ARTICLE SUMMARY: The old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In design, the road to bankruptcy is paved with poor design.
It’s the small, ordinary patterns of human behavior that quietly break our designs. You can do all the testing in the world and everything looks great—then out of nowhere, bang, a real person does something perfectly reasonable and everything goes wrong. What the heck happened?
In Kelly Smith’s “Vanilla Moments,” she uses the story of a car that would not start whenever the owner went for vanilla ice cream as a parable for what could happen to our designs. In this article, she shows how seemingly reasonable behavior can expose hidden flaws. She explains:
- What is a Vanilla Moment?
- How to Discover Vanilla Moments
- Remember: We Don’t Design in a Vacuum
When it comes to truly evaluating our products, we designers need to get out of the studio and into the real world to see how people actually use them to achieve their goals. Tracking down problems takes work. It takes purposeful observation if we’re going to deliver a friction-free user experience that keeps people coming back.
Kelly concludes her article with this advice: “For designers, makers, and creators, the challenge is clear: don’t wait for vanilla moments to break your work. Seek them out early. Watch closely. Listen deeply. And above all, design with real people’s imperfect, brilliant lives at the center.”
This article is well worth the read. Please let us know what you think in the comments.
