Get Your Product Used in Anger!litsl.com/design/whiteboard_article_2003.pdfReprint of ACM Interactions Magazine Whiteboard Article - May /June 2003 1 Get Your Product Used in Anger!

Reprint of ACM Interactions Magazine Whiteboard Article - May /June 2003

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Get Your Product Used in Anger!(before pretending you understand its requirements)

Carl Myhill

Some months ago, Carl wrote to an email list about a bike light and a newrequirement that he had discovered after using the light “in anger.”

“Anger!” I thought. “What a perfect topic for The Whiteboard! Use aproduct, get mad about its design, and take advantage of your anger to deriveimportant but hidden requirements.”

It was only on receiving Carl’s first draft that I discovered he wasn’t talkingabout anger at all — that to use something “in anger” means to use it for real.

But in fact, Carl does get angry about bad design.

And I think that’s a good thing.

— Elizabeth Buie

You cannot understand requirements precisely until a product is ‘used in anger’.Surprising? I don’t think so. But let’s explore the evidence, look at what can be doneabout it, and think about the future of badly designed products. Is there a kind ofnatural selection that favours good design?

My obsession with design, especially the design of things I’ve used in anger, coupledwith my day job as a UI designer, conspire to make me very boring company at times.When I ‘go off on one’ about my latest product-inflicted misfortune, generally peoplethink I’ve gone mad. They’re usually right — I’m hopping mad about missedrequirements. Cooling off, I sometimes wonder what designers could have done toidentify the requirements that came to light when I used their product in anger. Threeprevalent approaches often help in getting product requirements and design right,during the design process:

1. User interviews, with the user population before design commences.

2. Usability testing as opportunity allows. Most human factors folks giveweight to the importance of this – and I am always surprised by what I findwhen I get the chance to do it.

3. Design patterns which assert an understanding of the requirements for aclass of products with an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution.

I wish I could count on a principle of Normanian Natural Selection. (Don Norman,author of The Design of Everyday Things, is renowned for his focus on design andbears partial responsibility for getting me started on all this.) I want to believe thatmarket forces will trigger a kind of evolutionary natural selection favouring gooddesigns and successful adaptions, and denying the long-term survival of bad designs.

OK, on with the evidence! Let’s look at some products.


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Bicycle Light

First under the spotlight is a white LED bicycle light by CatEye.

The light has a high specification: Threebright LEDs; easy fitting and removal fromthe bike; and a 100 hour battery life.Although the product cost was high ($30) Idecided to buy the light, particularly sinceI’ve had a great CatEye rear light for years.

When I used this light in anger in my dailycommute, a critical requirement becameapparent. Can you guess what it might be?

Think about it: When you park your bicycleat night, you remove the lights so that theyare not stolen. Now encumbered by twolights, you shove them into a pocket or arucksack. The designers clearly did not

consider the inside of a rucksack as the normal environment for their product, thoughit is essentially a ‘daily use’ scenario. Have you guessed it yet?

The light, used in anger, needs a switch firm enough that it does not easily getswitched on while it is being jostled around in a rucksack – 100 hour battery life isunimpressive if your light is switched on all day!

Could this requirement have been identified earlier?

• User interviews? Given enough cyclists, some would probably have had theswitch problem before. But would talented interviewers have been hired toextensively interview cyclists for a $30 bike light? Unlikely.

• Usability testing? Would physical prototypes have been available for the realworld usability testing that could uncover this problem early enough to changethe product design? Unlikely.

• Design patterns? A design pattern for bike lights could solve a problem likethis, if designers were aware of it and could be forced to follow it.

Will we see Normanian Natural Selection?

A cyclist with experience of this problem will avoid a similarly designed light, so onesurvival gene of the weak switch design is triggered off.

Keen cyclists are vocal and likely to contact CatEye about their light’s failings.Magazine product reviews may also bring problems to their attention. CatEye’sreputation may motivate them to act on customer feedback — who knows, theirdesigners may even get to hear about it. So, there could be a connection from theusers back to the designer — another trigger.

