Poor design is all around us.

‍

As I’ve written about before, I’ve been going to coffee shops to work in the mornings. If you’ve ever been to a Starbucks, you’ll know that their restrooms are open to the public, but they put a code on the door. This makes very little sense to me. What is the point of putting a code on a door if you’re just going to tell everyone what the code is anyway?

‍

But the nonsense doesn’t stop there.

‍

On top of that, the locking mechanism on the door is confusing. You enter the code, the door unlocks, you enter the bathroom, and then what? This is what you see:

‍

‍

Most people, from having gone to the bathroom their entire life, know that this is when you lock the door so that you can do your business. But people are used to three types of bathroom locks, they normally look like this:

‍

‍

So can you guess what happens in the Starbucks bathroom?

‍

People don’t lock the door. Because they don’t know how to.

‍

What happens next is that people—aka me—are always walking in on other people using the bathroom. This is embarrassing for everyone involved.

‍

Today, I accidentally walked in on a woman. I immediately apologized, closed the door, and then waited. On her way out, I apologized again. She said, “Yeah, I guess they don’t make locks on the door anymore.”

‍

I sighed and nodded my head.

‍

What is even more concerning to me is that the first few times I went into the bathroom at this Starbucks, I forgot to lock the door too. My subconscious mind just completely skipped the step of locking the door. It wasn’t until my third or fourth time going to the bathroom that I remembered, “Oh yeah, I’m supposed to lock the door. Wait—how do I lock this door?” Eventually, I figured it out.

‍

If you review the first image again, you’ll notice that there’s a button on the top of the handle. This is supposed to be a “lock” button. If the light below the button is blinking red, then that means that the door is locked. Mind you, there’s no sign indicating this. And the fact people don’t know how to lock the door tells me that this is poor design.

‍

The truth is that there’s poor design everywhere. If you start to pay attention to the details of everyday objects, you’ll begin to notice how well or how poorly an object is designed. 

‍

Have you ever pulled on a push door? Chances are that wasn’t your fault. The door handle was probably designed poorly. There’s a reason your subconscious mind told you to pull instead of push. 

‍

I started thinking more about design after reading Don Norman’s book titled The Design Of Everyday Things. He does a great job of explaining how objects are meant to function and he uses countless examples to illustrate his points. Most of the time we don’t even realize that we’re using something correctly. If it is designed well, it will just work. If you’re into this sort of stuff like I am, I highly recommend the book.   

‍

The lock on the Starbucks bathroom door annoys me. But when something does work as intended, I appreciate it that much more because I know that whoever designed it, did so with care. 

‍

In the meantime, please lock the door, people. I can’t bear making eye contact with another person peeing.