Good usability is a feature you may not even notice
After weeks of 530am starts with my daughter last year, and living where the local cafes don’t open ’til 800am, I couldn’t face another 3 hour stint before my first coffee, and so took myself off to the nearest purveyor of fine espresso makers, and as luck would have it, picked up a Saeco machine for a great price. Not only did it pay for itself inside about 3 months, and make a great coffee, it had a design feature I only discovered by accident recently.
While expensive machines are plumbed, machines like this one need to be topped up with water. You can imagine that trying to use the machine after it had run dry might be pretty bad on the internals — a bit like running out of coolant in your car’s radiator.
So a challenge for the designers would have been to work out how to ensure users don’t let the water run dry. Of course, you could add electronics to measure water level and giver feedback — say an orange light when water levels are too low, or even simply shut off the device when there isn’t enough water — but you can see that these would add cost, more potential for something to break, or a big uptick in service costs — “it just stopped working” phone calls would probably increase dramatically.
As mentioned, I only discovered by accident when I recently went to thoroughly clean the machine the clever trick the designers used to get users to keep the water level sufficient. The water receptacle appears to be empty, even when it is 1/3 full! The bottom third of the tank is recessed into the machine. So, when you look at the water level, it seems to be getting close to empty, even when it has over a third of its capacity left.
Robert Hoekmann spoke of forgiving design in his keynotes at our recent conferences, where an application is designed so that in effect you can’t make a mistake. While you can still let this machine boil dry, with little fuss, or expense to the manufacturer the designers have made it much harder for users to do so. Beautiful design.
A good example of forgiving products. There are water cookers who use the same principle. The see through window for water level starts a bit higher then the bottom, so the chance of burning the cooker (without water) is smaller.
But I am still not sure if this is good usability, you can still ruin your coffee maker. I mean, I like the point your are making and it is sure a nice usability touch, but it doesn’t fully prevent you from destroying your cooker. If you are busy and doing multiple things at the time I don’t think you will notice the water level.
Good article, thanks.
A good example of forgiving products. There are water cookers who use the same principle. The see through window for water level starts a bit higher then the bottom, so the chance of burning the cooker (without water) is smaller.
But I am still not sure if this is good usability, you can still ruin your coffee maker. I mean, I like the point your are making and it is sure a nice usability touch, but it doesn’t fully prevent you from destroying your cooker. If you are busy and doing multiple things at the time I don’t think you will notice the water level.
Hi Niels,
while you can indeed eventually boil the machine dry, because of the way it works, it’s much less likely.
It only uses water while you are making a single cup of coffee, or steaming milk — so you are actively using the machine while water is being used. You’d probably have to make 10 coffees or more with no visible water in the machine before it boils dry.
Im actually not sure what happens if it does go dry — to precious a device to find out!
john
Hi John, thanks for your quick reply, I agree with you
The machines look nice and make great coffee, I tried it once.
It is really good you can still make 10 coffees when you don’t see the water level so chances are pretty slim your machine will run out of water.
But the price, quite expensive, also in use. I write a lot about these kind of usability problems with products, feel free to check it out. I am going to follow this blog closely!
Hi Niels,
you can buy espresso makers, at least in Australia, from about $50 and up. The reality is, until you start paying say $200 or more, they probably won’t last long, nor make a very good coffee.
The good thing about coffee makers is, if you drink coffee regularly, they pay for themselves quite quickly. For example, where I live, its $4 for a large coffee — so I save about $3 a day after coffee and other costs by making my own. So, you can pay off even a quite expensive machine in 4 – 6 months (much quicker if more than one person in the household drinks coffee).
After that, it effectively pays you to make coffee!
Now, that’s nice design.