To have a positive effect, evolution requires only the slight favouring of an adaption.With some sales potentially affected by this problem, Normanian natural selectioncould work — and perhaps bike lights will evolve into having stiffer switches.Against this though is the fact that many millions of bike lights are sold to casualcyclists who are just motivated to buy the cheapest light and would probably nevernotice the problem with the switch.


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Lavatories

Can you guess the missed requirements in these products that were discovered inthrough use in anger?

Paper Holder

Cubicle Door lock

You don’t really notice the paper holder when you walk in because it is deep grey andhard to see through. But at what point might you notice there is no paper present?

What about the door lock? Well, sometimes when you lock the door you might like totry the handle to see if the door has locked properly – with designs like this, as soonas you try the handle the door unlocks itself. You have no way to confirm that thedoor is locked from the inside.


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Earlier requirements identification?

• User interviews? Possible, but do door lock designers ever talk to a user?Come to think of it, they are users too; do these things not strike them?

• Usability testing? These problems could be discovered by testing but wouldanybody ever do such testing?

• Design patterns? These could be effective but who is going to enforce them?

Normanian Natural Selection?

The is an almost total disconnect between the designer of such products and the users(and cleaners) because lavatories are so anonymous. It would take quite a crank towrite to a door lock manufacturer, and the destiny of the letter would be predictable.

So, I fail to see any triggers for Normanian natural selection to evolve aspects oflavatory design — this is borne out by the prevalence of such bad designs today.

Footpaths

As early as 1912,planners have knownthat it is better to waituntil paths are used inanger beforefinalising theirdesign. Often, whenputting up newbuildings, plannerswill leave out thefootpaths and watchwhere people actuallywalk and then buildthe footpaths there —on the ‘Desire Lines’.

Earlier requirements identification??

• User interviews? Better to hold interviews in the buildings without paths andwatch where the tracks form!

• Usability testing? Footpaths make their own usability test report in the grassto show where the designer went wrong. Sadly, I guess many desire linesdon’t actually become proper footpaths due to poor timing.

• Design patterns? Desire lines for footpath design are the ultimate pattern fora design approach, flawlessly acknowledging human behaviour. The pattern isperhaps successful because it’s well known. When placing scratch protectionpads on his new motorcycle’s tank, a friend of mine used “the same principleused to place paths at Warwick University” — he waited to see where hisjacket’s zipper scratched the tank and then put the pads over the scratches!


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The connection between the user and the designer of a footpath is from use in angerbut it is communicated as an etched desire line. If the designer waits for these etchingsto form before finalising the footpath, the finished path will be in the right place. Ifnot, the desire lines could become a living statement of inadequacy and promote ‘keepoff the grass’ signs.

So, does Normanian natural selection favour footpath design? I would hope so,because of the pure genius of the approach of waiting for their use in anger beforefinalising the design. But I wonder what proportion of footpath design uses this wellknown pattern for the design approach? A small proportion would be my guess — Icertainly see a lot of dirt tracks etched into grass taking unpredicted shortcuts.

Hobs (US Eng: Cooktops)

Why is it almost impossible to buy a hob with controls that afford switching on theright element without ambiguity? Sampling 400 hobs revealed three configurationsfor sale in the UK:

86% have inappropriatemapping of controls toelements

4% have the poor mappingbut use a visual crutch to linkelement to control

Only 10% have a goodmapping of controls toelements (but these includeceramic hobs riddled withother usability problems).

An overwhelming 86% have an inappropriate mapping — and one of the bestdesigned hobs for human use is ironically called ‘The Alien’!


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Earlier requirements identification??

• User interviews? Users are not designers and would probably not highlightthis problem if asked.

• Usability testing? A 1997 Home Office report cited cookers as the secondcommonest source of household fires. Bad hob design is never cited as apossible cause but with usage error rates of 11-19% found in usability testingthis should be taken seriously.

• Design patterns? Could vastly improve hob design but the designers mustfollow them instead of indulging their needs for funky expression.


