The Design Error that cost me £500
Design done well has the ability to gain companies a lot of money. But poor design leads to costly ‘user error’.
Yeah… I know £500, unlucky right?
To give some context; I’m a User Experience Designer. I’m very analytically minded and find software and real-life appliances more intuitive than other people, largely due to the amount of time I spend interacting with them (a lot).
Since reading the Design of Everyday Things (a must-read for new UXers, or any designers for that matter) , I’ve tried to pay more attention to…well… the design of everyday things.
And while I feel that fits into my ethos of being mindful and deliberate about things — it obviously didn’t help me in this instance.
Here's what happened...
I decided that for once, I’d be an adult put mine and my girlfriend's clothes in the washing machine.
I put in the wash, chucked in the washing liquid pod, turned the dial and pressed the start button. We had dinner and went for a walk. Got back an hour later and made a hot chocolate.
I was pretty tired and had forgotten about the wash. So naturally, I was a bit irked when I discovered that I would now have to hang it up after a long cold walk, all I wanted was a hot chocolate. I went over to get the wash out of the machine.
“Wait… the wash is still on, after all that time,” I thought to myself. I swear I only put it on for 45 minutes…?
The pin dropped and I realized that I had not only put on a wash for triple the amount of time I was supposed to (no biggie) but… I had put it on at 90 DEGREES! 90!!! Celcius!
I’m sure you can tell by my calling putting a wash on “being an adult” that I’m not very experienced with clothes washing so I wasn’t immediately aware of the fatal error I had made.
My first panicked question to my family was ‘are all the clothes going to be tiny?’ which was obviously wrong, that only happens in the movies. But what did happen was it ruined a lot of expensive clothes, it completely melted all of the elastic.
This means sports leggings & bras, jeans, jumpers, t-shirts and socks are now completely unwearable. Unless I want to wear my underwear with suspenders that is. Not a look.
So you might ask: how on earth did this happen?
You would be very right to ask that. And no, I didn’t think that 90 degrees was an appropriate temperature — I’m not that inept.
I’m sure most people would call it ‘user error’, but to be honest, this is a cop-out. It lets the designers off far too lightly.
Here is the washing machine in question:
What I wanted to put on was 40°c mixed load. ‘User error’ meant that I didn’t notice that I accidentally put it on 90°c, the setting that’s reserved for cleaning the washing machine itself.
I missed the notch for the 40°c mixed load setting by 1mm and bang: £500 damage.
My question is ‘how is this allowed to happen’? Why would you put something that is almost guaranteed to ruin any and all clothes right next to the most used setting?
Shouldn’t there be steps to prevent somebody from doing something like this? Did the designers even think about the end user? Doubt it.
The solution?
Please accept my mock-up as a visual representation of my solution including:
- All the features you’re going to use in one group
- The one feature you definitely don’t want to use right at the bottom past all the others
- a notch to make you think twice before you force the washing machine into the 90° mode.
The premise for this design is that you would have to go through ALL of the options you could possibly need before arriving at the setting that will ruin all your clothes.
This combined with a visual marker to distinguish the bad setting from all the others & more friction-to-entry via the notch = less likely to get to the 90° setting and costing lots of money.
It’s a good rule for design in general, make things that you want people to do easy, and things you don’t want them to do harder.
The moral of the story is, essentially, that there is no such thing as user error, just designer error.
Please test your products in a variety of circumstances, early and often.
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