Shower UI

Index, feed.

On the first night I spent in a bed & breakfast in Quebec, the host explained to me how the shower faucet worked, simply because he was experienced and knew that North-American bathroom user interfaces can be confusing to people from France.

A shower + bath faucet in France

Indeed, I was most used to faucets having separate controls for hot and cold, typically left and right, respectively, both controlled by rotation. Faucets with separate outputs for a bath and a shower would typically have an extra control in the middle, that one could pull towards themselves while the water is running to direct the flow to the shower.

A shower faucet in North America

Indeed, my B&B room was different: a single handle, initially pointing up, in front of a metallic disc mounted to the wall under the shower head. One would turn the handle clockwise slightly to start a flow of cold water. Turning further would make water increasingly hot. This has two shortcomings that are surprising at first:

1. There is no way to control the flow of water: it's either full-on or nothing;

2. one has to start with cold water.

Neither are very important in hindsight.

After years and years of seeing various shower faucets, I keep being amazed at the amount of variation, and the apparent lack of concern for discoverability: in a way, it does not matter very much if the faucets you have at home are instantly understandable, because you will get used to them and overcome any obstacle. But this is not the case for hotel bathrooms; someone spending just a night or two risks being confused for a significant portion of their stay.

I will try to list a few examples and how they could present a better user interface.

Two-faucet arrangements

Those are the ones I find to be the most discoverable. One common issue, as can be seen in the picture at the top of this post, is that which side is hot is only indicated by the color of a small red dot, the cold side bearing a small blue dot. This is very common on many types of faucets. This gets worse as the markings get smaller, or erode with time.

An alternate mode of failure of this type of indication, made worse in Canada with its two official and common languages being English and French, is each faucet being marked "H" or "C", for "hot" and "cold", respectively, or « C » / « F » for « chaud » / « froid ». There are then a variety of ways to confuse the user :

• Have both faucets marked with the same letter—this probably happens when one of the variations is not available when maintenance is needed;

• have one of the faucets unmarked, and the other marked "C": the user will wonder whether this stands for "cold" or for « chaud », which means "hot".

Single-faucet arrangements

While the basic design is easy to remember, once explained as in this article's introduction, there are many ways to make things confusing:

• Have the handle shaped to make it look like it can be both rotated and lifted, when it really does only the former;

• have the bath / shower switch use one of many non-standard interfaces:

  • pull-button somewhere in the middle;

  • small handle on top of the main handle, making sure that it is not obvious whether the handle needs to be rotated or pulled or something else;

  • small pull-button on the bath tap;

  • "streamlined" (i.e., hidden) pull-button at the extremity of the bath tap, that water flows through, and that has to be pulled down to direct water to the shower.

www.kurokatta.org

David Haguenauer <www@kurokatta.org>
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