Discovering that a product is not working as expected when it is already at the streets is not a pleasant feeling. Fixing a product design it is neither easy nor always possible. In this article I show you two typical examples of design fix that you should try to avoid.

First Case

Traveling to the Bavarian alps on a beautiful, high-tech train, I was doing something that the designers of it didn’t do: observing how people use doors and in particular how they would interact with their design. I was lucky enough to be sitting in front of the toilet’s door, enjoying the possibility to look at the passengers trying to deal with the door.

The design: the door had a door handle, a yellow button and a huge sticker indicating that people are not supposed to use the door handle to open the door; instead they should press the button.

What happened here? After many passenger breaking the "automatic" doors, designers decided to add an sticker to their design to try to fix it. Did it work? Obviously not:

Second Case

In Mar del Plata, one of the biggest cities in Argentina, people have been paying bus tickets with cash using machines installed on the buses. This system has recently been changed by another one that uses magnetic cards. These cards have to be loaded with electronic money at city kiosks; once on the bus passengers use the cards to paid for their trip.

The problem with the new design: people that were used to pay using cash were trying to introduce coins and bills inside the magnetic card reader. Probably, hundreds of readers got wroken and had to be replaced.

The solution: designers (or maybe the people in charge of the system) tried to fix the poorly designed system with a sticker saying "DO NOT INTRODUCE COINS". Did it work? Probably not well. 

Why this is happening and what could have been done?

These two products, the high tech door and the card reader, were probably designed without taking into account many parts of the system. Observing a few people interacting with the train door would have been enough to notice that people would try to open the door using the door handle if there is one (and not a button). The same applies to the card reader, designers probably never got on a bus and observed people using the old ticket machines.

Specially hardware design flaws are difficult and very expensive to solve. In most cases a sticker would probably not solve the problem and would make the whole user experience even more confusing. 

A user centered design process should have prevented these design failures: doing field research, talking with people and observing what they need and how they behave in their environment.