Ironing Board Usability

I travel to Utah a few times a year on business. The hotel I stay at, like many others, has an iron and ironing board. Again, like other hotels, there is a metal rack to hold the iron when it is not in use. The difference is the rack is bolted directly on top of the ironing board instead of the wall!

Why is this an issue?

The problem is that it makes my job of ironing a major, major pain. I can't iron an entire pant leg at one time. I can't lay my shirt out right. The silly rack keeps getting in my way. Plus, at some point it is also going to be a major pain for the hotel when they have to change the covers on boards and have to unbolt all the racks to do it.

I’m sure it makes sense to the maintenance engineer and probably made his life easier to do it that way. He was probably able to bang them all out in his workshop at one time rather than having to lug his tools around from room to room.

I’m positive you could care less about my ironing woes, but it illustrates something that technologists do all the time. Like the hotel maintenance engineer, all too often user needs are not considered enough in system design, and short-term objectives (i.e. the desire to get the job done as quickly and painlessly as possible) trump long-term objectives (i.e. the need for maintenance and growth).

I’ve seen way too many credit union and bank Web sites (yes I look at those too), that don’t take member needs into as much consideration as should be. For example, a regional bank in Michigan has its customers go one place for loan information, another place for rate information, another place for the bank contact information and yet another place for the loan application. When all is said and done, you’d need to click 10-15 times going back and forth throughout the site to actually get to the point of starting the application process.

A lot of organizations accept that kind of scenario because it’s the Web and it’s “easy” to click around. But could you imagine making your members go through same sort of labyrinth to take out a loan at a branch? You’d lose all of your members if you did. The problem is that the same thing (losing members or potential members) might be happening on your Web site because of poor usability—you just don’t know it.

It all comes down to usability and putting the needs of the user first. Or at a minimum, striking the right balance between the goals of the user, the developer and the organization.

Good and bad design (i.e. usability) examples exist everywhere. What are some things you’ve run across that you either love or hate?