Yesterday when being dragged around shops by out shopping with my girlfriend Suzanna, we were walking down a shampoo/haircare isle when I asked ‘Is it shampoo or conditioner where the lid is on the bottom of the bottle, as opposed to the top?’
Suze answered my question with ‘Conditioner has the lid on the bottom, shampoo on the top, but I don’t know why’.
I knew why…
The shampoo lid
Imagine the scenario, you’re a girl with long hair and you’re washing it in the shower. Your hair is in your eyes, and covered in shampoo. Opening your eyes would lead to some serious stinging! You reach down and below you, by your feet, you have two identical bottles—except they’re not identical… One has its lid on the top and the the other has its lid on the bottom. As long as you’ve learnt which one’s which, as my girlfriend clearly has, you know without having to open your eyes which bottle you have hold of. This is a really ingenious piece of usability, yet so so simple.
The vacuum cleaner
Another great bit of usability I saw was in Suzanna’s vacuum cleaner. It has a retractable cable which rests inside the body of the cleaner when it’s being stored. When pulling the cable out to plug it in, when you are roughly a metre away from reaching its furthest limit of extension, you see a yellow marker on it. This indicates that something must be about to happen, and then when you pull that extra metre out, there is a red marker to signify that this is a far as the cable will extend. This means that there’s no chance of accidentally pulling the cable out too far and damaging it if under the impression that there’s more wire in there. Simple, but so helpful.
The lesson?
A lot of the time, the best way to make something usable is to imagine yourself using it—what would you want out of it? Because nine times out-of ten someone else would appreciate that feature too.
By Harry Roberts on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 in Usability. | 6 Comments »
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David Oliver said on 28 February, 2010 at 6:59 pm
Ha, nice. :) Funny how we end up drawing parallels between our web work and stuff in the “real” world. There’s certainly a lot to be learned by doing so.
I wrote about our electric toothbrush degrading gracefully at http://blog.doliver.co.uk/2010/01/electric-toothbrush-graceful-degradation/
Matt Tarbit said on 1 March, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Have you seen The Design of Everyday Things? It’s about this kind of stuff. Not perfect, but worth a look:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Everyday-Things-Don-Norman/dp/0465067107
Harry Roberts said on 1 March, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Ah no, not seen that Matt. Looks pretty interesting though, cheers.
Ben Denison said on 5 March, 2010 at 2:16 pm
I await double ended bottles from Wash and Go.
I still think it would be easier if they just removed all the gubbins, and had SHAMPOO vertical down the whole bottle!
Interesting thought though. Thanks.
Kelvin Owers said on 5 March, 2010 at 2:35 pm
And at the other extreme… …using the same brand for dishwasher tablets and also clothes washing tablets: that’s just to confuse men, yes? And why so many ways of delivering some detergent… powder, tablets, capsules, balls, gell, liquid, concentrated liquid… and liquitabs, what the hell is a lliquitab?!
barry said on 13 April, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Don Norman’s book is great. ‘Affordance’ is a word he uses a lot, and not one given enough consideration when designing.
However, on the shampoo / conditioner… I would say this… Conditioner is always much thicker. I’d say they designed it to sit like that originally so that you weren’t waiting 5 minutes for it to come out, and because people were always balancing the bottles upside down… and only later realised the handiness in differentiating them.
But that’s just a guess.