This is why for the longest time I’ve been a strong advocate for Unified Experiences in both digital and physical products.īasic products/devices/items, have to be identified fast, easily and with no instructions. And paper towel dispensers are the ones who lack that unified interaction experience, when people encounter such device, they often have to spend a few seconds trying to identify which one is it? the automatic? the pulling? the pushing? the unrolling? Most bathroom devices used by us is fairly unified, the faucets can be manual or automatic, yet they all have the same interaction no matter where you are and in what country, same goes for toilets, water flushing mechanisms, showers, sinks, etc. So here is what I realized by observing and analyzing usage of this everyday product… The reason why people don’t really know how to use (as intended) some of the paper dispensers boils down to a lack of Unified Experience. I cant imagine itd be easy for any dog to rip it apart And Bigfoots facehilarious Purchased item: Sasquatch Bigfoot Dog Toys Might Micro Fiber Soft. But in my case here, seems like the device, especially the one at my gym, is pretty clear, fairly intuitive and provides a clear instruction. However, Don Norman talks about the fact that some of these products are not intuitive enough, or clear enough, or provide no affordances, etc. If any of you ever read the book The Design of Everyday Things - by: Don Norman (which I strongly recommend!) the author brings many different examples of products that seem to be fairly simple and used on a daily basis by millions of people, yet are poorly designed and confuse those millions of people on daily basis. So here I am, trying to figure out is it in our nature as humans to ignore instructions, or maybe not think, or, the design is bad… Now when it comes to digital products which is what I mostly work on, if the user is using the product incorrectly or not as designed, or if the user is confused by the function or how to perform a task, than it means that the product is poorly designed, but in this fairly simple example, I wonder, is the design broken or we are? And yet, I have spent some time observing how this very intuitive dispenser being used… and noticed an identical behavior, people actually going around the paper which is an extra effort to push the lever several times to dispense the desired amount of paper and rip it off…
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