Don't put all your eggs...

I'm occasionally surprised by the kind of everyday math facts that people don't know. Most people (though not all) do know that there are 12 in a dozen. Not too many things are bought by the dozen: donuts, bagels (but they give you 13 usually), and of course, eggs.

I have a nice paper carton in my refrigerator with a dozen eggs in it. This drives me crazy, because I also have an egg holder in the refrigerator with exactly one egg in it. Why do I have both? Because the egg holder has exactly a dozen spaces in it. I'll give the designers of the refrigerator a break and presume that they didn't do this with the intent of irritating me, but the other alternative is that they designed the thing without thinking about how it would be used.

This is a common fault in product design, where the emphasis is on features rather than benefits. The first is about the product. The second is about the person using the product. In this case, some guy thought, "Okay, you get eggs by the dozen, so we'll put a dozen spaces in the egg holder." That's a feature. Thinking about it as a benefit you would think, "People use this to store eggs. People buy eggs by the dozen and they probably buy a new dozen before they're completely out of them so I'll put 16 spaces in the egg holder."

Not so hard, but clearly harder than it looks.