Reducing frustration with poor design around you
Understanding this concept helped me become (a bit) less frustrated with the poor design around me.
Let's take an example.
Paper receipts haven’t changed in 40+ years and are mostly useless. Now imagine buying a sandwich and getting a receipt with:
Meals’ nutritional facts
Shop's peak hours so you can avoid queuing next time
A coupon for your next purchase
So much better, right? So why nobody’s doing it?
10 years ago I wanted to build a business that produces better receipts. But it was clear that paper receipts would die and get replaced by digital ones, so I didn't proceed.
And here we are 10 years later still not transitioned to digital receipts and stuck with the same useless and wasteful paper receipts.
Such gaps in innovation are called Leapfrogging.
Sometimes products skip one or more steps in their evolution because the next significant step is clear, and no one wants to start a business with no future, so no one is solving the "in-between".
This is one of the many reasons we end up with imperfection and inefficiency around us.
Being a designer is a blessing and a curse. The «designer eye» makes us notice imperfections and inefficiencies everywhere which often could be frustrating.
Understanding Leapfrogging isn’t going to change the fact that things work or look poorly, but it helps to relieve that frustration a little bit 😊
For 27 more tactics like this to help you advance your design career, check out my last book The Effective Product Designer.