Where a drop-off is not a colour problem

A stall on a ticket screen is often a missing fact, not a missing shade. Notes from a ferry booking reading in Batumi.

Teams point at the continue button when a ticket buyer leaves. Colour is a convenient villain: it can be changed in an afternoon, it does not require admitting that a fact is missing from the screen, and it gives the room something to vote on.

In a Batumi ferry reading last spring, buyers reached the passenger list and stopped. The continue button was already large. Interviews did not mention colour. They mentioned the return sailing. The outbound date was on the first screen; the return was expected to appear later and never did. People hunted. Then they left to telephone an uncle who “knows the boats.”

The usage map put that hunt in the middle of the sheet. Once the missing date was visible, the colour argument had nowhere to sit. This is ordinary. A drop-off is a place where the product stopped answering the job the person brought. Naming the job is slower than naming a shade, which is why the shade wins the meeting.

When we read a stall we ask three things of the records and the conversations:

What did the person come to finish?
Which fact did the screen withhold at the moment they left?
What did they do next — another room, a telephone, a walk to a counter?

If the answers are “buy a return ticket,” “the return date,” and “telephone,” the drawing is a hunt, not a palette. The report should say so in the product’s own words, even if that makes the afternoon’s redesign look smaller than the invitation suggested.