The back of the cereal box
A short defense of the maze, the spot-the-difference, the wordsearch — and the kind of thing they teach about attention you can't learn anywhere else.
When I was eight, breakfast took half an hour because the back of the cereal box had a maze on it, and I was in charge of the maze. Not the front of the box — the front was for adults to decide which cereal to buy. The back was for me. It was for the people who had already committed.
This is a useful distinction.
Two surfaces, two contracts
The front of the box is doing one job: it is trying to get a stranger, in a hurry, to pick this box and not the other one. It has six seconds, maybe four. So it shouts: a cartoon tiger, a sunburst, a number with a unit that doesn’t mean anything (+30% MORE CRUNCH). It is the world’s smallest landing page, and it follows every rule landing pages follow.
The back of the box is doing a completely different job. The visitor has already committed; they are eating breakfast; they have eight minutes before the bus comes. So the back of the box is a small game. It is asking for attention, not requesting it.
I think most websites are written as if every visitor were a stranger in the cereal aisle. They are not. Most of the people who land on a personal site arrived through a link from a friend, or because they typed the URL on purpose. They are already eating breakfast. They have time. They are looking for something to play with.
The maze design rules
The cereal-box maze had rules. I think about them more than I should.
- It always solved. You never spent five minutes on it only to find out the designer had cheated. The contract was honoured.
- It had exactly one path. Not zero, not three. The puzzle was discovery, not search.
- The reward was inside the maze. A small picture, a joke, a code word. You weren’t doing the maze to complete it; you were doing it to find the thing.
- It fit on the box. No second page. No “continued on the website”. The whole world of the maze was the back of one box.
I think a small interactive project should follow the same rules. It should solve. It should have one path. The reward should be inside it. And it should fit on its own page.
The bus
The bus came at 7:42. I usually finished the maze in the bowl-rinsing window. Sometimes I didn’t, and the box went into recycling unfinished, and that was OK too. The maze didn’t owe me a completion. I had had eight minutes of being somewhere.
That is a lot for a cereal box to do.