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. Van Halen’s shows ran on production values—elaborate staging, massive sound systems, heavy electrical loads—that were more advanced than most touring venues were used to handling, and the rider spelled out exactly what a venue needed to do to support them safely. The brown M&M clause was a heuristic to test whether the promoter had actually implemented those specifications. If they’d missed that seemingly trivial detail, there was a good chance they’d also missed the 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 are only a starting point. The more useful signal is what they mean by UX when the conversation gets specific.
That brings me to what I call the Brown M&M Test. I’ve noticed something similar happens with UX. Van Halen’s brown M&M clause showed whether a venue had truly understood and followed the band’s requirements—not simply agreed to them. UX can reveal the same thing about an organization.
The signal often appears in what an organization means when it says UX is important. The answer becomes especially revealing when UX and UI are treated as the same thing.
The terminology itself is not the test. The conflation is a small signal that UX may be understood primarily as the production of screens, rather than as a way to understand customers, reduce risk, and shape better product decisions.
That is what connects it to the brown M&M clause. The detail is not important on its own. It matters because it reveals whether the larger idea has actually been understood.
The reaction tells me more than the distinction itself.
In my experience, that narrower definition points to a broader organizational mental model—one that recognizes design most readily through the visible artifacts it produces.
That mental model conflates UX with UI for the same reason it measures outputs instead of outcomes: UI is the artifact you can see and count. UX is the outcome that takes more effort to measure—the change in how people’s lives actually improve.
When organizations define UX by screens, they treat design like a production function: count the artifacts, track the throughput, and measure the handoff.
Those outputs matter, but they are only part of the value UX provides. The broader outcomes include tested assumptions, reduced risk, better decisions, stronger products, and improved customer experiences. The more useful question is not only what design produced, but what changed as a result.
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. These heuristics can help teams connect their UX aspirations more directly to everyday actions and decisions.
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.