Nick Jones

Readers may have noticed that from time to time in this blog I rail against bad design and poor usability. Naively, I’d imagined that some things were safe from these evils. For example, you wouldn’t believe that it was possible to design food badly would you? But, as with so many of my long-cherished illusions, I have been proved wrong. I’ve just eaten my lunchtime sandwich and have come across not one but two examples of badly designed coleslaw. Unbelievable, how can you get coleslaw wrong? But they did.

The culprits I am forced to name and shame are the UK supermarkets Sainsbury and Marks and Spencer. I felt I deserved a bit of luxury and indulgence, but in a modest way as we’re in a recession, so in both cases I bought their premium coleslaw. And the first thing I found when I put it on my plate is that the pieces of cabbage were far too big. They didn’t fit on my fork or in my mouth. And coleslaw isn’t easy to cut up on a plate; the cabbage pieces aren’t aligned so I couldn’t slice them all with a couple of elegant knife strokes. Oh no, I had to waste ages cutting in lots of different directions just to get a practical mouthful. How difficult can it be to set the cabbage chopping machine to produce pieces that fit on a fork? Do the people who create this stuff actually eat their own products?

Sainsbury had another nasty surprise in store for me. Their “premium” coleslaw contains parsnips and fennel as well as cabbage. What are these obnoxious alien vegetable invaders doing in my coleslaw? I hate parsnips, if I’d wanted them I’d have asked for them. I’m used to consumer electronics companies loading their products with random features I never use, but at least I can ignore them. That’s hard to do with coleslaw; have you ever tried separating parsnips from cabbage when they’re both camouflaged by gobs of mayonnaise?

Please excuse my little lunchtime rant, and if you work for a UK supermarket go hire an industrial designer to take a look at your coleslaw. And, be vigilant. Bad design is lurking in unexpected places waiting to ambush you.