IH01-Hong How Quek

From IEOR 170 Spring 2007

[edit] GOOD DESIGN

The product(shown in photo/sketch formats) is a chin-up bar. What sets it apart from other chin-up bars is its uniquely designed curved arms that serve two purposes:

Firstly, these curved arms give the chin-up bar portability, as the bar no longer has to be permanently attached to the door frame with screws. The curved arms are specially shaped to hook onto the molding of the door frame, and the user’s body weight will create a cantilever effect that helps to bind the device securely in his doorway without the need for a single bolt (see Figure 1 below). This gives the user added convenience, as he can easily disassemble the bar and bring it to wherever he wants to do chin-ups at.

Secondly, the curved arms give the bar added functionality and makes it a versatile fitness machine that assists the user with doing both sit-ups and push-ups as well. When placed on the floor, the user can press on the elevated curved arms to perform deep push-ups (see Figure 2). However, when it is placed at the bottom of the door frame (and tucked snugly to it, such as in Figure 3), the curved arms elevate the horizontal bar so that the user can place his feet underneath the bar do to sit-ups and abdominal exercises.

Photo, Chin-Up Bar

Sketch, Chin-Up Bar

Figure 1: Chin-Ups

Figure 2: Push-Ups

Figure 3: Sit-Ups

[edit] BAD DESIGN

The Yosemite Bug Bus website provides information about its tour packages to various locations such as Yosemite and San Francisco. When the user first enters the website, he is confronted with a clickable image map showing signs labeled with different locations, as well as a mailbox labeled “e-mail” (see Figure 1 below). These affordances lead the user into thinking that clicking on the different signs will take them to another page with detailed tour information for each location, while clicking on the mailbox will open up an e-mail message. The user clicks on the sign/mailbox, but finds out the hyperlinks are faulty and decides to leave the page.

The bad design here is having the image map take up the user’s entire viewing space, because this misleads the user into thinking that there is no other useful information on the page. In reality, this is not true, because despite the faulty links, the user can still access tour information simply by scrolling down! (see Figure 2) However, most users will not do so, and the company loses potential customers as a result. This bad design is due to a lack of foresight by the designer, who failed to consider how his users may leave the page (and miss out on useful information further down the page) if his links ended up being faulty.

An easy way to solve the problem will be to remedy the faulty hyperlinks in the image map. However, I feel a better design will be to use a more conventional main page layout as shown in Figure 3 below. The company banner is at the top of the page, and should not take up more than one-third of the viewing space. This will give the users instant viewing access to the “meat” of the website—that is the information about the various tour packages that are available (in the bottom right frame). The links to the various tours, grouped by locations, are placed in the bottom left frame. Clicking on these links will scroll down the bottom right page to the selected tour package.

This design not only provides a bird’s-eye view of the website structure, but more importantly ensures that even if the hyperlinks were faulty, the user will not miss out on critical tour package information as he can manually scroll down the page himself.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3