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Toilet Usability - 6 Reasons Why the New NYC Public Toilets are Doomed

Published
by
Anders
on January 11, 2008
in New York City and Usability
. 5 Comments

Deputy Mayor of New York City Dan Doctoroff (who will almost certainly never use this toilet himself) today announced, with great fanfare, new public toilets to be installed in locations throughout the city. The idea of public restrooms is all good and well, and frankly it’s pretty embarrassing that this is being announced in 2008 and not, say, 1908. But no matter, when reading the description of the new toilets, there are just so many IMO terrible design choices that were made that I have to wonder if any kind of prototyping/usability testing was completed. I just can’t imagine these toilets being a success and these are some reasons why:

1 - They look like prison toilets

The new public pay toilet in Madison Square Park (Photo: Mary Altaffer/Associated Press)

There is a very strong association between a stainless steel toilet attached to the wall with no seat and what you might find in a prison cell. In fact, when I first saw a picture of the toilet, I thought that it was a picture of exactly that. The idea of a prison toilet has a pretty negative association, as in “citizens of New York are so uncivilized and prone to destruction of property that we have to take the same approach to designing a toilet for them as we would for prison inmates.” Sad indeed.

2 - I would never sit on a public steel toilet without a seat (even if it supposedly had been cleaned)

The reason for this is not only about logic, but also that I would just find it weird. And wouldn’t the toilet also get very hot in the summertime and very cold in the wintertime? Why couldn’t they at least have a plastic top on the toilet that can’t be lifted?

3 - The door to the toilet remains open for 20 to 30 seconds after entering

Like the NYT article says, this will

possibly be the longest and most awkward 20 to 30 seconds of a person’s day. The door slips open like an elevator, but then it stays open, to accommodate those who need extra time getting in. Meanwhile, men and women in suits walk past. It is very difficult to look inconspicuous in a bathroom on a sidewalk in New York with the door open. There is just nothing to do but stand there. And the delay will not please those who are in distress.

So here I am, really needing to go. With most every other toilet I’ve ever encountered, I can close the door behind me as soon as I enter. But here I am supposed to just stand there looking stupid with people walking by? The fact that certain disabled individuals may need more time is all good and well, but they should be able to keep the door open rather than creating awkwardness and discomfort for everyone else. Truly moronic IMO.

4 - The door to the toilet opens automatically after 15 minutes

Interestingly, this second ‘feature’ is in complete contradiction to the door remaining open on entry. What if I am a disabled person who needs more time? I would be publicly humiliated. And, frankly, even if I technically would be able to finish my business in that amount of time, I just don’t like the idea of this time limit hanging over me. And this isn’t just about disabled people, what about older people who need more time? Or parents with their kids? Very very bad, IMO.

5 - The toilets are only open from 8am to 8pm

If these toilets supposedly are completely automated, why in the world can they not be available 24/7? After all, the time when I think a lot of people would want to use something like this is when everything else is closed.

6 - The toilet will use 14 gallons of water per use

This is according the NYT City Room Blog. Keeping in mind that the EPA’s recommendation of water use for a single flush is around 1.5 gallons, this is absolutely egregious. To be clear, the 14 gallons are used to hose down the toilet between each person who has used it. This kind of water waste is IMO just not environmentally ethical, and reason enough for me to avoid it.

Why do people who have my email address message me via FaceBook?

Published
by
Anders
on January 7, 2008
in Email and FaceBook
. 3 Comments

Call me a FaceBook curmudgeon, but I’ve never really been too crazy about it. It seems to be just another thing on the web to occupy your time. The only good thing, I’ve found, with FaceBook is that it has allowed me to connect with some *very* old friends, who discovered my page there (tho I think just googling my name may have been easier…) Someone I was talking to the other day also (to whom I was doing some venting) reminded me that FaceBook can be great for creating virtual communities, which certainly is the case. One reason FaceBook is great for that is because many of the people you’d want to have join your community already are signed up, so they don’t have to register for yet another web app. But that will only remain true as long as FaceBook is remains the in-vogue app.

But getting to my main point, I think my biggest pet peeve with FaceBook is when people who have my email address message me via FaceBook. Why oh why do you do this? It just seems like all it does is create an additional obstacle in the communication process, since I get the message that you messaged me in my email inbox anyway. Maybe I’m just not a sufficiently enlightened FaceBook user to understand why this roundabout way of communicating is a good thing. Is it just a way of saying “Hey, I use FaceBook, I’m cool” or is there some actual functional or feature benefit to doing this?

