IDEAS

The Food Processor Problem

I was slicing twenty-five pounds of onions the other day. Yep, twenty-five pounds. For caramelized onions. You start with a ridiculous amount of onion and end up with… not very much. They’re worth it. Which is why I was standing there with twenty-five pounds of onions in the first place. It also seemed like a great time to pull out the food processor.

I don’t particularly like my food processor. It’s big, it’s a pain to store, there are too many pieces, and washing the thing makes me nervous because several of those pieces are designed specifically to remove parts of food (and apparently fingers) very quickly. Still, twenty-five pounds of onions. This was its moment. Except the feed tube is maybe two inches wide. Half an onion doesn’t fit. A quarter of an onion doesn’t fit. I ended up cutting the onions into eighths so I could get them into the machine. Think about that for a minute. I was cutting onions so I could put them into the thing I bought so I wouldn’t have to cut onions. And I STILL didn’t get sliced onions. I got chopped onions. Not the same thing.

This is where my annoying habit kicks in. I can’t unsee things. Once I notice something that doesn’t make sense, I can’t stop wondering why not. Who designed this? Why do I have four blade discs that don’t stack neatly anywhere? Why does it take up so much cupboard space?

I’m sure someone thought through this, right? That’s what makes it more interesting. I doubt anyone set out to design an annoying food processor. They were solving for something. Maybe how many functions they could put on the box. How it looked on a shelf. Shipping dimensions or manufacturing cost or whatever else goes into designing and selling a kitchen appliance. I’m pretty sure no one was solving for me standing in my kitchen with twenty-five pounds of onions.

Once I started thinking about that, well… there went the rest of my day. How many things do we use that have been carefully optimized for something other than the person actually using them? CRMs are a spectacular example. We kept adding features because more features made the software more valuable. At least that was the theory. Eventually we had systems that could do almost anything, once you got a PhD in how to use them. (That may have been my lack of patience.) Then we wondered why people didn’t use them.

The same thing happens everywhere. Software that makes perfect sense to the person who configured it and none to the person who has to use it every day. Forms asking for information we already gave someone. The paper towel dispenser that gives you four square inches of paper at a time because somebody, somewhere, is very proud of what they’ve done to the cost-per-use number. The same dispenser, mounted so high I’m wet to the elbows before I can get one. Ok, I get that, they installed it where the tile stopped. Who decided how high the tile should go? Someone who was never going to reach for a paper towel.

Everybody was doing their job. They weren’t necessarily solving the same problem as the person standing there with wet hands. See how quickly my day goes down rabbit holes? I ask some version of the same question all the time: Who was this optimized for?

Sometimes there’s a perfectly good answer. I don’t need everything to be pretty. I don’t even need everything to be simple. If ugly works better, I’ll take ugly. If something needs to be complicated, fine. The world is complicated. It’s the unnecessary stuff that makes me nuts. The extra click. Entering the same information twice. Remembering something a system could remember for me. A workaround everybody has been using so long that nobody remembers what we’re working around in the first place.

Once I see it, I can’t leave it alone. I want to know why it’s there, whether we can get rid of it, and what would happen if we started with the person doing the thing and worked backward from there.

Which is probably why my food processor is in the back of a cabinet I have to half-unpack to reach, next to a drawer full of knives.

I sliced the onions by hand. The caramelized onions were worth it.