Comments on: Usability in everyday items

By: barry

barry — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 21:39:49 +0000

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.

By: Kelvin Owers

Kelvin Owers — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:35:56 +0000

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?!

By: Ben Denison

Ben Denison — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:16:20 +0000

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.

By: Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:19:26 +0000

Ah no, not seen that Matt. Looks pretty interesting though, cheers.

By: Matt Tarbit

Matt Tarbit — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:14:46 +0000

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

By: David Oliver

David Oliver — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:59:10 +0000

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/