Goldilocks
Sean Moore
Too hot. Too cold. Just right.
Every morning, I engage in a guerrilla war with my shower. I’m always the first to strike, giving both knobs a good hard twist, and spilling the first – well, it’s first water, not blood, but you get the idea. My shower always has the upperhand though, invariably deciding to emit freezing cold or scalding hot water. It’s all I can do to fight through the volley to reach the knob again, and twist it, almost imperceptibly, to regain control. Of course, my first attempt always overshoots, going right past water temperature nirvana right into the other spectrum of shower hell. I’m sure my shower gets quite the kick from me standing there, doing my best impression of a safe cracker as the water fluxuates between icicles nd lava, until finally, I’ve guessed the combination and can enjoy my shower in comfort.
There’s a lesson to be learned in all of this, besides of course testing the temperature before hopping in like an idiot. Rather, that lesson is of designing an intefrace to meet a user’s, rather than a system’s expectations.
We don’t typically think of a faucet as an interface, and yet that’s precisely what it is. We tell our pipes what pressure we like our shower to be, and what mix of hot and cold water is most to our tastes. Well, sort of, because that mix isn’t really what we’re interested in: it’s the temperature of the water that we’re really after. It’s diffcult of course is that there isn’t really a good way to make a purely mechanical valve that regulates temperature. While that offloads some of the difficulty to the user (and it’s something modern faucets are beginning to build in, to the great convenience of lazy showerers everywhere), the simplicity of shower design isn’t overly burdensome.
The real trouble is that the mixer, or my mixer, at least, isn’t really built to the expeectations of a typical shower user - that is to say, someone who doesn’t want to be scalded or turned into an icicle every time. A shower has a large range of temperature output, anywhere from groundwater temperature to the maximum of a boiler. People on the other hand, expect a much smaller range of temperatures, typically in the 80–120º F range.
It’s a classic case of mismatch between a system’s capabilities and a user’s expectations. Sadly, showers are typically designed from a system’s standpoint: they can output the full range of the system, with no special treatment to what expectations are in the real world. From this, we get a tiny little sliver of a goldilock’s zone: nudge the cold mixer a turn either way, and you’ll be in for a quite a shock as the temperature goes from ideal to one of the unpleasant extremes.
The solution of course, is building a more effective interface – one that understands the user, rather than the system. If users almost always use a very small region of the system output, make the controls corrspondigly biased toward that range. It’s exactly what the brain has decided as the best way to allocate neurons: creating a perversely-biased homunculus that corresponds to the areas of our body that are most actively involved in sensation.
Of course, this involves knowing something about who is actually using your product, or service, or as the case may be, your shower faucet. It’s certainly no small feat for an engineer to get out from behind his keyboard and, you know, have a real conversation with a customer, but it is essential in order to understand your user and design a great product.
You may be wondering, active reader that you are, what a better design would be for a shower would in fact be? To that, I’d suggest looking in the direction of the toaster, that lowly kitchen appliance. The toaster, and I should say the simple, slot-loading toasters in particular, is almost unique in that once you’ve found you’re ideal toast level, you set the dial, and leave it alone. When you come back the next morning for another slice, there’s no guessing, no estimation: your setting is stored for as long as you’d like. A shower could certainly be constructed in such a manner (and indeed some are constructed similarly), wherein you set a temperature once, and then adjust the flow of water accordingly. That would be a shower that wouldn’t be a pain getting into every morning.