Less Babyfoot is More

( this is a reprint of something I wrote for another blog on 12/27/07 )

More Foosball is less, and how it applies to User Experience

My cube neighbor Jenn, who is not in UE but who is still pretty cool anyway, tells me that the Canadians and French call foosball a word that translates out to "baby-foot" in English.

Presumably this is because foosball is a baby version of soccer, a miniaturization. For those of you living on desert islands and reading this blog through your Kindles, foosball is a table top version of soccer for two players where each player tries to score goals by spinning multiple handles and yelling loudly, just like the real game. Here in UE West we have a sort of group area decorated by furniture raided from Sears of Christmas Past, as well as several baby-foot tables. We had two, yesterday we got another one.

That makes three baby-foot tables, for the math challenged. And we don't call them baby-foot tables, of course. We call them foosball tables. And on an extremely busy Foosball Day we use one of them, a couple times. Having three tables in the same small space seems a bit excessive.

Meet a need

It’s possible someone thought “well, people like foosball; our one table is going over well, lets put more down there.” Or maybe it was a matter of Someone Important deciding that for true happiness, our unit needed three tables. Or perhaps the solution was meant for scale; at some point in the future, we might –need- three tables. Then again, maybe we just have a surplus of tables… and like my mom never wanting to throw anything out, we jam them into 2G’s common area on the assumption that we’ll need them someday. Like that old sweater, or a margarine bowl you automatically wash and save.

The thing is, we really don’t need three foosball tables. They languish, taking up space so that ironically it’s tough just to play on just the one table. If we only had the one table, and by some bizarre chance more than two people wanted to play at one time, then maybe they’d have to wait five minutes for their turn to turn the handles and yell. But this never happens, and I’ve been here nine months. I think one table would meet our need just fine.

More is less

I am pretty sure no one has ever put these next words together in a sentence before… we should certainly be careful not to put three foosball tables into our web experience.

What I mean is everything we do on our site should address a need, something we can concretely speak to. We have a pretty dense web environment, from the Home page to the Thank You at the end of checkout. It can be tempting to put something in because we might have a need down the road. Or because they’re doing it over Somewhere Cool. Or just because.

This helps lead to a cluttered environment, a confused visual or task hierarchy and people using none of our cool widgets, even though we have plenty of them. More is definitely not always better. We should take care to remember that more foosball is less.

Now where did I put that sweater…? And that margarine bowl. Hmmmmm.