Debunking the Ketchup Bottle Once and for All 🍅

Okay. I don’t need to open this post with the ketchup bottle meme. It’s a picture that everyone’s seen—and that I’ve written about before—where the glass bottle is labeled “UI” (beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, nice materials), and a plastic squeeze bottle is labeled “UX” (ketchup comes out easier, you can squeeze it! we love plastic!)

It seems obvious by now that this meme does not describe the work of creating the interface meaningfully, yet I still see it posted earnestly across Twitter and LinkedIn. To some extent, I get it. Engaging in a conversation about the terms we use to describe our work as designers (UI and UX) and litigating how, when, and why to use them can be productive. I once called myself a UI/UX designer (I’ll admit it) and I have feedback for that version of myself.

But I can’t help thinking it’s time to retire this particular line of inquiry, debunk the meme itself, and refocus that energy somewhere else.

Okay, fine, let’s consider the primary text.

Just to be clear, I mostly think this meme is flawed as a descriptive tool because the idea of “interface” already captures the idea of interaction.

But more than that, the prevalence of this meme (and its many variations) feels less about explaining what we do, and more about explaining what we don’t do; drawing lines between parts of the discipline in a way that—as I’ve said before—is full of implicit assumptions and value judgments. Is the interface the aesthetic and cognitive encounter with the object? Does it stop there? What is left to be assigned to the “experience?” The squeezing? That’s an interaction. Maybe the satisfaction of ketchup coming out of the bottle quickly? The deeper subjectivity of what we do unfolds quickly before us under the slightest scrutiny of this and other memes (like “is design art?”).

To me, the memes describe an unneeded compartmentalization of what is inherently a holistic, broadly encompassing process of creating an object used by others. The concept of the “interface” already captures an exchange between object and subject that comprises the “experience” we are trying to delineate. And, by the way, does the plastic bottle not have a UI? Or...? Can we honestly say that experience is designed through a process discrete from the rest of the interface? I don’t think we can.

To the extent that we can deliberately influence how someone experiences an object (an idea that should be urgently and carefully considered), it is done as part of a continuous, systematic phenomenon that synthesizes inputs from across material culture, creating, changing, or reproducing mental models, resulting in artifacts that then go on to become their own inputs as the system keeps running. The aesthetic experience of an object at the end of this cycle, being sensory and cognitive in nature, cannot be separated from the object’s creation. The idea of the visual “UI” is inseparable from the experience of encounter that is here called “UX.”

Arguments to the contrary, including a meme I saw where a “UX/UI designer” is compared to an “astronaut/fisherman,” don’t hold up to scrutiny. There’s no reason we can’t consider these (and other) facets of design as parts of a whole, systematic phenomenon.

The meme and its implications of compartmentalizing our discipline, I think, ultimately emerge from uncertainty around where design falls in broader systems of culture. I’m reminded of a paper by Sean Keller that describes the post-war ethos of British architecture and how it was shaped by the discipline’s declining reputation throughout the war. He says that the need for reconstruction meant that, for decades, post-war architecture in Britain was dominated by public projects (private building having been banned in 1940), with “45% of architects practicing in Britain [working] in public departments.” This centralization, he says, led “to a focus in the 1960s on the general relationship of structures to user needs,” and it was this development that would lead architects to “deploy computers in a ‘scientific’ approach to design methodology.” A sort of crisis of confidence leading to earnest and prolific exploration of how the discipline could be made more objective, taken more seriously, and segmented off from art and decoration. The parallels to design being productized and made into a calculable, repeatable process within corporations (where the first graphical interfaces emerged) are worth noting.

Ultimately, I can’t take the ketchup bottles seriously because they simultaneously conflate and compartmentalize ideas about the process of design, and reach for a set of objective definitions for something that is inherently subjective. The ketchup meme exists at a level of abstraction that is neither broad enough nor specific enough to meaningfully describe anything.