Software developers are increasingly becoming aware of just how much influence they can have on the usability of their apps by considering exactly how their software is going to be used. That’s a wonderful thing, and if I have a single goal for my career than it’s probably to spread that message.
However, the need for good usability doesn’t end with software – our physical devices, containers, mechanisms and objects in the real world must also be usable, and it’s our responsibility to point out failures in this regard, and demand improvement.
I was recently on vacation and when I returned (and awoke the next morning), I encountered several examples of both good and bad design and usability within the space of ten minutes or so, whilst I was unpacking my suitcase and making some coffee, and Lauren was starting some home-made soup. I’d like to share those examples with you, via the medium of my own awful photography.
Plugs
First up, plugs – as in electrical plugs which let you connect your devices to the mains power supply. Here in the UK, we have somewhat bulky plugs which have a 3-pin construction, due to the separate earthing pin (it’s the topmost one, with the vertical blade). Here’s a picture of such a plug:
These plugs have several safety features. Notice the insulating coating around most of the live and neutral (horizontal) pins, and also notice how the earth pin is longer than the others: this is because most electrical sockets have spring-loaded barriers covering the live and neutral slots, which only fold up out of the way when the tip of the earth pin is sufficiently inserted into its slot.
Furthermore, the cable is at right-angles to the direction of insertion of the plug, so you cannot yank on the cable to disengage the plug, which could result in detached sheathing, frayed wires and possible shock. You can also replace the fuse without disassembling the plug at all, eliminating the possibility of wiring it back up incorrectly. These features save many lives every year.
The plug is, however, bulky, and when it’s inserted into a socket it requires a solid grip and moderate force to remove. This introduces the possibility for the plug’s design to go very wrong, as it did in this case. The plug shown above is for Lauren’s handheld electric food-mixer. This is how the plug looks when viewed from above:
Imagine this plug is snugly inserted into a wall socket. Since it’s attached to a food mixer, further imagine that you’re whisking some batter or some other culinary task, and your hands are thus likely to be damp, and perhaps the atmosphere might be humid because something is cooking on the hob. Your grip is at an all-time low, so you require the plug’s design to help you. You would be entirely out of luck; it is almost impossible to grip this plug and pull it free from the socket.
The sides are completely smooth, and even rounded at the rear edges. There are no indentations down the side of the plug, and nothing to grip. The cable is no help, and you should never attempt to remove a plug via the cable anyway. You’re going to have to use considerable force, and perhaps even a cloth or some other such artificial grip-hold to just take this plug out. This is, at the very least, poor design.
The reality is in fact even worse. Because there’s no convenient grip, we’re tempted to try to slip our nails and then fingertips between the plug and the socket itself, to pull the entire plug away from the wall – i.e. to slip our fingers around the connecting face of the plug, perilously close to metal pins which are making an electrical connection to the mains. Poor design can literally cost lives.
Let’s now consider another plug. Still a UK plug, and indeed from the very same kitchen just a few metres away. Here it is viewed from above:
Notice the crucial difference: this plug has grooves built into its sides, and wide ones too. These grooves afford gripping and pulling the plug smoothly and easily away from a wall socket, without undue grasping force. The grooves are even broad enough to accommodate entire fingertips, rather than forcing you to use your nails and risk a painful injury. Gripping this plug is simplicity itself:
This plug was well-designed for its purpose, and is considerably easier to use than its counterpart mentioned earlier. The dangerous improvisation caused by the first plug will never occur, because this plug makes it easier to just use it safely. The person using this plug will not be electrocuted, and will be free to live their life, to make love and make music and make social security payments. These seemingly minor points of design truly matter.
Sunscreen
Whether you call it sunscreen, sun lotion, tanning lotion or something else, it’s important to protect your skin. I tend to use a high factor lotion when I’m abroad, and the cheapest way to buy anything is in larger quantities. Accordingly, I picked up this 400ml bottle before we went on holiday.
