Better Experience #7: Shower Sets That’s Easy to Understand 🛀🚿
Small details to keep you from getting wet.
Better Experience Design is a collection of arbitrary encounters with everyday things that have given us either delightful or stressful experience.
Have you ever gone to the bathroom just to wash your feet but ended up wetting yourself because you accidentally turned on the shower instead of the water tap?
In this article we’ll discuss about what is the problem and how can we make a better experience for shower sets.
1. What is it and what is the purpose?
I bet you don’t know that we can use shower sets to take showers.
Shower sets usually have more than one function, and the shower-tap combination is the most commonly used set in our homes (based on non-scientific research conducted by me while visiting friends/relatives).
2. Why/When did I use it?
Most shower sets in our homes usually have two main functions: to spray water from the shower or the tap. And well, of course, we use them to take a shower or simply to wash our hands/feet using the tap.
However, there are also lots of variations of the shower sets which sometimes include rain shower heads, wall sprays, and even a bathroom bidet sprayer.
3. Was it a delightful or stressful experience? Why?
I am quite sure that all of you who are reading this have experienced the scenario above at least once in your life. The problem with most shower sets is the lack of signifiers that match their affordances. Let’s look at the following example:
- The pink arrows show the affordances of the shower set. It can be used to spray water from the rain shower (top), shower head (middle), and lastly, it can pour water from the tap (bottom).
- The green arrow points to a lever which acts as a signifier to turn the water on or off.
- The blue arrows point to two buttons, which can either be pushed or pulled.
There is no clear indicator of what is the default setting of the shower set. Furthermore, no one knows until they tried it at least once; What would happen if you turn on the water? Will it pour down the rain shower, shower, or the tap? How do I change the setting, pull the top button or the lower one?
Check out the example below. You can kind of guess the purpose of the knobs. So one is for hot water, one for cold water, and one for… What? How do I switch between tap and shower?
4. Can it be better?
Definitely. Here’s how we think we can make shower sets better:
Make it obvious by providing more context
Look at how clear it is to switch between the functionalities. You don’t even need to think because of how obvious they are!
This can also be used to clearly indicate how we can get hot or cold water.
Use different “input” for each “output”
To make it even clearer, we can differentiate all the knobs and put labels on them.
Lastly, do we even need to merge them as one?
In the example below, the shower and tap water are separated. As some would say: Keep it simple, stupid.
5. What do you think?
We think this might make a better experience of a shower set. What do you think?
Let us know in the comments if you have any idea about how to make it even better and let’s discuss 😆
Thanks for reading! If you have any idea about what we should cover next, you can comment below / send us an email: hello@betterexperience.design !
