One of Frito-Lay’s largest factories produces more than half-a-million pounds of snacks daily. Potato chips are transported around the factory on conveyer belts moving up to 60 miles per hour. How is quality control possible with so many chips moving so quickly?
In this podcast, Brendan O’Donohoe explained how the feat is accomplished. Chips move down a conveyer belt while an overhead camera photographs them. The images are analyzed by a computer program that determines if any of the chips are the wrong color, size or shape, and records their positions. Moments later, the chips go airborne over a gap in the conveyor belt. Above that gap is an array of jets that deliver precise puffs of air, blowing away offending chips, just like magic.
We don’t naturally give serious consideration to ideas as outlandish as optical sorting quality-control systems. Could you have ever come up with this idea? If you had, would you have seriously considered acting on it or would you have dismissed the idea as being too complicated?
Penn Jillette (of the magic duo Penn & Teller) revealed in an interview that “the absolute secret of magic” is that the magician is willing to work harder than the audience would expect. He explained that it’s not so much that you’d refuse to do the work required, it’s that you’d subconsciously dismiss the idea as preposterous before giving it actual consideration. All that effort just doesn’t seem reasonable to most of us.
Products that work well are often described as working “like magic.” This means the products are fast, beautiful, useful and delightful. As a designer, you want all of your products to be magical.
So how does one make the mental shift necessary to concoct and give full consideration to these magical ideas?
When designing anything, ask yourself, “how would this work if it were magic?”
Don’t think about how you’d build the product, just think about how it would work from the user’s point of view. Give your idea a moment. OK, now think about what it would take to make the product reality.
Is it within the realm of possibility to create the product in the way you’ve imagined? If it appears not, slowly take a small step back toward reality and consider your idea again. Make sure you explore every possibility thoroughly before dismissing the idea. Magic happens when we work on something that seems too difficult or too time consuming. By working backward, you’ll end up at the most magical outcome.
Not every difficult idea is worth pursuing, but this exercise at least makes you consider such ideas.
This most magical concept is something we’re considering constantly while building Flinto for Mac. There have been times we’ve started working on a new feature, through testing and iteration realize there’s no magical way to create it, and cut it.
Other times, we are able to work it out. For example, when you use a swipe gesture to trigger a transition in Flinto for Mac, we feed the velocity of your finger into the transition to make it seem natural and smooth. This makes it feel as though you’re actually physically controlling the transition with your finger, and that’s magical.
Like a magic trick, truly great design is not something that is created with ease, but almost always requires more work than seems reasonable. A typical business-oriented designer won’t take this path. An artist will. Decide to be that artist. The execution will be challenging. Jump the mental hurdle to magic. Don’t stop before you even get started.
Originally published at blog.flinto.com.
