IH01-ErinPalermo

From IEOR 170 Spring 2007

"Good and Bad Designs"

Good Design: Gevalia Coffee Maker

This coffee maker is an example of a good design because it is very easy to not only turn on, but to program. When a user wants to have a hot cup of coffee when they wake up in the morning, they simply program the coffee maker to turn on before they wake. That way, when they are ready for coffee, it will be there. First, it is very simple to program. There are five buttons on the machine:

“On/Off” – “Program” – “Hour” – “Min” – “Auto On”

With these buttons, it is clear that when you simply want to turn the machine on, you press the “On/Off” button. And if you want to program the machine to turn on at a certain time in the morning, you press “Program” then choose the “Hour” and “Minute” that you desire. Then you press “Auto On,” and everything is done. I especially like that there are separate hour and minute buttons. Another feature which is immediately clear when you press the “Auto On” button, is that it displays the time that the machine is set to turn on. So if you forget what time you set the machine for, there is an easy way to find that information.

Bad Design: Jewelry Box

This jewelry box, while pretty, is unintuitive to use. On the front of the box, there are drawers. There appear to be 4 drawers, but in fact, only 3 of them are functional.

The top drawer is a faux drawer: when I try to pull on the handle to open it, there is no drawer to pull out.

I understand that the designer of the box wanted consistency in the box’s design, but adding a handle to a faux drawer is not a useful feature, and in fact, leads to a lot of confusion when operation the box.

Further, the sides of the jewelry box open up, so that necklaces may hang. But there is no handle that informs the user of this feature. Instead of adding a superfluous handle to a non-operational drawer, it would be useful to add a handle to the sides of the jewelry box, so that the user knows that the sides open.

I propose the following design for the jewelry box:

This design has no handle on the non-operational drawer, and has handles on the side doors, so that the user knows that the sides open up. This will make the jewelry box much more accessible, and less confusing.