Interfacing with a Virgin Train Toilet

If you’re one of the lovely people (or less lovely pornbots) that follow me on Twitter, you may well be aware that whenever i visit a Virgin Trains toilet i feel the need to tweet about it. Despite what some might think, this isn’t because i’m the kind of boy that hangs around public toilets, but more because i love good user interface design, and get frustrated with the bad.

We always say that it’s really difficult to make things simple, and in my humble opinion nowhere is this demonstrated better in modern day life than in a Virgin Train toilet! (Just to be clear, i don’t mean the toilets that look like a toilet – they’re relatively straightforwards because they’re quite similar to a toilet – but the toilets that look like a Blankety Blank revolving set, sometimes complete with a slightly startled contestant sat in the hot seat who didn’t realise that closing and locking a door was a multi-button process not dissimilar to launching a nuclear weapon…)

On a recent trip to the big smoke i managed to count 32 instructions for how to get into and out of, and use a Virgin Trains toilet.

THIRTY TWO INSTRUCTIONS!
FOR A TOILET!
THIRTY TWO!

That’s a record for me – the most i’ve counted before has been a mere 27. But apparently to get into the cubicle, ‘interface’ with the hole in the ground, wash your hands (which you definitely want to do after fondling the toilet seat and lid looking for a flush) and get out again require thirty two individual instructions.

There are soooo many UI design errors in the ‘space age’ toilets: putting the buttons to open the door on the opposite side of the room to the door for instance… creating ‘clever’ devices to encourage men to lift the toilet seat up and put it down afterwards – but that are so clever they need 3 instructions just to flush the toilet… putting the order of events on the wash hand basin: dry, wash, soap, rather than wash, soap, dry…

Of-course you don’t know the literacy levels or English language capability of the user in a Virgin toilet, so one wonderful way to get around this is by creating icons! ICONS! Don’t you just love them! We’ll have an icon for everything! Well nearly everything… well the things that we can design icons for… and for the things we can’t design an icon for, we’ll design one anyway, and we’ll put some instructions in English on there too just to clarify what you’re supposed to do… or not do… which can’t be understood by the people that the icons were created for in the first place… oh…

We think that writing simple instructions that facilitate is actually harder than creating a user experience that doesn’t require them in the first place. That’s why we don’t write instructions: Help often hinders (see Microsoft Excel / Help for evidence). However, experience shows that many of our effortlessly simple to use content management system customers expect the system to be more complicated than it actually is, and so it takes a little time to get people on to the level of just do what you think you should do… How do i update a page? You go to the page, and erm… update the page… ;-)

For me, good interface design should be invisible the majority of the time, and delight some of the time – like lighting or editing in a movie, you shouldn’t even notice it apart from the times it makes you go nice!

Meanwhile, back in the Virgin Train toilet, they’ve gotten themselves into the situation where a non-intuitive interface requires non-intuitive icons which require ever increasing instructions. The end result is a quagmire of ‘information’ that confuses rather than informs.

So the next time the silence of the ‘Quiet’ coach is being interrupted again by another confused passenger who doesn’t know whether to hit the small button labelled ‘Open Door’ on the far wall away from the door, or the larger, more enticing button near the door marked ‘EMERGENCY CALL’, think about how simple it is to make things difficult, and difficult it is to make things simple. I’ve always wanted to press that big Emergency button too, i think next time i might and blame it on poor UI…

Gareth Langley: Thursday 15th October