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I was in the shower, looking at a shampoo bottle, when I wondered who came up with the pump. Not the shampoo. The pump: you press it, it springs back, and the right amount comes out every time.
It works so reliably that nobody thinks about it. That got me reading about the stories behind a few objects like it. Each one fixed a small, constant annoyance so well that the annoyance disappeared from memory. I think that is also the best test of good design, including the websites I build.
In short
- The best everyday inventions remove a small annoyance people put up with many times a day.
- They only look obvious afterwards. Several took decades, or a fight, to catch on.
- When they work, nobody notices. When they break, everybody does.
- A good website passes the same test: people get what they came for and never think about the site.
The shampoo pump made liquid soap an everyday thing
Liquid soap is old. William Sheppard patented a version in 1865. For more than a hundred years after that, though, most homes still used bars: soft, slippery and messy next to the sink.
What changed it was packaging. In 1980, Robert R. Taylor's Minnetonka Corporation in Minnesota started selling Softsoap in a plastic bottle with a plastic pump. It sold fast. Because the pump itself could not be patented, Taylor reportedly bought up the supply of pumps from the only two American makers, so rivals could not copy the bottle for a while. Colgate-Palmolive bought the brand in 1987.
The soap was not the invention people paid for. The pump was: one hand, wet or not, and the same amount every time.
Windshield wipers made driving in the rain normal
Early drivers in rain or snow had two options: lean out of the window, or stop and wipe the glass by hand. In 1903, Mary Anderson patented a "window cleaning device" (US patent 743,801): a rubber blade on an arm that the driver swung across the glass with a lever from inside.
Carmakers were not interested at first, and her patent ran out before wipers became standard. Decades later, Robert Kearns patented a wiper that pauses between sweeps (US patent 3,351,836, 1967), the setting most of us use in light rain. He spent years in court with carmakers over it.
Today a wiper is a stalk you flick without looking. That is the whole point.
The zipper took about thirty years to look obvious
Whitcomb Judson showed his "clasp locker" at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. It was clever and unreliable, and hardly anyone wanted it. Gideon Sundback, an engineer at Judson's company, spent the 1910s redesigning it into the interlocking teeth and slider we know, and built the machine to make it in quantity.
Even then it was mostly used on boots and tobacco pouches. B.F. Goodrich put it on rubber galoshes in the early 1920s and named it the "zipper". Only later did it move onto clothes.
Now it is hard to picture a jacket without one. Nobody stops to admire a zipper; people only notice one when it sticks.
The shopping cart had to convince people first
In 1937, Sylvan Goldman, who owned the Humpty Dumpty supermarkets in Oklahoma City, noticed shoppers stopped buying once their hand baskets got heavy. He put two baskets on a folding frame with wheels.
At first, shoppers did not want it. Men said they could carry their own groceries and women said they had pushed enough prams. The story goes that Goldman hired people to push carts around the store until it looked normal. Within a few years, carts were everywhere.
So even a good fix can need a nudge. Once people try it, they never want to go back.
What these four have in common
| Invention | The annoyance it removed | Who and when |
|---|---|---|
| Soap pump bottle | Slippery bars and messy dishes by the sink | Minnetonka's Softsoap, 1980 |
| Windshield wiper | Leaning out to clear rain or snow | Mary Anderson, 1903; pause setting by Robert Kearns, 1967 |
| Zipper | Rows of hooks and buttons | Judson, 1893; made practical by Sundback in the 1910s |
| Shopping cart | Heavy hand baskets cutting a shop short | Sylvan Goldman, 1937 |
Dates from the patents and company histories; sources differ by a year or two on some of them.
Put side by side, the pattern is clear:
- They fix something small that happens often. Not a once-a-year problem; a several-times-a-day one.
- They look obvious only afterwards. Before they existed, people simply put up with the problem.
- They take one action, with no thinking. Press, flick, pull, push.
- Success is silence. Nobody praises a zipper that works. Everybody notices one that jams.
The same test works for websites
Most of my work is websites and online ordering for small businesses, and I have started judging it the same way. The best compliment a site can get is no comment at all: the customer found the menu, ordered and moved on with their evening.
When I built online ordering for Akbar, an Indian restaurant in Yokohama, the annoyance was the phone. Customers waited for someone to pick up, orders were sometimes misheard, and someone in the shop had to stay by the phone. On the site, the first thing you see is one question: delivery or takeout. Then the menu with photos, a time slot and payment. Nobody writes in to praise that flow, and that is how I know it works.
If you look at your own site, these four questions catch most of the problems:
- What do most visitors come to do? Book, order, call, find the address. Is that the first thing they see?
- How many taps does it take? Count them on your own phone. Every extra step is a heavy basket.
- Does anything make people stop and think? Unclear buttons, forms that ask too much, a menu that is a PDF.
- What happens when it breaks? If a payment fails or the shop is closed, does the site say so clearly?
Small fixes outlast clever ones
None of these four inventions is flashy. Nobody queues overnight for a new door hinge. But they quietly save time, every day, for millions of people, long after the clever gadgets of their time were forgotten.
That is what I aim for in my own work: something that removes a small, daily annoyance so well that people forget it was ever there. Then one day, standing in the shower, someone looks at it and wonders who thought of it.
If you want to see what that looked like for a real restaurant, the Akbar case study walks through the whole ordering flow.