I was awoken on the first day of my holiday to a clattering sound and my girlfriend exclaiming “I can’t get the top drawer open”. I turned over and looked at the clock. It read 05:50! Something within the drawer has risen high enough so that when you try to open it it catches and the drawer can’t open.
I then had to spend 30 minutes taking the whole set of drawers apart with a screwdriver to get this drawer open. I don’t know how many times I’ve come across this same problem but still the design of drawers, and more to the point their casing, stays the same. The drawer cavity always has space above the actual drawer to allow things within the drawer to move into this space and then catch when you try and open the drawer.
My point here is that this has proven time and time again to be bad design with flaws yet this design does not change. The same problem can be seen in other engineering designs including software.
I’ve recently been working on a product which all in all has been a big success but there is one particularly ticky piece of code that is continuing to be troublesome. The interface to the section of code is well defined but the implementation continues to cause problems. The implementation was designed and has organically changed throughout the project and at various stages we’ve said that it could probably do with a redesign. However, it generally works without problems so we keep putting of the redesign. This is the same as the drawer design; you can open the same drawer 1,000 times without the contents catching but when it catches on the 1001st it’s still very annoying.
I did a quick google for “when to redesign” (ignoring “website” related posts) and came across a PDF on Law 3 from the 10 laws of design and development by Innovative Thermal Solutions.
It is usually difficult if not impossible to make the desired level of improvement without significant change to the original design. Everytime (yes, everytime!) I have been through this struggle, hindsight has shown that if we had bitten the bullet and made the significant design change called for at the first sign of a problem, the product cost and project schedule would have been better off.
The fact is that if something has a flaw which may require an overhaul in design then it should most probably be done. Something as simple as a drawer opening mechanism should work flawlessly. I’m not saying that software is as simple as this but the same design and redesign principles should be used across all forms of engineering.
If it works all the time and does everything you need then leave it alone. If it works most of the time then redesign and fix it – most of the time isn’t good enough.
kyb 12:40 pm on June 5, 2008 Permalink |
I had a similar problem with the cutlery drawer recently, which was particularly bad because the action of attempting to open it embedded the point of the knife in the bottom of the drawer, sticking it even more firmly n place, making it impossible to push down with a spatula.
I’m interested in the design of toilet door locking mechanisms. We’ve had hundreds of years of design on this, and people are always trying new things, but what stands out about them to me is that most of the “improved” designs are far worse. The requirements are, 1. you want to know just by looking at it from the inside that the door is locked, 2. you want to know just by looking at it from the outside that the door is locked, 3. it should be easy and quick to lock and unlock.
Straight forward enough, yet for some reason I still come across electronic button locks, or clicky in the middle of the door handle locks where they open when you test them, or handles that you lock by turning, and you can’t tell if they’re locked or not.
The thing that annoys me the most is that someone somewhere must have designed it thinking that it was better than the big wooden bar across the door that has been used for thousands of years, and it falls so short.
Rob 9:54 am on June 17, 2008 Permalink |
…so what did your girlfriend want out of the top draw at 6am in the morning?