Week Notes: Vol. 2 – № 4

The Office Dishwasher and Visibility of System Status

Sometimes design sets us up to fail.

We have a dishwasher in the kitchenette where I work. It’s made by Fisher & Paykel.

On the inside it seems like any other household dishwasher. But on the outside, it’s designed to match the surrounding cabinetry.

The control panel on the lip of the door neatly hides under the countertop when closed. It’s remarkably quiet while running.

It’s also remarkably frustrating. It violates Jakob Nielsen’s first usability heuristic: visibility of system status.

The lack of sensory feedback turns a routine task into a guessing game. Is it running? Is it done? Who knows!?

To address this, we first bought a cheap, adhesive sign to signal when dishes were clean or dirty. But people continued to open the machine mid-cycle.

We hadn’t accounted for that in-between “cleaning” stage. So now we also place a sticky note on the handle that says: “Running! Do not open.”

There’s a term for this: Norman doors. It’s colloquially used in design circles to describe anything counter-intuitive and needs extra explanation.

When we prioritize function over aesthetics, we’re left with something forgettable that can hide in plain sight.

But when aesthetics are prioritized over function, we risk over-designing, making what should be obvious invisible.

Why can’t things just be obvious?