During Van Halen’s peak touring years, the band’s contract required that all the brown M&Ms be removed from the backstage candy bowl. Many assumed it was rooted in rockstar ego and excess—a band making arbitrary demands because they could.
The genius was that it wasn’t about candy. It was about risk management. It was a heuristic to test whether the promoter was paying attention to the band’s requirements for the venue. If a promoter missed that seemingly trivial detail, there was a good chance they had also missed smaller but more important technical and safety requirements elsewhere in the rider.
The unusual contract language wasn’t the issue; it indicated how closely people were paying attention, and how decisions were likely being made.
Throughout my career—as both a consultant and leading in-house UX teams—I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard someone say, “UX is important.”
Experience has taught me that those words, on their own, don’t tell me very much. The more useful signal is what they mean by UX when the conversation gets specific.
That brings me to what I think of as The Brown M&M Test. I’ve realized something similar happens with UX: like Van Halen changed how venues produced better shows, UX changed how teams produce better products.
One of my Brown M&M Tests starts when I hear others state that they believe “UX is important” or “We need UX.” My next inquiry is some form of: “What do you mean by UX?”
The heuristic presents itself when others conflate UX and UI. When I start distinguishing between UX and UI, it’s obvious to me that others often assume I’m arguing semantics or acting from designer ego.
I’m not.
Like the Brown M&M clause, I’m paying attention to a detail because of what it reveals. The reaction to the distinction tells me more than the distinction itself.
In my experience, it’s obvious when UX is conflated with, and reduced to, UI. Like spotting brown M&Ms in the bowl, it indicates a misunderstanding about what UX is. But more importantly, I take it as evidence of an organizational mental model.
That mental model often measures design by what it produces instead of what it changes—optimizing for outputs like mockups and screens rather than outcomes like validated assumptions, reduced risk, and better customer and business results.
When organizations measure UX by mockups, screens, or prototypes, they’re often applying a manufacturing-era model to knowledge work: count the artifacts, track the throughput, measure the handoff.
But UX doesn’t create value simply by producing more design outputs. It creates value when it changes what the organization understands, decides, builds, and improves customers' lives.
The Brown M&Ms were never about candy. The UX/UI distinction isn’t really about terminology. Both are small signals that reveal something much larger about how an organization thinks and makes decisions. Without such heuristics, UX is left hoping that actions and decision-making will eventually catch up to organizational UX aspirations.
The misunderstanding isn’t the point. It’s what the misunderstanding reveals.
I’ve found every organization has its own Brown M&M Test. This just happens to be mine.