6. Design should solve problems not create them
Pop up urinals in Westminster, London.
Image: http://www.travelblogexchange.com/profiles/blogs/move-over-portapotty-urilift
7. Design should solve problems not create them
Image: Richard_Hicks http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4103/5019016839_da9579c733_o.jpg
8. The importance of semiotics in communication and design
Harbour Inn, Lyme Regis
9. The importance of semiotics in communication and design
Harbour Inn, Lyme Regis
10. The importance of semiotics in communication and design
The River Cafe, London
11. The importance of semiotics in communication and design
The River Cafe, London - viewed using colour blind simulator at http://www.colsim.com/
12. The importance of semiotics in communication and design
Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar
13. The importance of semiotics in communication and design
Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar
14. The importance of semiotics in communication and design
Tavern in Freiburg, Germany.
Image: http://news.asiantown.net/r/9847/i/1/4/41378
15. The importance of semiotics in communication and design
The Hunter S, London
Image: http://barchick.com/barchicks-best-loos/
Because when you use the toilet the flush button becomes invisible . . .
How can an engineering company spend millions on carriage design and get the toilets so badly wrong?
The location, context, materials and shape make this sink look more like a urinal.
The revealing toilet makes an adaptive city based on how humans interact with the city.
Sainsbury’s last year introduced a narrower toilet roll and reduced transport emissions and costs as they could transport more rolls in each lorry. Challenging conventions by leads to better design.
Semiotics or the communication and meaning of signs is key to many digital interfaces. In toilet design you often get confronted with a difficult choice - which door to go in? Made more difficult with increased anxiety of needed to pee and potentially impaired decision making ability once you’ve had a few pints. The designer is not helping in task completion or reducing time on task.
This is the female toilet, which may make more sense if you could see both doors next to each other to help in the choice paradox.
The added graffiti is a good indication of user feedback that should be acted upon.
The River Cafe in London removes any labels and just goes for colour - which you need to interpret in the context of your culture . . .
And is made really difficult if you are red/green colour blind like 9% of the population.
When done properly the wayfinding can become embedded in your brand.
The consistency of signage and brand assets really help in making sense of the building. Easy to understand, easy to find but not dominating.
This public toilet in Friedburg raises question about form leading function but has a sense of delight in the design . Whereas when semiotics go wrong . . .
At what point in the design process did anyone think pissing into a women’s mouth would embody the brand’s values?
You can’t do a UX talk without talking about affordance of buttons and labels.
This is from a care home for people with dementia. Lots of buttons that all do the same thing. Why not one button?
Here’s what looks like a flush button but when you look closer . . .
You can’t press it, even though it is raised and button like. The addition arrow draws attention to an action you don’t need to take.
The instructions and call to action are meters away from the button to press.
The sequence of the buttons and the illumination of the second action to take is poor interaction action.
Then to top it all the anxiety with public toilets of have I locked the door is increased with two sets of identical instructions.
When a transfer of a fly was introduced at Schiphol Airport 20 years ago spillage rates dropped 80 percent. A change like that, of course, translates into major savings in maintenance costs and shows a design coming from an psychological understanding of how men think.
Maybe the new transfer of a golf flag is a form of A/B testing.
Gamification however relies on an understanding of the rules. If anyone has kids you may be familiar with this aid to toilet training, you pee on the ball it spins round and you learn through play. Apart from my nephew who appeared from the toilet holding the pee soaked ball to show what he had done.
Design should solve a need in the user. There alot of apps to find public toilets that variously use open data sets from councils with improvements suggested to the data by users. Its a great example of solving needs with the device you have on you and improving the data with user generated input.
The opposite of simple is the Satis toilet in Japan. An over-engineered solution with more features than necessary.
Australia’s most popular brand of toilet paper uses the inside of the tube to introduce some brand humour.
