Have you ever walked into a supermarket, pharmacy, or department store looking to buy a specific item, only to find the layout confusing? Perhaps you ended up aimlessly strolling around, purchasing other items? This is deliberate, and known as the Gruen Transfer.

The 'Transfer' part is the moment that you, as a consumer surrounded by a deliberately confusing layout, lose track of your original intentions.

We've all experienced it, and now it's starting to consume the internet. It first appeared on Facebook, with the introduction of the feed. Originally intended as a way to simplify updates from your friends, and hold your attention captive for longer. However somewhere along the line, the feed became more than that. Facebook now feels more confusing than my local department store, and my original reason for visiting (keeping up to date with friends & family) is quickly forgotten. The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my feed was updates from friends. The rest was a combination of ads, memes, and influencer marketing videos, leaving me doom scrolling endlessly.

This isn't relegated to Facebook though, or even social media. So many websites are now designed to disorient you upon visiting, so that you start acting impulsively. This can even happen in a relatively benign way - who hasn't looked up something on Wikipedia and fell down a rabbit hole that ended looking at a list of animals awarded human credentials?

It pops up in other areas as well, closely associated with several UX dark patterns. If you've tried to permanently delete your account from any major social network, you’ll know what I mean. It is utterly confusing to find and navigate to the page you need, and the site will desperately conjole you into doing something other than deleting your account. It's the same for trying to alter your insurance policy, cancel subscriptions, spend frequent flyer miles, and so on...

I wonder where all this will end? There must be a point at which the friction generated by needless complexity has a detrimental effect. A kind of Laffer Curve of web design.

In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. So if it takes 10 seconds to fill in a form online to get subscribed, they need to offer the same ease of use for canceling.

I like this idea of ‘complexity’ as a measure for legislation. Now if only they could apply the same thing to my local Boots when I'm trying to buy toothpaste.

Phones have displaced paper money and credit cards as the preferred way to pay for a bill at the end of a meal. The trouble is, how does the waiter know when you're ready to pay?

The meal was delicious. The service, excellent. The waiter asks if you want dessert, but you decline... and feeling somewhat guilty you hurriedly justify this rebuke by explaining how you over-ordered one too many sides, are ready to burst, and couldn't possibly have room for sticky toffee pudding, but honestly, the food was delicious. The waiter brings over the bill, in a black rectangular wallet, and walks away.

We're now faced with a dilemma. How does the waiter know when we're ready to pay? For generations, the accepted signal was a banknote, and then a credit card, poking out of that said rectangular black wallet. In the age of Apple Pay, this vital signal has been lost. I've tried laying my phone over the receipt, but it just doesn't work.

This mutually agreed upon non-verbal signal is for the waiter's benefit as much as our own. People can be funny about restaurant bills - everyone has their own way of doing it, and it can be awkward to walk up to a table when Dave is still arguing with Sally & Val over whether that bottle of Pinot Noir should be split equally when Dave only drank a pint of Guiness.

So how do we solve the problem? I propose the most low-tech solution possible (please save us from another app or QR code). The bill should arrive with a card, red on one side, green on the other. The bill arrives with red facing upwards. When you want to signal that you're ready to pay, you turn it over. A solution so simple it almost guarantees that it won't be implemented. So for now I will resort to rather limply trying to catch a passing waiter's eye.