Samsung Galaxy Fold is the Homer Simpson car

Foldable computing devices and phones may have a bright future, but the Samsung Galaxy Fold is not it.

When I first saw the Samsung Galaxy Fold, I was immediately reminded of the Homer Simpson Car. I show this clip to all of my human-computer interaction and user-centered design classes, because it’s a great way to show people the perils of letting users design your products.

One of the things that makes the Homer Simpson Car clip so interesting is that Homer has real desires in a car that are perfectly reasonable. As designers our job is to figure out people’s problems and desires and translate those into great products.

Homer wants a large car because he is a family man with three kids and two pets. He’d also like ways to not be distracted by his three kids while he is driving. He wants places to put his drinks.

He often struggles to find his car when he parks in a large parking lot. Homer wants a car that is pretty quick because he wants to feel alive every now and then in his suburban dad life.

All of this is great feedback from a user. Understanding the problems Homer faces and understanding his life is a great way to inform design. By utilizing contextual inquiry and user interviewing, we can find out the problems that people like Homer face and synthesize that data and translate it into actionable requirements to build again.

Where the Homer Simpson Car implodes is that it lets a user actually design the car. Homer is not a designer. He has no idea how to design anything.

So it ends up that he has really bad solutions to his problems. He can’t take sensible requirements and make them into good product design. Almost no user can. Don’t let users design your products for you.

The Galaxy Fold is the kind of device that a random user might think is interesting in the abstract. It’s a phone. It’s a tablet. It folds in half!