I got in an epic fight with my washing machine this week.
It seems a simple enough process, right? The user adds two things to the machine (soap and clothes), pushes a couple of buttons, and ends up with clean clothes.
Not in this case.
There is no standard set for washing machines, meaning that manufacturers are able to take whatever liberties they like with them. Somehow these liberties never seem to extend to leopard print paint jobs or buttons with weird shapes. No, it's always the controls. Even though people will often say they find one setting they like and use it over and over again (see The Design of Everyday Things), manufacturers like to make it complicated.
I like having the option to wash my clothes in the appropriate temperature, or to do a gentle wash if I have nice clothes, but generally I don't need 60+ combinations I can use. Last time I did laundry, I discovered that the dial must be pulled instead of pushed to activate the chosen cycle. Not only is the pulling action not intuitive, but the button doesn’t recede inward once the previous cycle has ended. This results in the user pushing the dial and expecting it to start, user frustration as they attempt to reset the machine, and only then success as they try pushing the button in again out of frustration.
My issue this week arose when I set the machine to ‘extra spin’ which I understood to mean that the cycle would include an extra spin cycle after washing. Jeans don’t dry well if not spun extra, and I had several pairs of jeans. I added soap, closed the lid, and started the cycle. Simple, right? I heard the machine start and figured it was fine to walk away.
When I returned, I found that my clothes were entirely dry. No, the machine didn’t spin well enough to do that, the clothes were never washed in the first place.
Cue frustration.
Of course, I assumed that I was wrong, that I had failed to turn the machine on at all. I was in the middle of homework, and it’s not unheard of for me to do absentminded things when I’m focusing on something else. I grumbled, reset the machine, and started it. This time, I stayed around and listened to it start.
I returned later to find that…my clothes were still dry.
What?
Whatever this was, I knew I had heard the washer start. Why hadn’t it washed?
Long story short, I eventually discovered that I had set the machine to spin…without washing the clothes first. In the end, I used the setting I'd previously discovered worked.
Why was the machine designed to allow users to do that at all? Perhaps if you felt that your clothes hadn’t been spun enough in the first place, you might add an extra cycle, but otherwise it only serves to confuse the users of an already counter-intuitive machine.
My experience brought a number of ideas to light in response to the work we've been doing on navigation. I knew how to do one cycle on the washing machine, and I was essentially punished for attempting to use a different pathway. Interestingly, this is one issue that could be faced with the OWL. The changing of known pathways and users' understanding of the website will have a serious impact on our initial decisions as we look at the current OWL design and determine what most needs to be changed.
On the current website, people may know one way of getting the result they want, but when they attempt to get the result in a different way they are unable to access the materials they need. Design should not only be intuitive, it should also allow the user to access what they need through multiple easily-discoverable means. With the redesign in mind, we need to take both returning and new users into account.
For the OWL, this could mean on the webpage, such as being able to access things through the search bar as well as by using the typically prescribed path. It could also mean accessibility through different devices, ones that are fairly outdated or the most recent smartphone. There are a number of considerations when redesigning a webpage for usability, and I think that our class is finally reaching the point of digging into the meat of the matter.
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