Comments on: The Invisible Interface

By: mr_noodle

mr_noodle — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:17:49 +0000

Hi Suresh,

You raise an interesting point but my experience indicates that things tends to go the other way. Donald Knuth’s quote about premature optimization is appropriate here. Interfaces create legacies. Most of the time, you can improve performance without breaking everything that uses the product. Change the interface, and you risk making users re-learn the new interface or re-tool things that use it (such as a programming API). I think it’s more important to get the interface right earlier on than the efficiency.

In a future article, I’ll talk more about this but there’s a lot that can be done to improve performance without changing the interface. The user mostly cares about what is being done, not how your program or device does it. Those are the engineer’s problems and the better interface is the one that can hide all the little bumps and ugly bits in the implementation. It’s extra work but I think the mindset shouldn’t be that it’s a problem so much as a challenge.

By: Suresh

Suresh — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:43:55 +0000

Good post.My thought on this problem is like this.
When we solve a problem through technology, do we probably not care a lot about the efficiency in the beginning, and make it a little too easy for the end user? Because, at a later point in time, we are forced to solve that problem of inefficiency, and by then we are used to very simplistic interfaces, that anything we have to do in extra, is considered a problem.
My 2 cents.

By: mr_noodle

mr_noodle — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:10:08 +0000

Thanks for that info. I’ve seen the two button toilets in Spain and the UK. I don’t remember whether or not they were in France and I have yet to go to Germany. It looks like I’m going to have to make a more extensive tour of Europe’s toilets.

Interesting about all the variations over there. So, if you don’t stop the water, does it run indefinitely? Also, is it obvious which toilet is which when you encounter one or do you have to fiddle with it to figure it out?

By: Berle

Berle — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 06:56:30 +0000

Most toilets in Germany have two buttons. One for flushing and a second one for stopping. Some have one button and stop flushing when you press that second time, but those tend to work more unreliable. Another variant: One button that’s a kind of a toggle switch that you flip to one direction to flush. It toggles back once it’s done, but you can flip back sooner to stop flushing.

Seems there’s a market over here for water-saving toilets. The toilet vendors are creative.

By the way… I have never seen the variant you are describing, but hey…

By: mr_noodle

mr_noodle — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:50:44 +0000

Well, if that’s what people want, then I’ll have to consider it. Personally, I’m just content being able to work the words “bare asses” in a blog post.

By: Paul Robinson

Paul Robinson — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:42:44 +0000

Great post!

I think, for consistency, at least one toilet reference should appear in each piece in the series…..