Make your brain spin (design flaws in a fan)

Our assignment for this week was to find a design flaw in an everyday object. My first attempt to pinpoint a design flaw around my home was futile, as I was simply looking for something that didn't "work." In my mind, I perceived that everything I saw functioned the way it was supposed to. If it didn't work, I would have thrown it out some time ago.

Then I sat down to read chapters 1 and 2 of Donald Norman's book, The Design of Everyday Things. I quickly acquired a deeper understanding of what contributes to a flawed design. It is not just limited to things that don't work, but rather anything which doesn't work intuitively to the user, or that doesn't work as well or as easily as it could.

When my girlfriend and I moved into our new home last August, we were happy to learn that the previous tennants were going to leave their ceiling fan in the dining room. The landlord commented to us that the fan worked at different speeds, and had different settings for the warm and cold seasons. We were just happy to have something that worked to circulate air through the room, as it was a pretty warm week when we moved in.

In the past few months, we haven't used the fan once. As I was looking around my place trying to identify a flawed design, I looked at the fan, and thought to myself, "why haven't I used the fan lately? Doesn't it have a setting for winter months?" I realized at that point that I had no clue as to how I would find the right setting, as there are no markings on the fan itself as to what settings should be used during which months.

Hanging from the fan are 3 chains. None of these actually give the fan it's power, that's done by the light-switch on the wall. While none of the chains are marked in any way, I was able to figure out what each switch does. The far right chain turns the light on and off (as long as the light switch on the wall is powered on.) The middle chain changes the fan's speed, from low, to medium, to high, and back to off. The left switch changes the direction of the fan's rotation, which presumably is to create a different air flow in the summer or winter months.

Thinking about it more and more, there are a number of design flaws. One flaw is the lack of visual cues to the three hanging chains. Without testing each one, a person would have no intuitive idea as to what function each chain performed. Norman discusses visibility as a significant factor to good design, and frankly, my ceiling fan would be just as easy to operate with a blindfold on.

Another challenge to operating the ceiling fan is changing speeds, or turning the fan off. If someone were to approach the fan while it's moving, they would not likely be able to tell if it's spinning on low or medium, medium or high. Some might have no idea how many speeds it has. So in order to turn it off, you have to pull the chain an unknown number of times. The problem here is that even when it is off, it continues to spin from the momemtum of the previous setting. So then you wait, and wait. Often times I'll be waiting for it to finally slow to a stop, only to realize after waiting for a while that I've pulled the chain one too many times
and set it back to low speed.

Finally, the whole summer vs winter modes. I'm afraid I'll never figure this one out without doing some focused research. Even once I determine which chain reverses the direction of the fan, I hae no idea which direction is meant for summer and which is for winter. Since we "inherited" this fan from the previous tenants, we don't have any sort of owner's manual, and we're left without a clue as to which direction is preferred for which months.

It's enough to leave your head spinning....