My secret obsession with bathroom taps and how they inform product design
‘The person who designed this bathroom really thought it through’ aren’t words you hear very often, are they?
Conversation about design and user experience today is dominated by gadgetry, but it shouldn’t be. Life happens around us, not on screens, and the potential to admire — and glean things from — everyday life is enormous.
What first made me write that opening sentence is a question in Basecamp, the tool we use to run our company, I’d set as an ‘automatic check-in’: Seen any companies doing anything especially well recently?
Asking yourself (and your team) this every week gets you thinking. You soon run out of low-hanging fruit (‘Apple did this cool thing…’, ‘Google…’) and find yourself looking up for leads.
One week, reaching for straws, on a layover at Calgary airport, I was struck by how well laid out the gents’ bathrooms were, and thought them worthy of comment.
What happens usually when you visit public bathrooms? They have driers on the opposite side of the room from sinks, which means you have to put your bags down on a wet and unclean floor, wash your hands, pick your stuff up (with wet hands), walk over to a dryer where there’s another queue, put your things down again, and walk out feeling grubbier than you went in.
Having the dryer immediately next to the sink, as well as a platform for small bags, made this bathroom notably pleasant to use. Great water pressure, soap that actually worked and a strong Dyson dryer. Well done Calgary airport! ‘We can all take inspiration from this,’ my note concluded.
Since posting it, I’ve developed something of a fascination with bathroom sinks.
How do you take something we use every day and make it new and interesting? Is there any need to make it new and interesting? Should they just be functional? How do upmarket hotels and restaurants attempt to make a richer experience for us than council-run train station loos?
It’s fascinating to see the various answers establishments come up with. My grandfather was a plumber, and I’ve derived a number of lessons from the trade.
If the above was a notable favourite, here’s a bottom-ranker (in design, not abhorrent uncleanliness).
What experience do we have with stacked taps? My only point of reference (and I assume that of most) is hotel showers — dials one on top of the other, one for pressure, the other for temperature. Anyone approaching this sink would surely expect the same. But no, it isn’t. The top one is hot, the bottom cold. It might look obvious from the picture, but not when you’re rushing. Bad design.
The essence of good editing is having the intellectual security to admit you don’t understand something. In product design, it’s having the nerve to admit it took you 40 seconds to turn the taps off!
Product testing (and hypersensitivity to detail) has to be encouraged from the top. Imagine you were a young product assessment intern at the factory that put these sinks together. Would you really want to tell your supervisor, ‘Sir, it took me nearly a minute to turn these things off, I had no idea which way the two dials had to turn’? Of course not. You’d fear being dismissed as incompetent. And it’s the fear of looking silly (not having an environment that encourages it) that leads to bad product design.
Next up, let’s say you’re trying to be flashy — to do something ‘never done before’. Here are some fine faucets to look at…
They’re an interesting antler-like design, but in contrast to the dials above, the spirit of being different in no way detracts from ease of use. Whether or not you like them is a matter of preference, but in function, we should approve.
And what if Apple got into the market?
A closed system — no dials at all — and no choice of hot/cold. Just stick your hands in and go. It’s almost impossible to be confused, you’re locked in to the ‘right’ temperature (no matter how authoritarian that may be).
Last but not least, a lesson from Dyson: always market your work.
Never be afraid to tell customers how well you do something. And choose an opportune moment (when they’ve got a few seconds on their hands) to tell them.
In a bathroom between a local supermarket and library, this sign might get 200 people reading it a day. How many of them are in the market for a new vacuum cleaner?
At Course Concierge, we’re sticklers for detail — and inspired by the small stuff. We pay more attention to a password reset than other firms might pay to your home page.
But we don’t employ many professional quality assurance folk; aside from being cautious to speak up, they know too well what they’re looking at. Instead, we favour real-world feedback. Team members’ mums and dads are our most hotly sought-after aids.
Kicking off a screen-share with someone who’s never seen your website and having them go through it can be enlightening. The first time I ever did this, some years ago, I learned customers enter credit card details either as one long number or with a space between every four digits. You better make sure your checkout accepts both. (Mine at the time didn’t.)
Is there anything they get stuck on? Anything that doesn’t make sense? These small things matter, and we put our sites through the ringer to catch them.
Have your systems conform to the consumer; don’t make your consumer conform to your system — many won’t. That’s what I’ve learned from bathrooms.
It’s worth the effort. Just a bit of friction can be the difference between a customer buying and tapping out.
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If you’ve ever thought about putting together an online course but don’t know where to start, get in touch to see if we can help. And, if you’re a stickler who enjoys sweating the small stuff, send me an email with ‘Recruitment’ in the subject line to be first to hear about openings.
