Bad design can make you go without a shower for 2 days
I have been reading Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things on my morning and evening commutes for a few days now. And reading it I realized quite suddenly that I have been a victim of bad tap (faucet) design recently.
I moved to an apartment here a few days before my wife and son, thinking I'd set it up as much as I could. Arrived late morning on a sunny, sweaty Saturday, having checked out of the hotel without a shower.
Back at the apartment, the shower tap was the regular one you see in hotel bathrooms. Turn left and you get hot water, turn right and you get cold. Point it dead center, and you've turned it off. Tried, tested. I turned a little to the left, and nothing. Turned all the way left, still nothing.
Maybe its disuse all these months (we were renters in 3 months) was causing start-up trouble. I turned the tap all the way to the right. No response.
I decided to come back in about a half hour and try again. Half an hour later, the tap and I played out the same scene again. Boy, I was sweating and here was a tap that just refused to talk. I was pretty frustrated with myself at not having checked this nuance during the walkthrough before moving in.
There was no other way the tap would go, I concluded after some more examination - only left and right. Maybe the property managers hadn't started the water supply to our apartment yet. And the earliest now I could get to them was Monday. Crap!
The rest of the weekend, I slipped into 'bachelor living' mode - no shower, no problem.
On Monday morning when the maintenance guy showed, I must confess I was pretty miserable. I explained to him my story of the waterless shower, making sure I didn't leave out any detail. "Did you pull it?" he asked.
"Pull?"
"Yeah, pull and turn. There you go!" Water was now coming out in torrents from the previously barren tap.
"Oh, well...I...just..."
"That's awright. You have a good one, bud."
Don Norman now tells me it wasn't me, after all. The affordance, the system image of the tap, and the natural mapping were all screwed up. Take that.
I moved to an apartment here a few days before my wife and son, thinking I'd set it up as much as I could. Arrived late morning on a sunny, sweaty Saturday, having checked out of the hotel without a shower.
Back at the apartment, the shower tap was the regular one you see in hotel bathrooms. Turn left and you get hot water, turn right and you get cold. Point it dead center, and you've turned it off. Tried, tested. I turned a little to the left, and nothing. Turned all the way left, still nothing.
Maybe its disuse all these months (we were renters in 3 months) was causing start-up trouble. I turned the tap all the way to the right. No response.
I decided to come back in about a half hour and try again. Half an hour later, the tap and I played out the same scene again. Boy, I was sweating and here was a tap that just refused to talk. I was pretty frustrated with myself at not having checked this nuance during the walkthrough before moving in.
There was no other way the tap would go, I concluded after some more examination - only left and right. Maybe the property managers hadn't started the water supply to our apartment yet. And the earliest now I could get to them was Monday. Crap!
The rest of the weekend, I slipped into 'bachelor living' mode - no shower, no problem.
On Monday morning when the maintenance guy showed, I must confess I was pretty miserable. I explained to him my story of the waterless shower, making sure I didn't leave out any detail. "Did you pull it?" he asked.
"Pull?"
"Yeah, pull and turn. There you go!" Water was now coming out in torrents from the previously barren tap.
"Oh, well...I...just..."
"That's awright. You have a good one, bud."
Don Norman now tells me it wasn't me, after all. The affordance, the system image of the tap, and the natural mapping were all screwed up. Take that.
posted by "Window, please" at 9:49 PM
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