User Experience with Banana
“There’s a lot of fruit in the produce aisle, but if any one type of fruit was designed by Mother Nature for the user experience, it would have to be the banana.”
A banana tastes good and is good for you, but there are other factors of its design that add to this optimal experience of snacking.
The color of a Banana makes it easy to know it is ready.
Most of us will use our eyes to observe a banana long before we smell, touch, or taste it. Just by looking at a banana, there’s no question of if it’s ready or not. Bananas have a built in accurate visual cue. You don’t have to waste time questioning or testing to see if it is ready because it is designed to be obvious.
They’re green before they’re ready, they’re brown once they’re past their prime, but that bright yellow peel means it’s at its best flavour and ready to eat.
Good UX is like a banana
The more time we spend in front of our screens, the more we’re affected by our digital work environment. Good UX is the digital equivalent of a clean, functional and uncluttered office. It helps us stay focused, calm and productive.
But, what exactly is UX? UX is short for User Experience. UX-designers often like to fruit as an analogy, to explain what UX is.
The banana, for example, is an example of great UX. Mother Nature really hit the UX jackpot when she designed that one. The banana is conveniently wrapped in protective packaging. It comes in single-size portions. It’s easy to tell when it’s ripe, it’s easy to unwrap, and it’s easy to eat. The whole fruit just makes sense.
Compare that to, let’s say, a mango. In terms of UX, the mango is a bit of a failure. Yes, it’s super tasty. If it’s ripe, that is. And it’s hard to tell if it is! It’s also a little bit too big for one person, but too small to share. It doesn’t fit in your pocket, and you’ll need a tool to peel it. Once peeled, it’s slippery, messy and you always end up leaving half of it attached to the ridiculously large pit in the middle.
And just like there are plenty of tasty but messy fruits, there’s a wide array of software on the market that can do great things. But that unfortunately, like the mango, leave their users frustrated, stressed out and sticky (ok, maybe not sticky) after every interaction.
