Scribem

Epic Fail

I’m sure there have been substantial amounts of time and money invested into the design of toilet cubicles. I mean, these things are ubiquitous and have been around for a good deal of time. There’s gotta be some sort of usability studies on this topic. Surely anybody in the building construction industry would have no problems coming up with a functional toilet cubicle that allows you to get your job done, without fuss, and away you go.

Well, apparently not.

Before AMP (the building site managers) got around to their brilliant idea of renovating our perfectly good and functional toilets, there were no complaints about them (other than people whinging about hygiene-related matters).

That’s how things should be.

However, a few months ago, AMP decided that their perfectly functional bathrooms needed renovating. So, for two weeks we had to take the fire stairs to go to another floor to use the bathroom. That, in itself, wasn’t really that much of a problem — provided that you’re not disabled/handicapped and hence can’t use the stairs, and really really needed to go.

So what did they accomplish after two weeks of renovating the bathroom space? On cursory inspection, it appeared that all they did was to replace the cubicle dividers and the doors. Apparently, they also installed some water-saving device for their part in looking after the environment.

If that’s all they did, well then it’s just a minor inconvenience. The optimistic part of me reminds me that at least I got some extra exercise ferrying my water tank up some flights of stairs, and back down again.

But no. That would be too simple. Too convenient.

See, what they did was to subtly relocate the toilet paper dispenser to be slightly closer to the door. The end result was that you can no longer just walk in and close the door behind you, as the dispenser would be in your way — you need to somehow straddle the toilet so that you can get enough clearance for the door to swing behind you to close.

Pure genius. They managed to come up with a regression in usability when it came to toilet cubicles. Who would have thought that’s even possible?

Now, engineers are a funny bunch of people. They can pick up the tiniest inefficiencies and flaws in design/implementation, and make a whopping great deal out of them. The fact that the renovators had declared the renovations as finished, whilst leaving behind their incompetent handiwork, can be interpreted as a personal offense to an engineer.

And so, there would have undoubtedly been a number of formal complaints filed against building management for getting in the way of engineers… doing their business, so to speak.

That was months ago, so fast forward to this week — I found that the dispensers have been relocated again! I guess they must have had enough of people whinging about the difficulty in closing the door, so they moved the dispenser to accommodate this. For the first time in several months, I can actually now walk into the cubicle and close the door behind me without having to mount the toilet. Huzzah!

Or not.

Because they moved the dispenser to be next to the toilet on the left-hand side such that when you sat down, the dispenser gets in the way of your shoulder. Now, I’m not exactly the most portly person and this is already annoying. I can’t imagine what it would be like for some of our more corpulent workmates. Furthermore, it is left as an exercise to the reader to determine the impact of such an impediment to the levering process involved in “cleaning up” (particularly if you’re right-handed).

For a diagram summarising the evolution of the cubicle, see Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 — Evolution of the toilet cubicle (diagram not to scale)

As Fig. 1 clearly shows, the original layout allowed the user to comfortably walk into to the cubicle, close the door behind him, and get on with the important work.

Simple and efficient.

Along came the renovators and moved the dispenser forward just enough so that you cannot maneuver yourself into any gap other than to straddle the toilet in order to close the door.

Fail.

The dispenser was then moved again to be on the opposite side and right next to the toilet. This configuration clearly discriminates against people with generous BMIs. Without going into too much detail, such a configuration also gets in the way of post-business hygiene.

Epic fail.