Buzzword: why Google Docs should be Flash-based

Published
by
Anders
on November 26, 2007
in Flash, Google and User Interface
. 0 Comments

After having just spent a few minutes playing around with Buzzword, a new WYSIWYG web-based document editor, it’s hard to return to Google Docs. I mean, it just feels so clunky compared to this elegantly designed editor. Sure, Google docs is a lot more than a WYSIWYG editor. But looking strictly at the editor features, Buzzword completely blows Google Docs out of the water. And it’s still only in preview. One reason for this is because the people at Virtual Ubiquity made what I think was a very smart decision and designed the app in Flash, which just makes it so much easier to add advanced functionality beyond the glorified Rich Text Area interface the Google Docs really is. Oh, by the way, I’m talking strictly about Docs here - the far more complex Google Spreadsheet remains a work of art.

GPhone - Phone 2.0

Published
by
Anders
on November 5, 2007
in Apple and Google
. 0 Comments

There is something ironic in how, while Apple’s trademark tagline is “think different,” the ones who really are thinking different when it comes to phones (and a lot of other stuff - don’t they have a search engine?) is Google. Yes, yes, Apple’s iPhone is an absolutely brilliant work of function meeting form, and had it not been for the fact that Google’s (non-) phone has been on the horizon ever since the iPhone was released, I would probably have picked one up. But the fact of the matter is that, design brilliance notwithstanding, the iPhone is still just a better mouse trap. (Ok, a cooler, hipper, insanely great mouse trap.) Worse, just like all the other phones out there, it’s a locked down, proprietary, dont-even-think-about-installing-whatever-you-want mouse trap. And that is where Google, or Andy Rubin, who is heading up the GPhone effort, is rethinking the fundamental phone paradigm, as Andy Rubin explains in an article on the Gphone in the New York Times:

We are not building a GPhone; we are enabling 1,000 people to build a GPhone.

In some ways, all Rubin is doing is carrying over a fundamental idea behind Web 2.0 into the mobile domain: openness, specifically open-sourcing, as fuel for innovation. While Nokia and Blackberry and Motorola (and now Apple) are butting heads, reinventing one another’s wheels (how’s that for some seriously mixed metaphors), Google is taking the same approach to phones as they have taken to the web, which, last time I checked, seemed to have worked out pretty well. In other words, they are making all their mobile software freely available to several major manufacturers by way of the Open Handset Alliance, which currently has 30 some major phone manufacturers as members.

For me, what is most attractive about this model is that, if I so wish, I’ll be able to install software such as Skype, on the phone. In other words, I’ll be able to install free-calling software where it belongs, on a phone, not on my laptop (which was never designed to be a phone.) The reason Google has no problem with this is because their income model is not about charging me for my calls, it’s about ad revenue, which I have no problem with. Of course, someone who will likely have a definite problem with that is AT&T and Verizon, which explains why they so far have taken the Luddite stance (or should I say deer-caught-in-the-google-headlights stance?) of not wanting to join this effort.

Or maybe what they’re really scared of are the GPhone’s team of (very young) designers ;)

Is there a better way to think outside the box (er, phone?) than to ask a bunch of kids what a magic phone would be able to do?

Gmail gets even smarter (mostly)

Published
by
Anders
on November 1, 2007
in Google
. 0 Comments

I think it’s been a couple days now since Gmail was updated to a new version (apparently only for some users, but for whatever reason I was one of them.) It seems to still be a bit buggy. For example, when I click on the Contacts link, I sometimes get the following blank box.

Blank contacts box in new version of Gmail

This only happens sporadically. When it works right, I get the new Gmail contacts interface

Gmail contacts - default view

The “most contacted” feature is all good and well, but my favorite feature is the groups feature. No more cobbling together the same list of people to send messages to. While it works great overall, again some bugs are apparently still being ironed out, such as the inline Add New… group option

Inline add new group - seems to still be buggy

This seems to still be buggy (had to first go and use the add new group and then I could use the add to group option), but that’s all water under the bridge, as I’m sure this will be fixed soon.

Oh, and the other great improvement, which probably tops all the visible features - Google apparently recoded the front-end of the app, cleaning up what likely must have been iteration after iteration of Javascript for each new feature added over the months and years - the result is incredible. I remember being impressed with how zippy Gmail was when it first was released, and I guess I hadn’t noticed that it gradually had become pretty sluggish over time - no more.

So I guess the only question that remains is: how many more updates does Google need to do before the thing no longer is in Beta?

What will happen when Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP?