Being as how it’s 400ml, it’s quite hefty when it’s full – you wouldn’t want it to fall off a shelf and hit you on the head. The lotion itself seemed to work just fine, but the bottle is poorly designed. Let’s consider how you actually use sunscreen.
Personally, I tend to apply sunscreen when I’m wearing exactly one item of clothing: a pair of swimming shorts. I then squeeze some sunscreen from the bottle onto either of my hands, rub it onto an area of my body, and repeat the process until I’m suitably protected. It’s not a complex business (though, as a fairly hairy man, it can be annoyingly time-consuming – and I hate the feel of the stuff too).
This means that, the vast majority of the time, when you pick up the bottle of sunscreen your hands are already covered in sunscreen. In other words, your hands are slippery. This is a 400ml bottle, so it’s heavy, and its natural tendency is to slide right through my fingers and go crashing onto my conveniently unprotected big toe, putting a serious damper on my enjoyment of my vacation.
It thus comes as a serious surprise that this sunscreen bottle has no grips whatsoever. Take a look:
This is very bad design. It’s actually doubly bad, because if you look carefully you’ll see that the bottle is actually tapered towards the top. This looks pretty on the shelf at the pharmacy, but it also makes an already smooth, slippery, difficult-to-hold container bottom-heavy.
Just the slightest indentation on the sides would have helped here (even nature itself is more clever than the manufacturers of this product, as you’ll recognise if you’ve ever seen an infant sitting comfortably on its mother’s hips).
This sunscreen bottle is almost perfectly badly designed for its purpose. We deserve better.
Coffee grinder
But all is not lost; there’s some good design out there too, and as is so often the case, the goodness is related to caffeine.
My little Krups grinder exhibits multiple examples of the designers really thinking about how the device would be used, and how to make the user’s life easier (to say nothing of the fact that the well-designed plug I mentioned earlier is actually also from this machine).
Here’s a picture of the modest device in question:
An unassuming exterior, to be sure – quite minimalist. There’s only a single button on the entire thing (that bit sticking up from the top at the right side). Inside, there are some sharp, curved blades which grind coffee beans into, well, ground coffee. That’s all well and good, but what’s clever about it? It becomes clearer when we remove the lid:
The lid is all one piece (the button is fully integrated), and the rest of the machine is likewise all one piece; there are only two pieces. That’s convenient, but it’s also integral to the cleverness of the design. You remove the lid, pour coffee beans into the cavity, replace the lid, and then hold down the button for as long as you wish to engage the grinding blades. That is, you just press down the button like this:
The first thing we immediately notice is that, since the button is part of the lid (and the button mechanism is designed such that you can’t activate the grinder without the button being present), you cannot switch the grinder on if the lid is off. You just can’t. Hopefully I don’t need to spell out why this is an extremely beneficial set of affairs (particularly if you enjoy yourself and your children having all five fingers on each hand).
But there’s more. The button requires to be kept depressed in order to keep the blades spinning (for this quantity of coffee, you’ll usually only want to run the blades for around 10 seconds, so it’s not overly taxing). Due to the design, if you are depressing the button, you are also pushing down on the lid.
We’ve all been taught by comedy movies and TV shows what can happen if you use a motor-driven kitchen device without actually holding the lid down (and indeed without remembering to put the lid on, but that’s impossible here). An eruption of milkshake ingredients, and a messy kitchen. With this machine, however, you not only must have the lid in place but you must actually be holding the lid in place during its entire operation. This is not just good design, it’s wonderful.
This idea of making the device physically force you to use it properly is called a forcing function in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, and since it also prevents the user or mechanism from being damaged or injured, it’s also an example of an interlock. Another example would be the way that your microwave oven switches itself off instantly if you open the door.
(As a footnote, I could further mention that the sloping design of the rim around the grinder’s cavity makes it much easier to pour the resulting ground coffee into a container for storage too.)
