Convenience or quality?

People will trade convenience for quality, almost every time when given the choice.

As a designer and person who is interested in habit change, I’ve noticed this about society and how we live our lives daily.

Think of your own life. Do you cook, or order in more? Do you wear the cheap shoes that are easy to slip on, or the leather boots that take forever to lace more often? Do you watch movies on your laptop, or on the larger TV every night?

I see more people today using their bluetooth speakers than their £4000 audiophile speaker set up. It’s so much easier to hit ‘shuffle play’ on your phone, than to physically need to input a CD, or even more cumbersome, vinyl into the player.

But why do we do it? To find the answer, we need to ask another question; what purpose do these products in our lives serve? More often than not, these products are designed to make our lives easier, which in turn reduces our stress.

In the case of ordering food, it satisfies our hunger quickly. It may not be the healthiest option, but it’s fast and convenient, much more so than cooking our own meal.

That’s why more and more things these days are becoming wireless, more compact, more lightweight, thinner, and faster. We want to eliminate any slight inconvenience in our lives, so we don't waste time doing tasks we don’t need to do. Deep down, we all want our lives to be more convenient, even if we don’t think so.

It makes sense as to why we choose the more convenient option. But this convenience phenomenon also makes me question; to what end will this keep going? When do we stop optimising for convenience? Are we all going to end up like the humans in the movie Wall-E, sitting down all day, looking at our screens and ignoring the people around us?

Well that’s a problem for another time, there's honestly nothing to worry about because that future is extremely far away. Anyway, you’re probably reading this in the form of a printed book, sitting outside in the sun with your family, enjoying the little things in life, right?