The Beach Sandwich Test: Can Your Idea Survive the Journey?
Designing for heat, glare, and stop-and-start reality — no cooler, no safety net
Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.
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Memorial Day flips the calendar to summer and reminds every product leader that Q2 is already half-gone. Roadmaps are red-lined, OKRs rewritten, and somewhere between backlog-grooming and booking this summer’s Airbnbs you’re wondering how a big bet promised in January will stay fresh until December.
Last Saturday, I was the human pack-mule: bike trailer full of kids, picnic gear over one shoulder, SPF 50 wedged under my chin, and my phone chirping its 10% battery warning. Did I pack the portable charger? A gust of wind sends both kids scattering, leaving me corralling toddlers instead of checking supplies. First stop: the Prospect Park Zoo. Then a picnic on Nellie’s lawn. When I finally collapse onto the blanket, I reach into an un-insulated canvas tote and fish out what should, by all laws of thermodynamics, be a disaster: a sandwich that has stewed for five hours in direct sun.
Instead of the mushy horror we've all unwrapped at least once, it's glorious. Five hours of heat and pressure have somehow elevated it. It tastes better than when I assembled it at dawn. No special handling. Just a piece of design wisdom so thoughtful it shrugs off heat, pressure, and neglect.
That cooler-free beach sandwich? That’s your product benchmark. Life is windier, noisier, and patchier than any usability lab. Real users meet your app mid-commute, mid-crisis, or mid-kid-wrangling with a sandy thumb and half their attention.
Where will your customer first meet the feature you’re shipping this quarter?
A Thousand-Year Lesson in Portability
(Let me have fun with this. It’s been a long week.)
Before we dive into the principles, it’s worth asking why a sandwich can be such a reliable teacher. The term “sandwich” begins as a place — Sondwic, an Anglo-Saxon market town literally built on sandbanks. By the 18th century it passes to the Earl of Sandwich, who demands meat between bread so he can gamble without greasy cards. Legend. Fast-forward two more centuries and the sandwich completes its destiny, returning to literal sand as the essential beach companion.
Enter Hailee Catalano, according to Food52, the internet’s undisputed beach-sandwich authority. Her philosophy hit me like a UX audit: design for the destination, not the photos. She packs crusty bread that absorbs oil without collapsing, layers fillings so thin they compress into a single bite, and refuses a cooler because, in her words, she’s “too excited to wait.”
Hailee’s sandwiches are built to serve the beachgoer’s day — not to steal attention or demand just-in-time logistics. That same intentionality is what separates a product that works in conference-room demos from one that works on a subway platform at 6 p.m. Let’s translate her rules into five design tenets for building sun-proof, journey-proof products.
Tenet 1: Serve the Journey, Don’t Hijack It
A beach sandwich supports your plan; it never asks you to reorganize lunch around an elaborate sauce packet. Likewise, a great product amplifies a user’s goal instead of forcing a detour into the product’s agenda.
Exemplar: Apple Wallet boarding passes surface gate, zone, and QR code directly on the lock screen. No hunting for the airline app, no email spelunking. The product respects the “sprinting through C-terminal” reality of travel.
Counter-example: Airline apps that gate your pass behind mandatory surveys or last-minute hotel-up-sell modals. They hijack urgency for internal vanity metrics — akin to a sandwich that makes you assemble toppings at your towel because “presentation.”
Design prompts
What business metric could you hit without inserting another step?
If your feature disappeared mid-flow, would users cheer (fewer hoops) or curse (lost progress)?
Field test: Hand your prototype to a colleague rushing to the next meeting. If you see even a single eyebrow-raise, you’re hijacking.
Tenet 2: Design for Hostile Contexts
Beach sandwiches assume hostile variables: heat, glare, sand, uneven pressure. Products must assume the digital equivalents — poor connectivity, loud environments, cognitive overload.
Exemplar: Google Docs offline mode silently stores edits and reconciles later. It treats a dead spot like a weather event, not a user error. (YouTube automatically adjusting its streaming quality with slow connections is another great example.)
Counter-example: Pretty much every LLM chat product that doesn’t handle drops in connectivity. It goes from feeling like you have a super power by using AI to being a chump and having to retype everything.
Design prompts
List the three most likely failure modes (network drop, dead battery, permissions denial). What actually happens when each strikes?
Does the UI degrade gracefully, or does it toss a modal tantrum?
