Archive for October, 2008
Thought: Bathroom design
As I admitted earlier, I am a bit fixated on the generally poor design of bathrooms. The way I see it, there are some basic expectations people have that when met will lead to a positive user experience. Today I am going to touch upon the first basic expectation.
Sanitary
The bathroom needs to not only be clean, but it needs to promote sanitary practice through some smart design decisions. For example, I often see that public bathroom doors have pull handles on the inside of the door. This makes the user pull on the door handle to leave the restroom. I can only speak for men’s rooms, but it is common to see a guy use the bathroom and then proceed to leave without washing his hands. Now I have to touch that handle. This in turn leads to another problem.
Users with the foresight to realize that the handle is not necessarily clean, will take a paper towel to grab it. Often, the wastebasket is not close enough to the door to throw away the paper towel. When this happens, you will inevitably see a small pile of discarded paper towels on the floor near the door.
Here’s another suggestion and thankfully this is not as common a problem, ditch the bar soap. I do not want to touch the same bar of soap that has someone else’s nastiness on it. This goes for peoples’ homes as well. I’m sorry. I may be your friend, but I do not want to share your bar soap with you. Also, please provide a hand towel. I rather not have to wipe my hands on my jeans.
I’m going to leave it at that for now. Otherwise, you gusy will think I’m a bit OCD about things.
Thought: Scented hand soap
First, I have to apologize for the delay between postings. There has been some travel madness as well as moving madness.
I spent a good portion of the last week traveling back and forth between Indiana and South Carolina. As a result of all this time on the road, I ended up eating out several times a time. Typically when I get to a restaurant, one of the first things I do is go and wash my hands. This is especially true if I have been traveling. I don’t know what it is about traveling that makes you feel extra grimey. Has anyone else noticed this? Anyway, I end up going through my normal hand washing routine at some stop along the way. While washing my hands I noticed that the soap had a somewhat disagreeable smell, but there was no other option for cleaning up. I suppose I could have asked the wait staff for a lemon and washed up with a lemon and some salt (which makes for a nice bath scrub by the way). I go back to my table and shortly thereafter my food arrives. I had ordered a sandwich. Here is where the problem arises. Now every time I go to take a bite of my sandwich, I get the smell and taste of that horrible chemical scrub. What were they thinking? Eating out is all about the user experience, but somehow restaurants rarely seem to get it right. I love eating out but I am hardly ever pleased. Maybe what I really love is punishing myself.
Meta observation: The bathroom seems to be the location of many of my observations, some of which I have yet to write about. Maybe I need to be a bathroom designer. Anyone need some advice on such a matter?