Ravings of a Textual Deviant

Dorothea is quite the evangelist for usability in All Things Tech, particularly e-text. It’s a dirty job, and I don’t envy her. It was on her recommendation that I started reading Donald Norman. As a result, I have got a real hate on for the more everyday bad designs one runs across…especially in plumbing.

I’ve complained about automated plumbing before. My new place of employment has managed to combine bad design with automated plumbing in the redesign of the nearest set of restrooms. The automated toilets are what I’ve come to expect, although the manual flush button is easily identifiable, and the flush timers seem to work much better than those in the Indiana Government Center.

The faucets are another story.

I suppose I ought to congratulate the perpetrators on the universality of their design. These things confuse everyone. The building that I work in includes an international conference center, and I’ve seen visitors from several different countries trying to figure these things out. Picture if you will a spout emerging from a chrome disk about the size of a small plate, which is set directly into the mirrored wall behind the sinks. On the four o’clock position of the chrome plate is a small cylindrical handle. At the nine o-clock position are two sensors, a graphic of a hand and the following:

On
—-
Off

Now, a question: How would you turn on the faucet?

Most people ignore the text and graphic entirely and attempt to turn the cylindrical handle, to no effect. The next step involves pressing the sensors. Sometimes this works; more often, it doesn’t.

What to do?

It turns out that the correct answer is to wave your hand in front of both sensors to turn on the water. A second wave turns the water off. I’m fairly certain that turning the cylindrical knob adjusts the flow of water. I have yet to discover a way to control the water temperature; I doubt that there is one. It took us all a few tries to figure this out, and I suspect that there were a couple of very unhygenic days at first.

A few days after the restrooms were officially open for business, small printed signs appeared stuck to the mirror above the spouts. “To Turn Water On, Pass Hand. To Turn Water Off, Pass Hand Again.”

I shudder to think what the urinals are like.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2004 at 1:52 pm and is filed under This Modern World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.