On ketchup

In a world where there's ketchup bottles that open from the bottom, as they should, some companies still sell me condiments that open from the top. They make them out of glass so I can't squeeze them and they make the neck narrow so I can't get in there with a spoon. This can't be the work of your friendly neighborhood moron. There's a greater force at play here: standards.

Here's another thing that I think is upside down: SaaS onboarding. Why do I need to sign up upfront? Why can't I use your invoicing software for a moment and then be asked for my email when I want to make a meaningful action like save or share? It's not a flight, you know...

I'll tell you precisely why. Someone, somewhere, much have once, made a questionable A/B test that "showed" the benefit of this paradigm. They must have had something to do with collecting emails upfront. Now it's called best practice and it's industry standard and clueless people like us gobble that stuff up like Haagen-Das (which isn't even Danish 🤯)

I'm sure your equally questionable A/B test will show a similar result. A fair test would be to redesign the whole experience around that. But that's expensive and nobody want to try it because if it fails, you look like the moron who didy follow best practices.

But how about making decisions out of principle? Whatever happened to principle?How about designing software that's in the best interest of the user? Seems to me to be a much surer bet than relying on bogus standards that nobody asked for. Flip the damn bottle, it's embarrassing...