Machines should protect us from undesirable situations and unintended operations, and they should most certainly protect us from actual physical injury. My tiny little coffee grinder does this every day. If yours doesn’t, perhaps you ought to demand a better one.
Users deserve usable devices
Usability is critical to the design of any product, be it a complex physical machine, a piece of software, or some simple mechanism or tool like a doorknob or a spoon. Poor attention to user-centred design will create a negative emotional response in your customers, and they’ll quickly become someone else’s customers.
And if, perish the thought, you actually injure them (either directly or via not incorporating reasonable safety interlocks and suitable forcing functions), then the consequences may be considerably more severe than a lost future sale.
When you’re designing something, no matter what it is, be your user. Use the thing itself, notice the inefficiencies and problems and dangers, and leave time and budget to properly address them. Usability is the core of your product, not the window-dressing. Your users deserve it.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Benjamin Dobson and Rung András. Rung András said: RT @mattgemmell: Good/bad design and usability in some everyday objects in my home: http://tinyurl.com/ycadf7m [...]
Part of the usability problem of UK electrical plugs results from the high current permitted in the mains. Plugs have to contain fuses because the mains current is so high. In wet areas, the spec requires lower current, hence the different plugs for shavers. Users should not have to replace fuses in plugs. U.S. plugs have their own problems. Looks like nobody has got it quite right.
This folding plug design did the rounds a few weeks ago. If this were available I wouldn’t hesitate to buy one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6DvjKkGT6s
To play Devils Suntan Advocate, the bottle is tapered to the top when it’s on a
shelf (which improves stability on the display stand). When in use, it’s generally
inverted (at least when I use mine), so the tapering actually
prevents the bottle from slipping.
Have you been reading ‘the Design of Everyday Things’ by any chance? :)
The very best example that always sticks in my mind about interface design (embarrassingly, it’s from a hugely influential book whose name I forget…) showed a door in a school or hospital with a handle and a ‘push’ sign. The point was that many people would try to pull the door, rather than push, and then read the sign and feel stupid as they pushed the door open.
The visual cue, however, is pull rather than push, and it’s poor design consideration on the part of the builder; it may say ‘push’, but the interface prompt is pull.
(Worse, this poor design on the part of the creator actually makes the users feel stupid, even though it’s not their ‘fault’.)
(Also, Christ but my command of English is sodding awful this afternoon. Apologies.)
You missed one crucial design issue with the plug. When they are on the floor, they will almost always sit with the pins facing upwards. You also omitted how excruciatingly painful it is to then step on those pins…
I moved to the USA from the UK last year and do not miss the UK plugs one bit. Despite being bulky, they also like denting things (like the underneath of my MacBook Pro 15″) and worst of all, left on the floor they will stick up ready to be stood upon where the talon pins of death will reach into the arch and leave a pain that won’t go for hours.
[)amien
Nothing beats the Swiss plug:
http://img.hisupplier.com/var/userImages/2009-02/12/chinapowercords$212422772(s).jpg
Hey Matt, if you hae the time look up the Miyako Bullet blender. It’s full of wonderful little attentions to design that mirror many of the ones in your coffee grinder. The blade base screws onto the top of the cups with the content to be blended, and then the entire container is placed upside down on top of the blending engine. This means that not only are the blades always safely hidden away when in motion, but you can’t even put them into motion without having attached them to the cup and placed them both on the device. Lots of other nifty things like handle and lid design make it our favorite kitchen appliance during our three years in Bangladesh. It’s sad we couldn’t bring it back with us, maybe we’ll find another one. Cheers!
I love that coffee grinder. We’ve had the same one for a good 6 years or more, and never had a problem with it.
Matt, I presume you’ve read The Design of Everyday Things since it’s so closely related to your blog post, but just in case you haven’t: http://xrl.us/bfqn4p. It was one of the required readings when I studied usability in university. Highly recommended.
And Australiasian plugs are wonderful (used in Australia & New Zealand): http://www.washington.edu/computing/global/plug_i.jpg.
