Automatic sinks, hand driers, soap dispensers, and more may seem like a dream come true, but this is not always the case. The construction of such a contraption is very simple – you need to create the main function of the device itself (um, duh – I hope that designers can at least do this part, or we’re doomed), then you need to find the optimal sensor to use by considering how a user would operate your product, and finally create a system that interprets detections from the sensor to appropriately control the main function. But it doesn’t just need a sensor to detect the event after which said device is activated, no – it needs a sensor that IS PLACED APPROPRIATELY! Countless times, I’ve encountered things like auto-starting sinks with sensors too far behind the water ejection port itself, and pointed in the wrong angle – really, how hard could it be to rotate a sensor to face the place where the user will put their hands?
I’m traveling in Southeast Asia right now, and while the afformentioned problem is rarely present in such devices in my hometown, here, TONS of sinks and dries are faulty. A user approaches a hand drier, for example, and puts their hands into the area of the drier to turn it on. As they don’t yet know where exactly the warm air will emerge from (although of course they could bend down and look underneath to examine the hardware, but how many people actually do this? 0.05%? Well, I’m part of that .05 percentile!), their hands are spread out, so the malplaced sensor still turns on the drier. Then, the user feels that their hands aren’t directly in the path of the stream of air, so they rearrange their hands, but now they are out of range of the bad sensor, and the machine shuts off! Can you imagine how utterly frustrating that is when the work-around is so painstakingly unefficient?
Really, creators of these products, are you kidding me? Doesn’t anyone have some common sense? Don’t you test designs of products before mass producing them to fix such flaws? This issue is clearly a human error, because the designer couldn’t figure out how exactly the user is supposed to use the device. The optimal design lets a user dry their hands swiftly and efficiently by placing both of them under the stream, not with one hand triggering the sensor while the other dries, nor with both hands alligned so that the sensor is barely triggered, but the dried area is smaller.
Really, people, this is just unacceptable. You already have the sensor trigger system part down. Maybe you should place it optimally now, so that your attempt to make your device automatic and thus easier for people to utilise doesn’t turn your product into an unusable piece of aluminum? Geez.
Filed under: Feature, Rant, Technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: automatic, automatic sensor, bad design, hand drier, hardware, IR, malfunctioning sensor, Rant, retarded products, sensors, sink
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