Usability in the home

September 10, 2006  FILED TO: Miscellaneous

My fiance and I recently purchased and moved into a new home. This is the first time we’ve lived in a freestanding house together and the first time we’ve owned our home. Very exciting times. The house was designed by a modern architect and is only three years old, making good use of space and light. Despite the odd few things that seem to have been installed by an inexperienced handyman or were second-hand, we are very happy with it.

There is one aspect of this house that really irritates me, however, and given that I recently read “The Design of Everyday Things”, it sticks out in my mind even more: the location and function of the light switches. Everywhere you look are switch panels with anywhere from 2 – 5 switches. It has taken lots of investigation to discover the function of some of them (such as the doorbell doesn’t work unless one of the switches near the kitchen is on) and some of them are placed without reasonable relation to the light they control (e.g. the switch for the outside courtyard light is in the hall with a bedroom in between).

It doesn’t stop there! On entering the spare bedroom and study, I automatically feel for the lightswitch on the same wall as the door; but stupid me, they’re not there! They are on the adjacent wall, causing much confusion in the dark and handprints on the walls.

I’ll go even further to describe the panel that greets you when you walk in the front door: 5 switches and a dimmer knob. The living room light is controlled by the switch above the related dimmer, ok that’s easy. The middle bottom switch controls the inside light above the door. Got it. The two right-hand switches BOTH turn on the front outside lights, one immediately and one with a half-second response. Ok… The top middle switch seems to do nothing. After much playing and waiting, we discovered that when the top middle switch is turned on with the bottom right switch, the front light will eventually go out and come on when a sensor on the outside wall is triggered. Even the four-switch panel in the bathrooms confuse me: upstairs they control normal light, fan, light in the IXL unit and heater in the IXL unit; downstairs, the same four-panel switch but only light and fan – two unused switches.

And that’s just the lights… The oven works as such: a switch on the wall must be turned on, then you can select the oven setting and temperature, ok that’s easy. But it doesn’t work until you then press the clock/timer’s “Reset” button… I never know whether to push or pull the atrium doors.. You need to walk through a bedroom or study to get to the back yard… Many of the cupboards are far too high for me to reach… And I can’t get the internal door buzzer to unlock the front gate – it buzzes but stays locked.

I could probably go on. I must mention that this house was featured in a book about architecture, highlighting good use of small spaces. Indeed, it has a surprising amount of space for a small house – plenty of storage (which we needed!), shelves, an inner atrium with water feature, good-sized main bedroom and ensuite, complete laundry in a cupboard complete including trough (MUCH more than I had in our last house in Australia which had the laundry taps in a cupboard in the kitchen)… It’s strange to think of all the work they put into the aesthetics of the house and the comfort of its inhabitants. But it seems they forgot to think about the interaction between the two.

So, here’s a tip: when designing something, don’t just think about how it looks and how it functions, think about how a person interacts with it, no matter what it is. Make it obvious. (Read “The Design of Everyday Things”!).