[wordup] Toilet User Interface Design

[Adam Shand]

From: http://maddog.weblogs.com/stories/storyReader$68

Fly UI

I have seen one of the finest instances of user interface design ever, 
and I saw it in the men's room at Schipol airport in Amsterdam.

In each of the urinals, there is a little printed blue fly. It looks a 
lot like a real fly, but it's definitely iconic - you're not supposed to 
believe it's a real fly. It's printed near the drain, and slightly to 
the left.

Fly Pissoir

I asked a user interface designer I knew at Nortel about this, who 
happened to be Dutch and who was familiar with this particular piece of 
toilet technology. And he told me that washrooms are much cleaner when 
these flies are there. Presumably because they encourage, in a very 
subtle way, good aim.

Fly Zoom In

Now I love this kind of interface, because it's so psychologically 
clever. If they had put big circular targets, and arrows with a little 
printed message "pee here!" (like it would probably be if anybody ever 
tried such a thing in America), it would backfire. A certain percentage 
of men would deliberately try to disobey this instruction.

But this innocuous little fly just invites being peed upon, if such a 
thing makes any sense, but in a non-insistent, gentle, and entirely 
effective way. If you're the user interface specialist Donald Norman, I 
suppose you'd say the fly affords being peed on.

I would love to know if Dutch toilet user interface designers (there's a 
title for a business card!) tried focus groups with other icons - bees, 
smiley faces, eye icons, circles, letters? I would love to know what 
process they used to decide that it should be slightly to the left.

My hat is off to the inventor of this design.