Experience Design… but in the Kitchen. Let’s make it relatable.

I know what you’re thinking but at some point as you’re scrolling you’ll have your “Aha!” moment. Go ahead, keep reading…
I’ll wait for it!

Simply put, we are creatures of habit. This is part of why experience design is so important, it’s essentially unavoidable. It impacts our daily lives and how efficiently we function. Our entire lifestyle functionality as humans depends on user experience design. Especially today.

Think about your kitchen for a second. For example - you put certain utensils and appliances in specific spots depending on how often you access them and how you use them. Simple, right? Well, yes. And also, no.

I have been in my house for five years now and my kitchen is still not optimized to its fullest potential. This is largely due to the fact that my journey, as a user of my kitchen, has changed several times since having moved in. Most recently, just before my second baby was due, I reorganized and decluttered my cabinets by taking tips from The Home Edit, IKEA and Pinterest blogs. I have an average-sized space, no pantry and not too much storage.

I thought I did a great job, especially on how much stuff I realized actually fit in my cabinets when thoughtfully arranged. It took a slight habitual adjustment, but I very quickly gravitated to my new method, which validated that I had optimized my morning routine, that was very, very task-oriented. I am sure this is the case for most of you as well.

Let’s fast forward to four months later in April, a few weeks after my son was born and me having to finding my bearings…again. The user flow of my newly reorganized kitchen no longer worked at its fullest potential, with a toddler and also a newborn in my arms.

With a baby usually hanging off of one hand, I find myself accessing a lot of day-to-day items with the other hand. This makes prioritizing readily used items in relation to the upper drawer storage space extremely essential.

Image of kitchen drawers. Pinterest 2021.

Image of pot and pan drawers. Pinterest 2021.

Neither of these are images of my kitchen. Pinterest just has some really great inspiration photos. Although I am sure both you and I can easily point out some non-functional placements here. But neither of these organization tactics were designed for our personalized day-to-day needs.

So how is this related to DIGITAL UX?

Well, you see, your users function the same way. If your website’s most wanted assets, whether it be your best selling products, the services you want to promote, login page retrieval, etc., are NOT easy to access or use, especially when requiring multiple steps — you are in grave, grave danger of user frustration.

Think about how many times you get annoyed when you’re unable to find your sharpest knife…or in my case, digging out the milk foamer from the dish rack to warm up my daughter’s bedtime milk - yes, you read that right, I prefer to have one less appliance on my countertop - after about five seconds of searching, you either evidently show frustration or give up.

These are nearly irreversible mistakes when it comes to your users. So next time you think about your site design or your client’s… think about you and your wayfinding around your kitchen while cooking dinner.

Remember, as good looking as your design is, it isn’t worth much of anything if you didn’t factor in usability.

Here are some good versus bad examples of what good design is what it achieves:

Check out Paybright’s user profile dashboard. This is one thing they got right in terms of simplicity and achieving the goal of helping user’s spend money easier. The grid layout with merchant options makes is super easy to focus on the goal of just straight-up shopping.

Looks simple but this example is the opposite of easy. Considering Paybright usually sends numeric pins to the accountholder’s mobile number…what the accountholder’s username and password should be is unclear. It brings into question user frustration and questioning whether the user landed on the right page. When trying to login into an account, the process should be as simple as possible. Period.