A badly designed bathroom door and why it matters

As a UX professional, I’m used to hearing questions like “What does a UX professional do?” and “Can you get off my property?” The answer to the latter question is always a hard no, but the former is more of a challenge. I can explain what I do, the ins and outs of the daily grind, but that’s a lot less important than why it matters. Depending on who I’m talking to, I might focus on improved KPIs or I might emphasize better representing the brand.

But at root, the reason I’m in UX is because bad user experiences suck. They suck whether they’re online or IRL. They make me mad. And while I don’t recommend that people walk around steaming about these things all day like I do, I think it’s helpful to understand better the thoughts that go into the designs of everyday things (or don’t, as the case may be).

Recently I had a bad user experience in the one place no one ever should: the bathroom. I’ve certainly mentioned before the value of a pleasant work restroom. (I like to think that everyone cares about this as much as I do, but I’m the only one with the courage to say it out loud. ) It was my first day in a new office, and as I strolled into the men’s room to attend to some quick business, I felt like something was off. It took me a minute before I realized.

Where were the stalls?

For the most part it had seemed like a normal bathroom. Upon entering, there was a sink to the left, and the room opened to the right, where there were two urinals along the same wall as the entryway. But there didn’t seem to be stalls. Briefly I wondered if this was some kind of express bathroom for number-ones only. That didn’t seem likely though.

By process of elimination (no pun intended), I realized eventually that the two floor-to-ceiling panels on the wall adjacent to the urinals must be the stall doors. It was hard to tell. They looked identical to the material along the back wall except that each panel had a small, flat, circular piece of metal about waist high.

Let’s talk about affordances for a second. An affordance is something that both indicates what you can do with a particular object, and enables you to do it. Picture a door in a public building with a handle on it. The handle is an affordance. It indicates that you can pull the door open, and by its form allows you to do so. There may be a sign on the door reading “pull,” which is helpful additional information but is not itself an affordance. Without the handle, you may still be able to pull the door open but it will be more difficult and you may try pushing first. The handle affords pulling to open.

So the first thing these stall doors were missing were affordances. There was nothing to indicate that they were doors at all, and if so, whether one should push or pull them to open. They were also missing supplemental information that could have suggested their “doorness,” like visible hinges. They weren’t contrasted from the rest of the walls to indicate that they were different in any way. This was clearly a conscious design decision. And it was a bad one.

There was even more to it than that. A standard bathroom stall door has a fair amount of clearance between the floor and the bottom of the door. This is extremely helpful for knowing if someone is occupying a stall. By extending from floor to ceiling, these doors didn’t give that indication. The way to know that a stall was occupied was by looking at an even smaller cut-out circle inside the already small metal circles. When the door was locked from the inside, the color of this circle changed from green to red.

A couple of problems here. One is the small size. You need to lean in pretty close to see it. (Is that where you want to be if someone is blasting a dookie just inches away on the other side?) The other is the choice of color as the indicator. Red-green color blindness is the most common type of color blindness, which according to Wikipedia affects 8% of males. Now imagine you’re a color-blind worker feeling the call of nature, and you’re bent over squinting at a recessed image the size of an Advil whose color you can’t even discern, all to determine whether or not you can open a door that doesn’t even look like a door. Good times.

My theory is that whoever designed this bathroom thought it would be cool and minimalist to blend the stalls in with the walls, and nobody involved gave much thought to the user experience. This design violates a couple of core principles of good UX design. For instance: novelty by itself isn’t a virtue. Stick with the familiar unless you have a damn good reason. Or: make sure that whatever you gain from making a particular design decision is worth what you’re giving up. Everything is a trade-off, so be sure you know what you’re trading.

To answer the initial question, then, of what a UX professional does, ideally we make things like going to the bathroom a smooth experience. As to why I, personally, am one, it’s because I can’t even go pee without getting real angry.