Mrs Beanbagmore shower shenanigans this morning as the hotel room shower doesn't have a shelf to put my toiletries on.
yeah sure they have their own toiletries in little holders on the wall, but i brought my own, which i prefer to use, for reasons.
also coffee cups. i swear to god. if i ever meet the designer responsible for perfectly round coffee cup handles, i will have strong words to say to them. how am i meant to get enough purchase to keep a full cup horizontal. you have designed a pivot.
Manfred@mrsbeanbag In the student café where I hung out in uni, we had a bottle opener that supposedly opened wine and beer. But the corkscrew part was just a bit too long, or mounted a bit too far in the middle of the thing. You had to fold it out to open a beer, or it would poke into the beer opener so that the corkscrew would poke the beer bottle's neck and the beer opener would be nowhere near the bottle cap. I think about that opener once a week. There are so many things out there where you
@mrsbeanbag think "Surely this whole mess would be resolved once I would go to the designer, give them their own thing, and just say 'Hold this' or 'Use this'." And then you think "Wait, did they seriously not do that, ever?!" There's so much stuff where they genuinely didn't. Designed a bottle opener and obviously never once opened a beer with it. Designed a cup and obviously never once drank some coffee from it. It baffles me every time. Once a week, "... like that opener in uni"
Pxl Phile@mrsbeanbag Despite what the internet thinks, I - as a man - also bring my own toiletries.
Usually the hand wash sink is large enough but having no place to put things at all is... unreasonable
Pozorvlak@mrsbeanbag have you read The Design of Everyday Things? A considerable amount of space is devoted to complaining about hotel showers.
@pozorvlak i have not. sounds like it should be a mastodon account
@mrsbeanbag like the one that posts random sentences from the CIA Simple Sabotage manual? I like it, though the book's still in copyright and I wouldn't like to upset Don Norman.
@pozorvlak does it have a bit about when the hairdryer is hardwired into the bathroom wall. thank you but i prefer to go and sit somewhere to do it and also somebody else wants to go in the bathroom and we have to check out in a bit
@mrsbeanbag not that I remember, though you may also enjoy his complaints about doors, light switches, cookers, and nuclear power plant control rooms: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things.html?id=heCtnQEACAAJ
The Design of Everyday Things
Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious-even liberating-book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. In this entertaining and insightful analysis, cognitive scientist Don Norman hails excellence of design as the most important key to regaining the competitive edge in influencing consumer behavior. Now fully expanded and updated, with a new introduction by the author, The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how-and why-some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.
Mike Prior-Jones@pozorvlak @mrsbeanbag these days the function of a hotel bathroom is to look good on Instagram, not to actually be a place to wash yourself.
Relatedly, I once rented a flat where the bathroom had nowhere to put anything, and discovered that Ikea's Crap Landlord Range of products exists to fix this: https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/cat/tisken-series-43918/
@drmikepj @mrsbeanbag good knowledge! The previous owners of our flat tiled the bathroom in what appears to be adamantium, so those could be useful for us too...
@pozorvlak ours have done pretty well - you have to reattach the suction cups periodically, and eventually the rubber perishes, but they've done really well.
mraaaaak@mrsbeanbag What? You mean you don't want to smell like the inside of a rental car? What is wrong with you?! 🙃