A little bigger than USA plugs, but far smaller than the UK plugs. (They’re around the same size as most European plugs.) Every cable has the extended grip that you see in that image, so it’s dead-easy to pull it out of the wall. The current-carrying pins are non-vertical so that they don’t slip out of the socket, unlike the USA plugs, which often do if they’re non-polarised (which is also pretty dangerous). You can omit the ground pin if you like, in which case they’re as compact as USA plugs.
Nice post. I used to have the exact same coffee grinder when I lived in the U.S. :-)
That’s the book I was thinking off, André, from which I took my example. Hence why I was so mortified that I couldn’t remember it. So, Matt, just read the damned book already and stop embarrassing yourself.
Have you seen those suntan lotion spray bottles? Like this http://tinyurl.com/yh5dqj7 They look brilliant. Can probably get a nice even application from those as well as of course being easy to use due to the power grip you’d be using to spray. It’s quite annoying how just because they have a spray attachment they are sold at a much higher price though. I’ve certainly never bought one! Oh yes and it’s also helpful if you can spray them at all angles, including holding the bottle upside down.
I’ve used the other bottles with the smaller spray attachments where you just use a finger to press down http://tinyurl.com/yfjqk9u, But i’ve had the same problems as you – slippery hands mean the force you need to press your finger down makes the bottle start to slip from your grasp. The ridged sides help somewhat but not enough in my experience (especially as I prefer the oily lotions as they make you feel less ‘sticky’)
Hi Matt,
I lived in England in 1979-80, and had a near electrocution thanks to this part of the plug design:
“Furthermore, the cable is at right-angles to the direction of insertion of the plug, so you cannot yank on the cable to disengage the plug, which could result in detached sheathing, frayed wires and possible shock.”
I actually read this as though you were citing it as a negative design aspect, but I think you were citing it as a positive? My brother and I (both 10 at the time) were horsing around by the TV, which we managed to knock over on its stand onto the floor. Righting it, it became apparent that it wasn’t turning back on. (!!!) But that wasn’t the close call with death (my dad would have been so pleased…) – it was seeing that the plug looked slightly messed up by the wall, so I reached back to push on it.
Well, thanks to the right-angle wire and concept of not being able to pull it out of the socket, the weight of the TV falling had actually ripped the cord around the plug itself, so when I reached to push on it I hit the now exposed/frayed wire and had a very nice jolt as my arm got ‘stuck’ to the wire for a few seconds while tensing up. I managed to fall backwards away from it and escaped with just a nasty shock, but I have to say it didn’t endear the plug design to me. To be fair, I have a lot of fun memories of living there as well. ;)
I understand the idea of not pulling on a cord to remove the plug from the wall, but on a loose plug like the US design (which I don’t actually particularly like…), at least it just falls out. The fact that it falls out half of the time for no particular reason, that I can live without. A generally safer design would be better here as well (easy to touch the live prongs, though I’ve never had it actually happen), but preferably not one that actually makes the cord rip apart on the plug when you pull it too hard.
But otherwise I totally agree – amazing seeing how bad some designs are and how good others are. Just had a pleasant experience with my coffee grinder a couple days back – I forgot to insert the container that collects the grounds, and the grinder wouldn’t engage at all. First I thought it was broken, then I thought what a mess if it had. ‘Thanks’ to whoever decided to add the $0.50 switch.
One thing’s for sure, the charge for the iPhone 3GS – the one that’s just a plug with a USB port is too flat.
You can definitely tell it was ‘Designed by Apple in California’ – albeit probably by an ex-pat Englishman (Jonathan Ive) – it’s just too damn hard to pull out the wall sometimes.
What is wrong with you people that you have time to even THINK about the design of plugs ?
You MUST endeavour to find a better way to use your time on this planet !!
On my previous car, it would buzz at me when I left the headlights on when I turned off the ignition.
My new car just turns off the headlights. Simple. Good UX.
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