On Design Constraints 1:

Designing an organizer for yourself can be a fun an rewarding experience. However, in doing so, you may be unaware of your internal priority biases. What do I mean by that? Well, when designing for yourself, you may inherently create a design that favors your basic concerns and ignores those things you simply don’t care about. However, when creating a design intended to be sold to others, I do have to be aware of these biases and, subsequently, pick my battles.

Through my time designing organizers, I’ve come to recognize a few of these. For example, I personally don’t mind lid-lift (the amount a lid is lifted compared to the base of the box due to what is stored inside). Personally, I’d prefer 1/2 inch of lid lift over adding a second box, which might eliminate that lid-lift, but adds a couple of total inches to the space taken up on my shelves when the game is stored.

So, I have to take into account several priorities when designing an organizer. These include, but are not limited to:

• Internal Storage effieciency

• Shelf Storage efficiency

• Material Efficiency

• Lid Lift

• Ease of use

Attaining simultaneous maximization of a couple of these can be tricky, if not, difficult. However, attaining simultaneous maximization of ALL of these is down-right impossible. So, you have to pick your battles. What’s more important? Which of these is nice to have, but not a deal breaker? These priorities vary drastically from person to person. I’ve had plenty of people express dislike of some of my organizers because of the lid lift, despite the fact they make game setup a breeze and reduce total shelf storage space to an absolute minimum. Contrary, I’ve had other customers seem to not care at all about lid lift and are absolutely pleased at how the organizer reduces the time needed for setup and stowage.

In the end, I have to balance all of these in order to create a successful organizer.

The tricky part is that these different priorities can often be mutually exclusive. Take a look at the follow diagram:

In reality, balancing just a few of these priorities looks like this. You can easily find a solution that favors just one of these priorities while ignoring the other two. You can also find a solution that combines two of these priorities while ignoring the third. However, finding a solution that maximizes all three is significantly harder. In the diagram above, it’s easy to visualize how I might come up with a solution that may utilize materials efficiently and eliminate lid-lift, but may be hard to use. Similarly, I could come up with a solution that is easy to use and utilizes materials efficiently, but there is drastic lid-lift.

In the following diagram, imagine each red dot as the location where a marble has been dropped onto a printout of the diagram. Each “hit” is is a possible solution for an organizer.

With infinite marbles, you could fill the diagram which would result in having discovered ALL possible solutions. It’s a nice thought, but it shouldn’t go without saying that this is both an impractical approach as well as probably impossible.

It’s much more realistic to realize that you have roughly 300x more possible solutions that favor any two of these priorities than you have of the number of solutions that favor all three. Again, Pick your battles.

For me, I choose those priorities that will directly translate into positive user experiences amongst the majority of people I see purchasing organizers. Most people care about the cost of my products, so I have to prioritize material usage efficiency. This helps reduce material costs as well as reduce the amount of time I spend actually cutting or swapping sheets on my laser cutter. Less time equals less labor. Less labor equals lower cost contribution to the end product. Internal Storage efficiency and Shelf storage efficiency are very closely related, but they are still separate metrics. I like to minimize the amount of shelf space a game requires because I feel it helps people make the decision later on of, “can I buy this new game? I suppose I can because I have space to store it.” Internal storage efficiency is also closely related to ease of use.

What is “ease of use?” Simply put, it’s a measure of how easy an organizer is to use, remove components from, store components in, and sort through when setting up or playing a game. This has been a huge priority for myself and my more vocal customers. I believe that if a game is difficult to set up, or sort through when playing, it’s probably not going to get to the gaming table as frequently as a game that is a breeze to setup and play. There have been plenty of times where I’ve sat down to play a solo game and I look some over and think, “I’d love to play that game; it’s fun and engaging, but it takes FOREVER to setup” and typically for those games, by the time I’m finished setting it up, I’m done for the night for solo sessions. Over time, the games I just don’t play usually get sold or traded in, regardless of how much I MIGHT have enjoyed it had I taken all that time to bother setting it up. I wish some games weren’t so heavy in that regard.

However, by prioritizing ease of use, I’ve found that a well designed organizer can drastically reduce these setup times and get people into the game faster. Faster setup means the game is often played more frequently, and when one is spending upwards of several hundred dollars on a single game, a games value is often weighed against how often it’s played, not necessarily by how fun it is when it is eventually played.

So I like to try and help you guys get your favorite games to the table easier.

The last priority I’ve listed is Lid-lift. As I stated above, I’ve had customers all over this particular spectrum. While I personally don’t mind a little bit of lid lift, I do appreciate the fact that many people do. It can completely break the aesthetic they’ve created n their gaming space, it can break the pattern of boxes as they appear on the selves and it can draw attention to a single game in an otherwise homogenous gallery of “artwork.” However, I disagree that it should be a deal-breaker when deciding upon an organizer. Of all the metrics I’ve listed, this is the only one that is of a personal opinion with no explicit, and unique external real-world impact. That is, it’s the only metric that doesn’t really effect how the game itself is enjoyed and used. However, it can negatively effect the efficiency of other metrics, such as shelf efficiency and ease of use. For that reason, I tend to deprioritize lid-lift. It’s a nice goal, if it happens to “be in the cards,” but, if after attempt after attempt at reorganizing my possible design solutions, I just can’t seem to get rid of lid-lift, I don’t worry about it. I’ll give it the ol’ “college try,” but at a certain point, I do cut my losses and focus on the other priorities which can result in longer lasting, more universal, and more life-improving effects.