Parallel topic: Factory Kitchen Interactions

 
Usability is everywhere.  Our factory conference rooms and offices have cool glass doors to let the daylight in. They have vertical pulls that are attractive yet offer little affordance as to whether you push or pull.  My architect brain tells me I push because its a left or right hand door into a room but the shiny vertical handle works on the lizard part of my brain that says "Its a bar not a plate.. pull it". Its minor yet its not uncommon to see peers tugging on door handles that won't yield.

 

Problems are often easy to identify but stepping back and noticing a successful design is worthwhile too.  The factory kitchen is full of examples of both.  Hours of coding and feature design requires caffeine which can be obtained via an automatic coffee machine and soda dispenser.

The coffee machine will make various styles with a few push buttons and grinds whole beans. It won't detect glass mugs but there are ways to trick it.  The buttons you can press light up and there are written instructions.  Occasionally it will display a cryptic message about water temperature but it usually snaps out of this state - altogether pretty good. The soda machine also has a thought out work-flow:

1. Insert money
2. Choose flavor: Coke 1, Coke 2, Diet Coke 1, Diet Coke 2, ect..
3. Retrieve beverage
4. Retrieve change (in the same place!)

Other than having to bend down to get my beverage (leveraging gravity is forgivable) its very smooth.

The snack machine is more of a jarring up and down, left and right process. The software equivalent to this is highlighting text when renaming objects to facilitate typing over or laying out a dialog in a logical order.

Out Kitchen Microwave...yikes. 

Its clearly a commercial model due to the fact its rated at 10 million watts and can convert a cup of water to vapor in 10 seconds.  The going theory is a commercial kitchen would label each number in the space provided and set it to a specified time for common things they need to nuke.  I know from experience that 4 = 00:45 seconds and 5 = 01:00.  We used to have a cheat sheet on the nearby whiteboard.  Clearly this is a case where the persona is someone other than a typical office worker.

_erik

Comments

[Andrew Dobson]

I can see the relationship with Revit workflows and workarounds.

Here is my work around for buying a diet Coke from my office vending machine:

1. Insert 3x 20pence pieces.
2. One of these got rejected (this machine is picky about which coins it accepts).
3. Pause for thought
4. Insert rejected 20 pence into the next door vending machine (which sells snacks not drinks)
5. Press coin reject and get two 10 pence pieces back out.
4. Insert 2x 20 pence pieces and 2x 10 pence pieces into the Coke machine
5. Get my drink.

I think there are lots of similar scenarios in Revit where a more direct route to the intended outcome has the potential to save time.

Incidentally, we have pull handles on the push sides of doors in my building. Still drives me mad after five years!