Tell HN: un-design of everyday thing
On a recent business trip, I was booked at the W Hotel in SF. Nice decor, but they overdid it to the point that "usability" suffers. Now I used to travel every week, so I know business hotels. Just like in s/w or web design, when a designer tries too hard to be cute or fancy, he/she ended up irritating. Here are some examples from that trip.
I could not find the light switches for the desk area for the first hour, because they were all located in an out-of-the-way side. And the switches are small.
For a hotel that recommends the guest to be green by recycling, their water lever in the bath / shower did such a poor job that when you set it to shower, half the water actually went down to the bath, instead of to the shower head. Wasted water.
The water faucets at the wash basin: one turn clockwise and the other turn counter-clockwise to open the water. Go figure.
I can mention a couple more, but the point here is not to rant - I like Starwood hotel chain. The point is to hear your experiences of "un-design" similar to mine.
And Merry Christmas, by the way!
16 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 48.0 ms ] threadhttp://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...
It's a really great book, and something I would consider a must-read for serious UI designers/developers. While the book was written in the 80s, and talks about things like ring slide projectors, VisiCalc, the original Macs, the ideas about what constitutes good and bad design are salient to this day.
What's really annoying, though is when the faucets (or light switches) in a place are not consistent.
@ojbyrne: It does not matter how they work from an engineer’s point of view: Design needs to be user-centered.
I regard »righty tighty lefty loosy« as an established standard for opening revolving things. But due to the mnemonic existing in the first place, that probably needs some testing as well.
I meant consistent with each other, if there are multiple faucets. The house I'm renting has two bathrooms with a total of three sinks. I think each sink had a different faucet pattern, until I changed them.
For some reason hotels like to experiment with new ways to control water. Each time I use a different shower it sees to have some new variation on how to control as many functions with as few knobs as possible, and I don't understand why.
Was there some key design failure in having two obvious knobs to independently control the flow of hot and cold water? Now I feel like I'm taking an IQ test whenever I want to get clean.
The flimsy doorknob and the cheap receipt:
http://dustincurtis.com/two_stories.html
I highly recommend that you read it. Basically it is an article about how presentation can make a positive or negative effect. And Dustin Curtis does a phenomenal job with the presentation of his own website. It is a real joy to read and always makes me aspire to the shear elegance of his typographic layout.
To those who think that faucets are supposed to be like double-doors, I understand, but usability is not always about idealism or philosophy. Sometimes it's about consistency. If most faucets operate one way, wrongly or rightly, then doing it differently forces the users to do it wrong the first time (or first few times) he/she uses the product.
The book that comes to mind is "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug. He did not advocate perpetuating "wrong" convention, but the point is still valid: don't waste the user's time by designing something to behave differently than "expected".
This is also why Scandinavian design seems to be held in such high regard - it's very simple and works like you expect it to.
This wikipedia should be compulsory reading for industrial designers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function
However, the designers found a way to trick me, making my attempts at signaling useless. When I push the lever over, the point at which there is significant torque pushed back also turns on a faster-than normal click of the turn signals. However, the signals do not turn on until I push past this; there is a further point where the turn signals actually turn on.
My instinct is to push the lever until there is audible and felt feedback, but this doesn't work, since that point does not turn the signals on. Very frustrating.