After trying—and failing—to find other people conspicuously struggling with a poorly designed object, I’ve found something that warrants this analysis: the machine in the lobby of my dorm that puts money on laundry cards. I’m not gonna pretend like I saw someone fighting with it and realized—just in time for this writing assignment—that it fit the bill. No, I’m writing about this piece of machinery because I know, from personal experience, that it’s really badly designed.
In order to use the laundry machines in the basement, you need to pay with something called a Hercules Card, which you’re given at the start of the school year. These cards are refilled at the machine in the lobby, and the machine looks like this:
The machine’s components have different affordances, and these seem functional enough. The two card slots that protrude from the machine afford card access and the two recessed card slots seem to be involved in some similarly card-related process. The number pad affords personal verification, presumably for something like a PIN number, and the four buttons toward the top of the machine afford interaction with the operating system. All of this seems fine on its own.
Enter the signifiers, and things break down. It’s unclear what each of the card slots is actually for, because the labels that usually signify which card goes where are either ambiguous or not there. Does the Amex/Mastercard/Visa label mean that the card slot directly above it is for payment method? Or do credit cards go into the card slot on the left, because aren’t credit cards sometimes called “smart cards”? No signifier indicates where the Hercules Card should go. And what on earth is that totally unlabelled card slot at the bottom-center of the machine? Is a third card going to come out of the machine that’ll later be “removed” on the right?
If I were to redesign this machine, I’d fix up the signifiers and label things clearly. That seems like an anticlimactic way to end this piece, but I don’t really see there being much more to it.