smorgasbord-design

Anyone who knows me, I mean really knows me, will be aware of my passion for the analogy. Explanations to clients and colleagues are, like a plasterer’s radio, liberally splattered with them. One of the strongest analogies that us Information/User-Experience Architects deploy is that of the construction industry; borrowing heavily from ‘real’ architecture. It’s how I explain what I do to my mum. I think she gets it.

So, when I picked up on Dustin Curtis‘ fine post on The Bathroom Door recently, it really struck a chord and thence went straight into my toolbox of bon mots. The story goes that Dustin visits a wealthy executive’s San Francisco house for a party. The house is “insanely beautiful … just about everything in the house is remarkable”, but this experience is tempered by the experience of using the bathroom door. A door with a knob which “felt loose and hollow, like cheap crap”. The paradox of being in a jaw-dropping house that relied – for one of the most-used interactive elements in the entire building – on shoddy ironmongery provides a wonderful analogy for interaction design.

Of course, it’s nothing new: attention to detail, red-route usability and so on. The key here is that by making some of these most-used interaction elements absolutely as solid and well-considered as possible then we go a long way to defining the experience overall. So, I ask you this: where is the bathroom door on your site, and how flimsy does it feel?