Published
by
Anders
on October 29, 2007
in Microsoft
. 3 Comments

I recall recently seeing a news article about how Microsoft has extended the date when it will stop supporting Windows XP, from January 30th of next year until some undetermined point in the future. Apparently, when the launch of Vista was being planned, Microsoft thought the new OS was going to be such a success that they’d be able to stop supporting the current OS as early as the beginning of 2008. Hah! With many users, such as myself, having no plans whatsoever to ‘upgrade’ to Vista, mostly because the OS seems to be basically a prettified version of XP, with some improved search capabilities, a huge RAM appetite, but with all the same security annoyances as before, akin to what Alan Cooper likes to call badly designed software made to look pretty: a pig with lipstick on it. Ok, I’m being a bit unfair - I’m sure Vista has some interesting innovations. But that becomes not very relevant in the face of what appears to be a general rejection among both individual users and large corporations alike - is there a single Fortune 500 company out there that has made the switch to Vista? And even if there has been (I’d be surprised if there has), I would imagine that the majority have not. So, the more interesting question (or pressing, if you’re Microsoft) to me seems to be: what will happen when Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP? Will users:

A: Give in and switch to Vista?

B: Switch to OS X? (Cnet seems to think so)

C: Switch to something like Ubuntu?

D: Stop using computers altogether ;)

Come to think of it, D maybe wouldn’t be so bad. As for me, I’m probably in the B category, but what I think would be most interesting would be if a lot of people picked option C, especially a few large corporations - that could very well spell the death-knell for Microsoft.

Single-click: The one Windows feature *still* missing from the Mac

Published
by
Anders
on October 17, 2007
in Apple and User Interface
. 6 Comments

Apple will soon be releasing the new OS X Leopard, which will be adding over 300 new features to the OS. There are some absolutely amazing additions to the Mac OS in this release, such as the Time Machine backup tool or the Spaces custom workspaces to keep your desktop clutter-free. And yet, as I was scanning through this stunningly impressive list of Insanely Great stuff, I was once more disappointed (and a bit surprised) to see that Apple *still* has not added the one feature that has led me to continue to use Windows: the single-click feature…

Single-click - the one Windows feature *still* missing from the Mac

Now, for someone not familiar with this feature (and, actually, for someone who is familiar with the feature), this might seem a bit weird, so let me elaborate. For me, I’ve found that constantly doing a lot of double-clicking causes pain in my wrist, so access to this feature, and the prevention of wrist pain is no small thing. And I guess what is really significant here, is that, even though I know that the Mac OS clearly is superior and just all-around more modern and robust than Windows XP, I still haven’t made the switch. Or, to be more specific, I haven’t made the switch back. For many many years, I was a hardcore Mac-Head, but then I needed to use Visio for my work, and was therefore forced to use a PC. At the beginning, I hated it, but then I discovered that, as with many things once you become more familiar with them, wasn’t so bad at all. (Keep in mind that this was in the pre OS X days, at which time I’d have to say that Windows was in fact the superior OS.)

I have to say that I am really surprised that Apple has not added this, especially with the web making single-click an even more predominant interaction form. I’ve talked to some Mac users and when I describe the feature to them, they are as surprised as I am, especially when I explain some of the bonus benefits of the feature, such as if I am creating a new file and want to name it similarly to another file, I just hover my mouse over that file, at which point the file name field is populated with that value, and I can just modify it (e.g. adding ‘v2′ at the end or whatever.)

If perhaps I should be mistaken, and Apple in fact has added this feature, I’d love to hear about it. I’ve searched extensively for it, including for 3rd party software, but to no avail.

Usability testing of books

Published
by
Anders
on October 11, 2007
in Books and Usability
. 4 Comments

I’ve done a lot of usability testing in my day, but today I participated in one that was different from anything I’ve done before. Rather than testing the usability of a website, we were testing the usability of a book. This, by the way, was a test conducted by Liz Danzico, the editor of Rosenfeld Media, and it all came about because of her post about the test on her blog.

What was most interesting about participating in this was that I found myself looking at something—a book—that I’ve used for pretty much long as I’ve been around (after all, before I even knew what the word ‘Book’ meant or what a book was, my mother was probably, surely, reading bedtime stories to me - Mom? You are of course reading my blog, yes? Could you maybe post a comment to confirm?), and yet here I was looking at it as if I’d never seen it before, as if this were a completely new website somebody placed before me on a monitor and asked ’so, what do you think?’ I handled the ‘prototype book’ that Liz carefully presented to me, leafing through it a bit, looking at the table of contents, the index, the back cover.