We have known about this problem for almost 45 years, and yet 86% of hobs on saletoday suffer poor mapping of controls to elements. Usability testing has failed toimprove hob design and Normanian natural selection isn’t working. We know cookerscause household fires and hobs probably contribute to the problem but designers,playing in the sandpit of aesthetic self expression, remain ignorant of the problem.

Microwaves

This brings me to Microwaves and the one I bought for my Grandmother.

I researched this well — youjust turn one timer dial tooperate this.

What design flaw became apparent when this was used in anger?

This is a cracker — I had missed the context. This Microwave lives in a housefrequented by grandchildren whose toys teach them the fun of turning dials. Amicrowave switched on when empty does not last long.

Earlier requirements identification?

• User interviews? Users are not designers — I doubt this requirement wouldhave surfaced.

• Usability testing? No lab test would identify this kind of requirement.

• Design patterns? Could evolve, perhaps when a microwave designer buys amicrowave for their Grandmother!


I think Microwave evolution has stopped too — I can’t see any useful evolutionarytriggers. The drive to make them look funky seems far stronger than useful product


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design evolution. Or should I say, any further evolution... A friend pointed out to methat Microwaves HAVE evolved. The first generation were a mass of buttons andmost are now far simpler to use. I wonder what triggered this evolutionary step. Myguess is sales — I reckon a designer tried a simpler design and it sold like hot cakes.

So, do many requirements remain hidden until the product is used inanger?

Yes.

How can we discover requirements earlier?

Interviewing has some potential to ferret out hidden requirements. Engaging decentinterviewers and getting them a good sample size to work with could be an effectiveway to uncover certain hidden requirements.

Usability testing invariably seems too late. Often production cycles are such that realworld testing cannot be done early enough to feed into the design. Perhaps the bestchance for usability testing is to identify hidden requirements between productversions – there needs to be a connection from user to designer if this is to happen.

Design patterns have endless possibilities for ruling out bad design, so long as theyare followed. Japanese firms such as Toyota force engineers to go through “lessonslearned” books, so perhaps this is a way forward.

Will Normanian Natural Selection Come to Our Aid?

I want to believe that companies that make a good job of design — such as Palm,Apple, Smile Banking, Google, and Amazon — will become supremely successful,allowing market forces to show other companies that they MUST take designseriously. Their success would be a key evolutionary trigger for good design. Designpatterns seem a natural part of this evolution because if you want to beat Amazonyou’d better learn from what they do and what patterns work for them.

For some products, evolution seems to have stopped — hobs and lavatories seemdestined to never improve en masse.

For all products, often something is wrong somewhere; some disconnect existsbetween the actual field use of the product and what the designers did. I wonder if aclassic usability issue worsens the situation — we often don’t notice well designedproducts because they do not stand in our way so they fail to gain evolutionary pluspoints. Bad design stands in our way; and we make noises about it — but perhapsnobody is listening, or perhaps we are just blaming ourselves.

What depresses me most about the evolution of design is where poor design adaptionssurvive, even in the harshest commercial conditions where losing money is a directconsequence of bad design. ATM design is the stark example: To a bank, the mostvaluable asset in the transaction is the bank card; to the user, the goal is money. So,when do you give the user the exciting cash — before returning their boring card orafter they have put it back in their wallet? It amazes me that some US banks fail tofollow the normal interaction design pattern. How many of their cards get lost? Howmuch does this cost them?

Does nobody think this is about design?


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Carl Myhill is the Principal Designer for GE Network Solutions. He hasbeen designing corporate systems (such as geographic informationsystems) for over 10 years, and he wishes he designed products like thosehe rants about in this article! His unique ability to always be the one topush the door marked pull and fall foul of every possible usability problemis perhaps his greatest talent — though it would be nice to switch it offsometimes.

Carl’s opinions are his own and do not represent those of GE NetworkSolutions.

Contact

GE Network SolutionsElizabeth House1 High StreetChestertonCambridge CB4 1WREngland

[email protected]

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Get Your Product Used in Anger!litsl.com/design/whiteboard_article_2003.pdfReprint of ACM Interactions Magazine Whiteboard Article - May /June 2003 1 Get Your Product Used in Anger!