Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

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.