The Inconvenience of Convenient Design

Why am I eating a cold burrito in 2025?

Author

Jon Haines
January 09, 2025

This week’s edition:

  • The inconvenience of convenient design

  • Design articles i found interesting

  • Design jobs I found interesting

One night last week, my wife and I decided to do dinner and a movie from home. We’d order burritos from a Mexican place we both like, and then find a movie to stream while we chomped on some chips and guac. Only here’s the thing — the food took forever to come, and when it did arrive, it was cold.

Not to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but I find the process of ordering food worse than it was 20 years ago. We have the convenience of only pressing buttons, and seeing the delivery person move from restaurant to our home. However, delivery people are now not associated with one restaurant, so they end up stacking orders from multiple places, making it more likely that my burrito will be cold, unless I ask for priority. On top of that, there’s a service charge. This could all be avoided if I called the restaurant and ordered without the help of UberEats or some other platform. After all, this is how it was done in the past.

Back to my date night, there is another element of modern technology that has seemed to have gotten more convenient, but in reality, has just become more confusing — finding something to watch. Streaming is a bit of a mess right now. There are too many platforms and it’s always an extra step to find out what movie is on which platform.

How did we get here? Is this the ideal user experience?

The irony is that this design direction was meant to speed up the experience of yesteryear. Before, we would need to call a place to order food, then find something to watch by physically going into a video store (unless something was on TV). Now, we have the ability to order from more place and watch movies from more services, but we are limited in how enjoyable our experience is due to resources spread too thin (when it comes to ordering food) and a paralysis of choice (when it comes to finding something to watch).

Just something to ponder about.

Design Articles for the Week

Is Google Search killing the website?

Google's major search algorithm updates this past year have left many smaller websites with no other choice than to lay off staff.

news.todayin.design/p/dec-24-2024

Generative AI and the tetrad color harmony

Amazing unanimous consensus among three chatbots.

uxdesign.cc/generative-ai-and-the-tetrad-color-harmony-91e1c58e0519

Transitioning from engineering to UX to product design: My story of 5 years

My journey of starting out as an engineer, venturing into design, beginning my design-career as a UX designer, and finally transitioning into product design.

mehekkbassi.substack.com/p/transitioning-from-engineering-to-05d

Design Jobs for the Week

Hi, I’m Jon, a UX and Product Designer from Brooklyn, New York. I write the Design Breadcrumbs newsletter to express my own thoughts on the design world, freelancing, and career advancement. Subscribe to get this news delivered to your inbox every week.