Field test: Throttle your dev phone to 3G, turn brightness to max, stand outside at noon. If you can’t complete the critical path, the product fails the sand-and-sun test.
Tenet 3: Min-Ask UX
You should be able to eat lunch with one sandy hand. Your customer should achieve value the same way: fast, single-minded, friction-light.
Exemplar: Slack emoji reactions convey tone in a tap — no compose window, no "Send" button, no cargo-cult thread, or Venmo "Recent payments" guesses the friend you probably owe and surfaces the payment tile up front. It removes the social-graph scavenger hunt associated with splitting pizza.
Counter-example: Date pickers that reject simple text inputs ("next Tuesday") or rigidly enforce calendar widgets.
Design prompts
Time a first-time user from launch to “moment of value.” Can they do it in under 15 seconds?
Which data inputs are truly required? Pare one away and retest.
Field test: Ask a teammate holding a coffee to perform the task with the thumb of their non-dominant hand (or with just the mouse). If they need to set the drink down, your flow demands too much dexterity.
Tenet 4: Portability Across Sessions
Beach days are stop-and-start; so are digital workflows. Assume device switches, time gaps, and context shifts.
Exemplar: Chrome’s “Continue browsing” restores tabs on any device without administrative ceremony. Or maintaining unread messages across devices.
Counter-example: Having to repeatedly re-authenticate on different parts of the app or having to sign-in at the end of a task and losing your progress.
Design prompts
If a user returns tomorrow, can they resume mid-bite or must they rebuild context?
Where does your backend store in-progress state and for how long?
Field test: Begin a task on laptop, close the lid, finish on mobile 24 hours later. Any re-authentication or missing data is a leak.
Tenet 5: Room-Temp Durability
The best beach sandwiches gain flavor after hours — the olive oil seeps, the herbs bloom. Stellar products age gracefully, too.
Exemplar: Dropbox version history lets teams recover from mistakes weeks later. Every edit accretes value instead of risk.
Counter-example: Having to repeatability set your preferences (e.g. shirt or pant size on an ecommerce website) with each session.
Design prompts
Which part of your product genuinely improves with each additional use?
Where do you unintentionally rot user data (unmigrated schema, lost drafts, expiring links)?
Field test: Leave an account idle for a month, then log back in on a new device. Does orientation feel like picking up a marinated sandwich or a wilted salad?
Scorecard
The Desktop Delusion
Here's the dangerous assumption: "Our users are at their desks with good wifi." Even enterprise software teams fall into this trap, designing for the happy path of perfect conditions. But enterprise software can have high-frequency use and tiny frictions compound into chronic pain.
I've watched teams build desktop experiences that fall apart the moment someone tries to demo on their phone, or review a doc while commuting. Ironically, your stakeholders — the decision-makers reviewing your progress — are most likely to encounter your product precisely in these unpredictable contexts.
The warning signs you're optimizing for the lab instead of the journey:
Your team demos exclusively on large monitors with perfect connectivity
User research happens in conference rooms, never coffee shops or commuter trains
Your analytics show high abandonment rates on mobile, but you blame "mobile users don't convert"
Features work beautifully until someone switches devices mid-task
If your users live in the real world (Narrator’s voice: they do), pack the sandwich principles.
The Sandwich, the Circle, the Lesson
You might not have recognized the "beach sandwich" by name — it's never listed next to club sandwiches or Reubens — but you’ve definitely experienced its soggy, sand-flecked nemesis at least once.
The best product mentor you'll meet this summer won't be in your Slack messages or at your next offsite. Instead, it's wrapped and slightly dented in your bag — a humble sandwich that's completed a surprising thousand-year journey to reach your picnic blanket.
Last weekend, my sandwich passed the Hailee Catalano test: crusty Italian bread, muenster cheese, roasted turkey, a thin butter barrier (moisture management, naturally), and a brine-y pesto up-cycled with capers and sun-dried tomatoes.
It embodied every principle above: support, resilience, minimal demand, flawless hand-off (from tote to mouth), and flavor that intensified over time. That’s the same bar I’m setting for the features slated in my own Q3 roadmap.
Before you sign off on yours, ask one ruthless question: Will this feature survive heat, glare, and gaps in attention? Or will it melt faster than mayo at noon?
Design for the real journey — no safety nets — and the lab demo will take care of itself.
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