Blogging about user experience, usability, and design
From the daily archives:
Hat tip to Ghost in the Pixel’s Uday Gajender for putting together this well organized resource page. Nicely done.
And Whitney Quesenbery of WQUsability tweeted this UX toolkit-slash-process map, which I’m dutifully blogging here. Credit where it’s due: the page indicates that the toolkit was created by Bas Leurs, Peter Conradie, Joel Laumans, and Rosalieke Verboom of Rotterdam University.
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Another example of how even tiny bits of bad design have real-world effects. I picked this one deliberately because it seems so small, yet affects the work satisfaction of about a half-dozen people and causes momentary consternation to countless hundreds every day.
Here’s the situation: this is a countertop drink fridge at a restaurant in the Portland Oregon airport. It sits to the (customers’) right of the register, roughly perpendicular to the leading edge of the counter. Customers are supposed to self-service and grab their own drinks while being rung up.
The frame of the door is uniform on all four sides; there is no flange, handle, or pull attached to the outward facing part of the frame. To open the cooler door, the customer is supposed to wrap her fingers around the side of the door frame, fit her fingers into the cut-out section of the door, and pull the door outward. However, this door is hinged to the right, i.e., at the edge CLOSEST to the customer. It opens from the LEFT.
The assistant to the regional manager of this store told me that they added the “Open Here” sticker because people were constantly struggling with the cooler, knocking over the drinks inside, and in some cases almost pulling the cooler off the counter.
Why?
With no distinguishing features (read: affordance) on the face of the door to indicate how it opens, what invariably happens is that the customer attempts to wrap their fingers around the edge of the frame on the right side and open the door from the hinged side. The cooler is light, and because most people are used to using a bit of force when opening a cooler with a magnetic latch, the cooler gets tugged around the top of the counter as people struggle to open it.
The staff became so tired of dealing with this, they decided to add an after-the-fact design modification. Hence the sticker.
Does it work? The person I talked to offered a qualified “most of the time.”
Again, a tiny example. But how many times do we see this type of thing in our daily lives? More often than we remember, I would venture to guess.
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