a lesson on usability courtesy of the Boston Red Sox

Sitting in the stands near Pesky's Pole on Friday night as the Blue Jays were cruising to an extremely pleasant 16-2 throttling of the Red Sox, I was actually a lot more interested in watching Red Sox fans than the game itself.

One reason? American sports fans are different than Canadian fans; more knowledgeable, more passionate, more vocal, and more likely to be female. (Completely anecdotally, I saw far more women not with men but with other women or on their own at Fenway than I have ever seen at any professional sporting event in Toronto.)

One of the more interesting groups was a gaggle of jock-ular ex-frat boys in front of us. They were betting each other on the action of every half-inning, talking trash to Jose Bautista and fetching each other beer in an almost continuous stream of motion. The fetching meant that every couple of minutes, one of them would come back from the beverage taps with a couple of cups of beer and manage to jump some seat backs while not spilling a drop of liquid.

The fact that they could almost always get back into their seats without having their neighbours stand up or move got me thinking about the layout of the seating in that section, as opposed to say the seating at Skydome (sorry, Rogers Centre) or ACC.

For instance, we were sitting in a row with extra leg room, half again the typical width of a row. This meant that people could easily get by us, and us by other people. And the reason this made a difference to our entire section, and not just our row, was that instead of a few super-wide aisles spaced very far apart (think Skydome) our section was criss-crossed with lots of narrow aisles (maybe less than the width of a seat) about every 10 seats. So it was always fairly easy to get in and out of your seat; beer runs and the subsequent washroom runs (um, let's say "trips" instead) did not involve having 15 people gather up their belongings while you were forced to rub your body parts on theirs as you inched by, praying that they wouldn't spill anything on you because you stepped on their foot. Again, if you've been to a Blue Jays game anytime since 1989, you know what I'm talking about.

(And given the Red Sox current payroll, I can't imagine that this seating design has a serious impact on revenue, via a loss of seating.)

I don't know if this is an original feature of Fenway, or a result of the renovations earlier this decade, but it's so simple and so smart that it's breathtaking. It's like the person who thought this up had actually been to a baseball game and realized that people actually do drink and piss during the game.

It wasn't the apex of the experience or anything, but the seating design was something that allowed us and everyone else to focus on the game and have fun and not resent every idiot who no longer forced us to stand up and try not to spill and block the view of everyone behind us. Which is not true of, say, a game at Skydome.

Reality should be a basic principle of design, digital, experiential or otherwise. Don't design to what you think people will do, or think they might do.

Design for what people actually do.

"the new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN."

We overestimate people all the time. Not their intelligence necessarily, or their common sense, but their familiarity with what some of us consider to be basic rules and tools for living.

We expect that they won't simultaneously eat, brush their hair and talk on the phone while driving a car, and yet, every few weeks, someone gets pulled over by the cops for doing something pretty much like that.

I know a marketing person who, when first confronted with a mouse for her computer, pointed it at her screen, expecting it to do something. (This was well after the introduction of Windows 3 in our office.)

The Internet is no different, as we all know. People still respond to emails from Nigerian princes looking for a little help moving their riches. Reasonably intelligent people – people who hold down steady jobs, who have post-secondary degrees and who vote – are at this moment typing URLs into Google instead of into the convenient address bar at the top of their browser window.

In marketing we have to remember that these people are usually a big chunk of our target audience. Even when they're sitting at a shiny new Macbook Pro, working in the latest version of Firefox or Safari, they don't necessarily know what we exepct them to know. And I believe as marketers that it's just smart for us to recognize that.

But this is unbelievable.

And yet, it happened.

People will not pay attention to even the most obvious signs that they are not on the site they think they've clicked on. They will try to enter their log-in and password in fields that look nothing like log-ins, in order to make a site that is not Facebook become Facebook and work like Facebook.

Um, let's not make assumptions about things being "obvious" in our work.