In a nutshell, I found myself feeling very strongly that contemporary book designers can learn a thing or two from information architects, the people who organize information on websites. Seems weird doesn’t it? After all, book designers have been designing books for hundreds and hundreds of years, so you’d think they’ve pretty much got it all down pat. Not so, at least in my opinion. Similarly to how the web is transforming the music industry, it appears that books are equally susceptible to the impact of the web. No, no, I’m not talking about the paperless office or some futuristic hoopla about how the web spells the end of the book. I’m talking about how the way that we use the web, the way that we move from one page to another, the way that we have come to expect information to be organized on a web page, or in a website as whole, consciously or otherwise, is affecting how we think about and read books.

As a case in point, I mentioned to Liz that I would expect something akin to a ‘Getting Started’ section in the book, and the reason I wanted that, of course, is because it’s something I’ve come to expect in online help documentation (as well as in product-specific websites.) This, of course, would be for how-to books, and not for a more theoretical text.

Additionally, I’d expect a very tight integration between the book (keeping in mind that this is a book for computer professionals) and a companion website for the book. I would assume that I could go to the companion site and find additional content, similarly to what one might find on a DVD in addition to the movie, and of course things like errata (which already is quite common.)

Taking this a bit further, I would like to see a discussion forum, where the book essentially is the hub of a community that can congregate online to share their thoughts. And what would really bring the book-web connection home would be the presence of a wiki, where maybe the author sort of continues writing their book, possibly in response to comments made on the discussion board, or maybe uses the wiki as a live beta of a forthcoming future edition of the book. I guess the overall idea is that the web would function as an organic, living extension of the original work.

Why doesn’t Amazon.com support embedding of their content?

Published
by
Anders
on October 9, 2007
in Amazon, Blogging, User Interface and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

So yesterday, when I was writing about Bill Buxton’s new book, I went to Amazon.com, thinking I’d grab a picture of the cover of the book, and as a thank you to Amazon.com have the image of the book cover link to their site. So, I started doing the same old rigamarole of saving the book cover graphic, opening it in Photoshop to tweak it (resize it, remove the gray background inserted by Amazon, etc.) and then I thought “wait, why I am I sitting here preparing a graphic that already exists on the web? Why not just point to that graphic?” So, I went back to the Amazon site and viewed the page source and trawled around to find the url for the image. And I’m sure if I had tooled around enough in the page source, I would have been able to find the right link, but after a while, I simply decided this wasn’t worth my time. At some point, while all this was happening, someone sent me a link to a video on YouTube (yes, it was another completely ridiculous but funny YouTube video, and no I won’t tell you what it was), so I went to watch it, but found myself instead staring at YouTube Embed/URL feature and wondering why in the world Amazon doesn’t add this to their site. Y’know something like this…

Mockup of how the YouTube embed feature might look on the Amazon site

Let’s see what all the possible advantages might be of this feature:

  • Authors of the book can easily promote it on their site, and the embedded content could include optional sales info or ratings info or whatever.
  • People who have reviewed the book on Amazon’s site can display a snippet of their review on their website. Users who want to read the rest of the review would be taken to the Amazon site.
  • Bloggers, like me, who want to write about a book could easily display a book cover (and maybe optional features like the search inside link in their blog entries.

So why hasn’t Amazon done this? Is there some legal reason that prevents it? Do they already have the feature but I just wasn’t able to track it down?

Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences

Published
by
Anders
on October 8, 2007
in Books and Industrial Design
. 4 Comments

I’m about half-way through Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences and, even though this book definitely is a tome (if not in size, then definitely in weight - the paper quality is very high - the book must weigh in at 5-10 lbs), it’s a fantastic read. First off, this book is about *a lot* more than sketching. In fact, Buxton doesn’t even get to actually talking about this (at least in practical terms) until around p. 250 or so(!), which is approximately where I am now. Instead, he lays the groundwork with multiple sweeps across a range of disciplines, from ‘designing for the wild’ (an incredible story of a close friend’s encounter with an avalanche and the testament to the power of good design in the face of a life or death situation) to a (I think) completely unique take on the story of the iPod and why it has become such a huge success (it’s probably not what you think) to a section on the history of industrial design, placing the actual meat of the book - methodologies and best practices for nitty-gritty everyday design - into powerful perspective. The part I’m on right now talks about the value, nay critical importance, of learning and understanding the practices of other team members in a design team, as in programmers developing an understanding of visual design and vice versa. Maybe what’s most weird about the book is that while it is incredibly dense, as in a 10pt serif font, because Buxton’s writing style is so fluid, and he is so passionate and knowledgeable about design (in the absolutely broadest sense of the word), reading this 5lb (10lb?) tome feels more like another equally great but much lighter read.