Holmes Window Fan
Many students on College Hill turn to window fans to escape the summer heat at the beginning and end of the school year. Depending on the outside temperature, you should either point the fan facing into or out of your room. If the temperature outside is cooler than the temperature inside the room, face the fan in the window so that it blows air in, and when the outside temperature warms up, turn the fan to face out the window to suck the room’s warm air out. A pretty effective mechanism for keeping cool.
The particular model that I use and plan to critique is the Holmes Dual Blade Window Fan. Although the model is relatively effective at going about its task, I believe it suffers in the area of efficiency. Each time I decide to switch the window fan’s direction, I need to completely unsecured it from the window, turn it in its opposite direction, and resecure it back in its position. Users with particularly difficult windows to work with would have an even harder time switching the fan’s direction.
Some possible reasons why the choice was made to require physically repositioning the window fan includes the fact that fan blade is usually designed to spin in a particular direction, and that simply having a switch to reverse the mechanism would produce a less effective draft in the opposite direction. There are also cost constraints, as the fan is an entry-level priced product, so developers probably tried to minimize costs.
The fan itself scores high marks in the areas of learnability, memorability, and affordances. It is very intuitive to use, with affordances such as indents used to signify where to grip the fan for transport as well as a protruding switch which signifies to use it for changing fan modes. It is very learnable since there are only three clearly defined mechanisms: low, high, and off. It is memorable because the switch is placed in a very visible, central location. The area I believe the fan could be improved is efficiency. To switch the direction of the draft, it requires the user to physically reposition the window fan, a task which is taxing, particularly for those with difficult windows to work with.
The way I would go about redesigning the fan would involve two simple changes. Redesign the fan blades so that they would operate effectively regardless of spin direction, and introduce a second switch above the existing one that controls draft direction: one for in and one for out.