On my way to Australia last week I read a great article in the Harvard Business Review entitled "Defeating Feature Fatigue." The article discussed a complex user interface for driving a BMW that, with over 700 features, required a "cheat sheet" for anyone who didn’t normally drive the car.

On the same overseas trip I had two experiences that reminded me careless design makes even easy things hard to use.

The first incident was at Auckland Airport, when I opened the door of a toilet that I thought was vacant. Imagine my surprise when an elderly foreign lady greeted me enthusiastically. She seemed relieved to have been rescued. You see, to open the door you couldn’t just operate a manual latch and pull the door. Instead you were required to press a button on a side wall some distance away, then pull the door. The woman had obviously figured out that she had to do something with the button, but who knows how long she had been standing there waiting for the door to automatically open.

Opening a door ought to be a simple operation. Instead, the airport authorities had installed a part-automatic, part-manual solution that was so unintuitive that it required instructions. The button was surrounded by verbose, ambiguous signage indicating what it was for, which was further reinforced by recorded instructions piped over a crackly speaker in a strong kiwi accent. All of which is useless for non-English speakers.

The second incident was at Sydney airport. A confused older gentleman, standing at the basins with lathered hands, was looking around. It was apparent that he couldn’t operate the tap. Once again there was a large sign above each of the basins indicating that the taps would automatically turn on when hands were placed underneath.

The need for signage to operate such simple devices is a classic indication of a usability problem. One of my favourite examples of this is the Evian "Nomad" water bottle that requires opening instructions. However, the bigger issue in my opinion is the complete disregard for foreign travellers. The main reason the gentleman couldn’t operate the tap was because he obviously couldn’t understand the sign. Surely non-English speakers must make up a significant number of those using the bathroom in international airports?

As a recent Slate article [1] discussing auto-flush toilets mentioned, you should never replace a technology with an inferior technology. We’ve taken a simple technology and made it so unintuitive that we now need written instructions to understand how to operate it. There are enough complicated interfaces in the world as it is, without having to be toilet trained all over again.

[1] http://www.slate.com/id/2137256/nav/tap1/

- Trent