Finding the Beans: What Lincolnshire Taught Me About UX

I’ve just returned from a visit home to Lincolnshire. You’ve probably never been—it’s not exactly on anyone’s bucket list. I grew up there. No one goes in, and no one really leaves. Imagine Texas (which I suspect you’re more familiar with, even if you haven’t been there) - long roads, big skies, RAF jets screaming overhead, and not a whole lot else going on.

To give you a flavour:

• Robert Webb (of Mitchell and Webb) grew up in a village five minutes from mine. He once described the relentless noise of RAF jets overhead. He wasn’t wrong—I forget how deafening it is until I’m back.

• Margaret Thatcher was from Grantham, just down the road. This isn't a post about politics, so enough said.

• Henry VIII, the one with the wives, called Lincolnshire “the most brute and beastly shire.” From a man who beheaded people on a whim, that’s saying something.

  
  

But what does any of this have to do with UX, service design, or customer experience?

The Beans Question

While I was home, I showed my dad a job ad I’m applying for—Senior Service Designer at Tesco. (Tesco, if you’re reading: I’d be pretty good.) N.B., I'm still not sure he understands what I do for a living. Anyway...

He read it, chuckled, and asked,“So… do you help people find the beans? They’re always in a weird bit of the shop.”

And my answer was, honestly Yes. In a way that's the job.

So much of UX and service design is exactly that: helping people find the metaphorical beans.

Digital systems, apps, websites, store layouts—they’re often built based on how a business thinks, not how people think. They make sense internally, but leave customers wandering around going, "Where the hell are the beans?"

Bridging the Gap

Our job is to bridge that gap. To walk the full journey. To map the logic of the business to the logic of real people.

Because if your users can’t find the beans—literal or metaphorical—what are we even doing?

What Lincolnshire Reminds Me

Every time I go home, I forget a few basic truths—then get hit with them all over again. Here’s what Lincolnshire reminds me about people, design, and being human in a world obsessed with digital optimisation:

1. It's not just my Dad...Most People Have No Clue What UX Is

And they shouldn’t need to. My neighbours in the village don’t know what service design is—and that’s fine. I don’t know how to raise livestock or harvest wheat and barley. We each have our thing.

If your work can’t be explained in plain English to someone in a village shop queue, maybe the problem isn’t them—it’s you.

2. Everyone Needs Groceries

Whether you're old, young, tech-savvy or tech-averse, you need food. You might:

• Shop in-store

• Order online

• Ask your neighbour to grab something for you

  
  

The why doesn’t matter. Your job is to make that experience seamless, regardless of the channel.

3. People Just Want to Get the Beans

They don’t care about your backend logic, your internal taxonomy, or your systems integration roadmap. They want:

• A can of beans

• At a reasonable price

• Named sensibly

• In a place that makes sense

  
  

That’s UX. That’s CX. That’s service design.

If I want to buy beans, give me the beans.I haven’t got all day.

So What?

Whether you’re designing a checkout flow, mapping an end-to-end service journey, or restructuring a store layout:

👉 Always come back to the basics.

👉 Be the person who helps others find the beans.

👉 And never forget how weird it all sounds when you try to explain it in a Lincolnshire pub.

If you’re a good designer, you’re not just helping users. You’re walking alongside them—whether they’re online, offline, or trying to figure out where Tesco moved the bloody beans.

Basically - Give them the beans.