( this is a posting I wrote for another blog, but which is apporpriate. The original appeared 12/07 on Sears's internal User Experience blog )
More Foosball is less, and how it applies to UE
My
cube neighbor Jenn, who is not in UE but who is still pretty cool
anyway, tells me that the Canadians and French call foosball a word
that translates out to "baby-foot" in English.
Presumably
this is because foosball is a baby version of soccer, a
miniaturization. For those of you living on desert islands and reading
this blog through your Kindles, foosball is a table top version of
soccer for two players where each player tries to score goals by
spinning multiple handles and yelling loudly, just like the real game.
Here in UE West we have a sort of group area decorated by furniture
raided from Sears of Christmas Past, as well as several baby-foot
tables. We had two, yesterday we got another one.
That
makes three baby-foot tables, for the math challenged. And we don't
call them baby-foot tables, of course. We call them foosball tables.
And on an extremely busy Foosball Day we use one of them, a couple
times. Having three tables in the same small space seems a bit
excessive.
Meet a need
It’s
possible someone thought “well, people like foosball; our one table is
going over well, lets put more down there.” Or maybe it was a matter of
Someone Important deciding that for true happiness, our unit needed
three tables. Or perhaps the solution was meant for scale; at some
point in the future, we might –need- three tables. Then again, maybe we
just have a surplus of tables… and like my mom
never wanting to throw anything out, we jam them into 2G’s common area
on the assumption that we’ll need them someday. Like that old sweater,
or a margarine bowl you automatically wash and save.
The
thing is, we really don’t need three foosball tables. They languish,
taking up space so that ironically it’s tough just to play on just the
one table. If we only had the one table, and by some bizarre chance
more than two people wanted to play at one time, then maybe they’d have
to wait five minutes for their turn to turn the handles and yell. But
this never happens, and I’ve been here nine months. I think one table
would meet our need just fine.
More is less
I
am pretty sure no one has ever put these next words together in a
sentence before… we should certainly be careful not to put three
foosball tables into our web experience.
What
I mean is everything we do on our site should address a need, something
we can concretely speak to. We have a pretty dense web environment,
from the Home page to the Thank You at the end of checkout. It can be
tempting to put something in because we might have a need down the
road. Or because they’re doing it over Somewhere Cool. Or just because.
This
helps lead to a cluttered environment, a confused visual or task
hierarchy and people using none of our cool widgets, even though we
have plenty of them. More is definitely not always better. We should
take care to remember that more foosball is less.
Now where did I put that sweater…? And that margarine bowl. Hmmmmm.
