Usable toilet doors
'[Virgin trains] denied reports in the Daily Telegraph about automatic doors opening unexpectedly or locking people in.
Problems with disabled toilets on the hi-tech tilting trains however were down to people not using the automatic doors properly, a spokesman said.
"There's a button to close the door and another with a key symbol on it which locks the door and flashes when the door closes," said David Ewart, communications manager with Virgin.
"It's pretty clear what you have to do. We've even got signs in Braille," he added.
Rail watchdog group Passenger Focus, however, said there might be a need for Virgin to have clearer instructions for customers.'
What a mad world we live in where people design electronic toilet door buttons... and get it wrong! And some poor soul ends up getting caught with their trousers down on the 9:13 from Birmingham New Street. Surely a manual door would have been ok. Then a nice handle which affords sliding would have been crystal clear.
But now we've got watchdog groups to make sure that the toilet doors get improved. And reporters to write stories about the whole business. And bloggers to blog about it. And Virgin has to refit the doors, and create improved signage.
Think how much time and money could have been saved if the engineer had just designed the door right, and usability tested it in the first place. Then the whole lot of us could go off and do something more meaningful. (There is a lesson here about hasty roll-outs of interactive products and the true time and cost of reaching customer satisfaction. But I'm not going to spell it out any further).
PS. If anyone 'goes' on a pendolino, do try and get to the 'bottom' of this one for me.
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April 18th, 2007 at 8:27 am
Having recently done some extensive travelling on Virgin Trains, in can confirm this. It baffled me the first time, and the design rationale behind the toilet doors still baffles me.
Basically, you push the “Open” button on the outside and walk in. You then press the “Close” button. The automatic door closes. Done, right? I’m the toilet and have shut the door. I’m in there, it’s locked. That’s how all Super-Loos work.
Well, not on the Pendolino trains. Despite the fact that you’re in the loo and have little desire to share the space with someone else, and hence closed the automatic door; the door isn’t actually locked when you press the “Close” button. You need to press another “Lock” button. Unless you do so, you may be caught out with your trousers down by an unsuspecting fellow passenger who got signalled on the outside that the toilet is vacant.
It doesn’t take much more than some basic common sense to identify that the design is counter-intuitive. It’s an automatic door, I’m inside the loo. Why doesn’t it lock? After all that’s pretty much the standard of all these French concrete cubicles that starting appearing in our town centres sometime in the late eighties and since then have largely replaced normal public toilets.
After some time of deliberation over numerous Virgin Breakfasts I think I’ve found the answer. Because it’s a disabled toilet, it has to cater for people who may need help from someone waiting outside. The “close” button is far too away from the toilet seat for a severely disabled person to open the door from the inside. So why not putting an emergency open button nearer to the seat?
Would anyone have tested this design with even just half a dozen users, or even just with a few colleagues, they would have found that a) it doesn’t meet user expectations because b) it violates the convention. Users see what they expect to see, and I, like many other passengers, did not expect to have to press another button to close the door, hence I didn’t see it (until I sat down…).