a long rant on behalf of physical business cards, but the overall point is that evaluating tech should be an honest assessment as to what is being impacted and whether the experience is truly improved by the solution.  Just like car control panels, we need to carefully consider the implementation and user experience of all tech we implement.  Is it a one-time pain point of educating our customers, or does it create continual negative experiences?

Let's not adopt tech just for the sake of adopting tech.  Instead, let's maintain a focus on the ultimate goals we are trying to achieve and leverage technology to achieve those goals.

As a side note, how great are these cards from CoSign?