Object I Love: Bathtub Overflow Drain Cover
For about 15 years of my life, I always thought good baths at home were a myth because the tubs were too small and uncomfortable, and water levels never reached past my shoulders. I’d be freezing from shoulders up with hot water shoulders down, making a dichotic and wholly unsatisfying experience. Enter the bathtub overflow drain cover! As a Southerner living in cold DC weather, this changed my life in the winter. The cover is a physical restraint for water, and the affordance that’s immediately obvious are the little suction cups that place the cover onto the tub, and gives a bit of space for the person to lift the edges and peel off from the tub when they’re done. Suction cups tell me that they’re supposed to grip onto something, and my mental model of suction cups based on past experiences (sticking GPS or phone stand onto car window) tell me that the surface is more than likely going to be vertical.
The material of the drain cover is soft and flexible, giving the user a bit of room for forgiveness should the structure or shape of the bathtub or drain cover be slightly different (rectangular vs rounded rectangle of clawfoot tub). The drain cover reminds me of an analog version of Fitt’s law because the drain itself is huge, but the drain cover is even bigger, so it’s quick and easy placement over the drain.
The material is soft, clear, and takes the temperature of the water, so it’s unobtrusive visually and forgiving should the person touch or rest against it. For such a simple object, Dieter Rams said it best: “good design is unobtrusive”. Having a warm bath is usually a gratifying experience – it’s an easy, out of the box installation with very little cognitive load on the user.
Object I Hate: Petwell Pet Drinking Fountain
What you see is my cat doing everything but drinking from the fountain – she will wait patiently for me at my bathroom sink until I turn on the faucet and hand feed her water, or drink out of my cup on my desk. Like all cats apathetic to consumerism, my cat chose to drink everywhere BUT the $40 fountain. What I quickly discovered was really a product suffering from aesthetic-usability effect. The amount of money I spent made the fountain seem like a luxury by raising my perception of it’s value and the water coming out of a fake spout that streamed down looked very aesthetic. The visual feedback was immediate after pouring water inside – the water looked like my own Roman fountain for my beloved cat.
However, what made the fountain unusable it’s propensity for mold (made worse from the material it was constructed from) and the amount of effort required to clean the fountain. The fountain cover created a dark and moist well for mold to grow inside. The material of the fountain was porous and slightly rugged, perfect for mold to cling onto forever and thrive. At one point in my life, and for longer than I’d like to admit, I scrubbed this piece of garbage daily with scalding hot water, pipe cleaners, and various scrubbers. The various nooks, crannies, and impossible places to clean really made the fountain a terrible experience to clean, and it’s clear that many of them were unnecessary and were only hollowed out in that way to save material cost.
The only clear, explicit affordance to me was that the cap should go on the top (but I later removed it because the top of it grew mold all the time) and where to place the ‘torso’ of the fountain. However, if I didn’t place the motor correctly the ‘torso’ wouldn’t fit in place, as evidenced by the middle picture. One feature that was an implicit affordance was that the water pump inside could be taken apart into two pieces. The first time I discovered the ability to do so, I was horrified by the gunk and hair inside and angry that I was not informed of my ability to take apart the motor for cleaning. The cleaning instructions in the manual did not have that step in it. If I had a journey map of my experience using this fountain, it dipped sharply when I called customer service when the fountain broke one day, and the very first thing he asked me was whether or not I had taken apart the motor and cleaned it, and that it’d been a known problem for several years.
For those of you wondering, this fountain solved most almost every problem above in both thoughtful design and material.