The Classic Dorm Room Staple: Fairy Lights
It’s the end of August, school’s about to start, and once again, you are faced with the exciting (or daunting) task of decorating your inevitably hideous dorm room. Knowing it’s that time of year, companies like Dormify, Amazon, Target, and many more flood your social media with ad after ad, and what’s one of the first things they advertise? Fairy lights. Walk into almost any dorm room on campus, and you are guaranteed to see some form of this deceptively cheap but effective decoration.
I, like many others, fell for the aesthetic of hanging fairy lights, with one wire from which strands of lights hang down. I’ve had these for about three weeks, but have been frustrated by their inconvenience since day one.
The lights have eight settings which you can flip through with a button on a small controller attached to the lights’ plug. Before I go on to complain about the inconvenience of this interface, I’d say that I do appreciate that whoever made these lights put the controller slightly above the actual plug, so it is relatively easily accessible if you plug it in under your bed/desk/etc. The eight settings include fast blinking, fading in and out, plain lights on, and some others I honestly don’t remember or use.
Given that when in my room, I’m usually working or in bed, I don’t really use any setting other than the regular one. Maybe I’m just an outlier, but I think most users of this product would agree when I say that the plain “lights on” setting is probably the one everyone uses most frequently. With that in mind, logically the first setting when pressing the button on the controller should be “lights on,” right? Well, the designer of these lights evidently disagreed and decided to force everyone who buys these to flip through SEVEN settings before reaching the regular one. If they flip through too quickly, they might miss it and have to flip through seven settings again just to turn the lights on.
In addition to this impracticality, depending on where you place your lights, you also have to reach the controller every time you turn the lights on or off. I put the lights next to my bed, meaning I have to reach over every time I want to access the controller. According to Amazon, some people hang them over their curtains, which I would imagine presents the dilemma of having to fumble through the curtains to find the controller. All in all, the controller attached to the wire is an ineffective interface that proposes an inconvenience no matter where you hang these lights.
In terms of learnability and memorability, this product doesn’t have any issues. It’s designed for anyone to use — you just press the button and the lights turn on. The controller is labeled with a numbered list of each type of lighting, so you know how many times to press the button for each choice. It’s not very efficient due to there being only one button for eight different lighting options. Since it’s a pretty cheap product, I think the designers chose the cheapest option to make these lights work.
In terms of design improvements, the biggest one would be to design a small remote instead of having the attached controller. Having separate buttons for each setting would also be helpful because it would allow the user to choose a lighting option without having to press one button multiple times to get the one they want. The on button would just turn on the regular setting without any flashing or fading, and there would be eight other buttons for the “fancy” options and to turn the lights off. I’d put the on button on the top because as a user I would want the regular lighting setting to be the most accessible because it’s most frequently used. The other buttons would be smaller and labeled clearly so they aren’t hard to locate.
Overall I think the many companies that make these fairy lights could invest in improving the simple interface of a product that has become such a staple in dorm rooms across the country.
