Do You Know Good Design When You See It?

Years ago, I traded in a Subaru Forester for a Volvo XC60. Both were solid family SUVs, roughly the same size, comfortable without being flashy. The Volvo had a few more elegant finishes, but more or less I considered it a direct replacement for the Subaru I was letting go of. Until the first time I took a ticket to park in a parking garage.

Reflexively, I flipped the visor down and went to tuck the ticket into ... nothing. My new Volvo didn't have the little plastic clip under the visor. You know, the one where you put your valet ticket or a dry cleaning claim ticket or a garage ticket. I flailed around for a minute, wondering what to do.

Good design is so invisible that we take it for granted. I had formed a habit around what to do with my garage ticket based on what my Subaru provided for me: a piece of plastic that held it in a perfect spot. It had never occurred to me during the buying process to look at whether the Volvo had a similar place to put a ticket; I only missed it when it was gone.

Of course there are other places to put a claim ticket: purse, wallet, cup holder, glove box, center console, pants pocket ... But my Subaru was designed to solve this tiny problem, while the Volvo was not. The Forester's designers, in the process of building that model, decided to include a clip for a ticket, and the XC60's designers chose not to. It's not as though the Volvo designers had no idea some cars were including that feature; they made the choice to leave it out. That one small design decision made a big impact on me, the end consumer.

As consumers we typically pay very little attention to design, unless it causes a problem: a door that swings the opposite way from what we expect, wasted space in a corner cabinet where you lose all your Tupperware lids, unreadable text on a menu. Good design goes unnoticed, and yet it can be the difference between a happy customer and an aggravated one. Chalk another one up for the intangibles.