Vanilla moments

Why you need to design for the real world.

The story goes that in 1978 a customer wrote to General Motors with a complaint about his brand new Pontiac. He said if he drove to the shop and bought vanilla ice cream his car refused to start.

If he bought chocolate, or strawberry, or any other flavour — no problem. But vanilla? The car just wouldn’t start.

At first the engineers chuckled, assuming it was a wind-up. Eventually they sent an investigator, who accompanied the customer to the shop to purchase vanilla ice cream. And it turned out he was telling the truth: his car simply would not start.

His curiosity ignited, the investigator conducted several tests. He ruled out weather, fuel quality, time of day. Nothing unusual. Until he looked beyond the car itself and went into the shop.

Vanilla was the most popular flavour, so it was kept at the front of the shop. The other flavours were tucked away down the aisles. That meant when the customer bought vanilla, he was in and out in a minute. But if he bought chocolate or strawberry, he took longer.

The shorter stop meant the engine didn’t cool down as much. That led to a vapour lock in the carburettor — a quirk of fuel delivery systems in certain 1970s cars. The problem wasn’t the ice cream flavour. It was that the engine wasn’t designed for short stops: a minimum time needed to elapse between turning it off and back on again.

True or False?

Now — did this actually happen? Well, it’s debatable. Vapour lock was a known problem in cars before the invention of fuel injection, and General Motors themselves have said they’re unsure what led to the discovery of this issue. It could have been due to vanilla ice cream… or something else.

Regardless, I love the story anyway. It’s a neat little parable about what I call vanilla moments — small, ordinary patterns of human behaviour that quietly break our designs. The sort of things nobody anticipates until a real person does something perfectly reasonable and everything goes wrong.

What is a Vanilla Moment?

It’s when real-world interaction with a design unexpectedly reveals a hidden flaw, overlooked truth or unmet need. It’s something that no lab, test or theory could have predicted — it emerges only through use.

The thing is, design often fails not because of big decisions, but because of tiny interactions between people, objects and context. These vanilla moments crop up everywhere… because people’s behaviour cannot be anticipated. As Sherlock Holmes said, it is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. You have to go and look at what people are doing in the real world.

People are tired, distracted, curious, sceptical, impatient, brilliant and fallible. That’s why observation, in my personal opinion, is the gold standard of design. Watching real people in real environments — whether that’s a kitchen, an office, or a street corner — reveals behaviours and pain points that no theory or focus group can predict.

Sell Your Ignorance

I often quote the architect and graphic designer Richard Saul Wurman, who said the following about the designer Charles Eames:

“Sell your expertise and you have a limited repertoire. Sell your ignorance and you have an unlimited repertoire. He (Charles Eames) was selling his ignorance and his desire to learn about a subject. The journey of not knowing to knowing was his work”.

This mindset is exactly what vanilla moments demand from us as designers. We must approach each project not as all-knowing experts, but as curious learners — willing to be surprised, to admit what we don’t know, and to discover meaning in everyday behaviours. Vanilla moments aren’t failures to be embarrassed about — they’re invitations to deepen understanding. They remind us that no matter how much we plan or prototype, real life is the ultimate design laboratory.

How to Discover Vanilla Moments

Vanilla moments live in the cracks between intention and reality. You won’t find them in a laboratory or design office — they emerge when people interact with design in their everyday lives. Tracking them down requires more than guesswork; it demands purposeful observation.

Get out of the studio and into reality: Step into the real world and watch how people complete their tasks and achieve their goals. Spend time in the environments where your design will live. Let understanding and ideas emerge from the actual context of use.

Look, don’t ask: Marketing tycoon David Ogilvy famously said “People don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say”. Self-reporting is inherently unreliable, which is why the best approach is to go and look with your own eyes.

Embrace imperfection and chaos: Look for the imperfect moments — the errors, the unexpected failures, the stuff that frustrates people. These “mistakes” often hold clues to design friction which would be invisible in controlled settings.

Be prepared: To discover things you didn’t and couldn’t expect. The behaviours you observe will be much broader than the scope of what you intended to study. This is often seen as a disadvantage of the “look and see” approach, but it’s actually its greatest strength.

Remember: We Don’t Design in a Vacuum

The real test is in the quotidian interaction between, people, place and object. Embracing these moments means embracing humility: recognising that no matter how much expertise or careful planning we bring, the real world will always surprise us. But those surprises are not setbacks — they are opportunities to learn and adapt.

For designers, makers and creators, the challenge is clear: don’t wait for vanilla moments to break your work. Seek them out early. Watch closely. Listen deeply. And above all, design with real people’s imperfect, brilliant lives at the centre.

About the Author
Kelly Smith is the founder of SPELK, an award-winning British interiors and furniture studio. She holds a PhD in Contextual Design.

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Vanilla moments was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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