I’ve spent much of the last year thinking about how to improve the user experience of a product I have been working on (more on that in future post).
One of the most important things to consider when crafting a user experience is the context in which the user interacts with the product.
A prime example of why context is so important when designing a product is the electric hob built-in to the counter top of the kitchen in my flat. One of the choices that the manufacturer would have had to make was what form the buttons would take — unfortunately they didn’t take the context in which the hob is used into account and therefore made the wrong choice.
On first look the hob is quite stylish — but let’s be honest, its a hob — and features touch buttons for the power button and heat selection. Whilst the touch buttons are quite attractive, and easy to clean, they fail to register touches most of the time. Not ideal when they manage the heat being applied to boiling pots of water. But why is this?
Touch buttons fall into two broad categories, capacitive and resistive. Resistive touch buttons use the pressure of your finger to register a touch whilst capacitive touch buttons measure the electric field generated by your finger.
The hob manufacturer opted to use capacitive touch buttons for the hob. What they failed to take into account was that capacitive touch buttons register for any conducive material including one which is often found in kitchens — water. This means that the situation in which you want to affect the heat quickest, e.g. when the pot overboils, you cannot! Sometimes you continue to be unable to use the button even after it appears to be dry, it is incredibly sensitive to water.
This means that whilst the product looks fit for purpose and likely works well in a situation in which there are no spillages (for example in the manufacturers R&D facility, or the shop in which it is demonstrated to customers) in real life it causes a lot of unnecessary problems and is a regression from hobs that had physical buttons.
I hope this blog post comes to mind when you are next making decisions around the user experience of a product you are working on and you remember to imagine not just the user using your product, but the context in which they do it and what they are trying to achieve whilst using your product.
Danny
dannybrown.blog 