The Toilet Seat Cover - A Case Study

One of the biggest challenges our local technology industry (and truly, all industry!) faces in our country is the lack of attention to quality and a shockingly frequent absence of good design. I don’t want to get into a philosphical debate about what constitutes “good design” and what are the 9 guiding principles and 11 succesful habits of good designers… let’s just go with a functional, bare bones definition… We’ll call the design of a product “good” when i) it does what it is supposed to ii) for as long as it’s supposed to iii) under the conditions it was intended for iv) by people of the level of skill it was intended for v) without any significant degradation in performance or functionality over the period of its intended use vi) while, aesthetically, looking “good” doing all the above.

Now that that’s out of the way, examples of poor design are all over the place in your neighbourhood. Examples of good design, on the other hand, are probably extremely difficult to come by. Step into your bathroom, loo, restroom, ghusalkhana or toilet. Whatever you call it. Look at the toilet seat cover… that’s the perfect case study for poor design. If your toilet seat cover is like most toilet seat covers in the country, it is made of plastic, matches the colour of your WC. A smaller, flat piece of plastic with hinges is affixed to the ceramic WC, while the toilet seat cover is in turn connected to this hinge with metal “pins” that allow the hinge to move.

If your toilet seat cover is like most in the country, it has probably come loose and moves around left to right. If it’s been in use for a year or more, the metal pins in the hinges have probably become thoroughly rusted, causing rust stains in their immediate locality. If your bathroom has a window that lets sunlight in, most likely the plastic used to mould the seat cover has also experienced some discolouration so it no longer quite matches. It may have some hairline cracks as well. Finally, the metal pin was probably too thin and by now, the plastic channel it was running through has probably become brittle and at least one hinge is now non-functional. Either the plastic has broken or the pin has slipped out or something of that nature.

This is an example of poor design across almost every dimension of our definition. We all know these toilet seat covers suck. Yet, they are all over the place. The reason that’s the case is because as a society, we’ve developed a tolerance for poor design. Sliding the seat cover back, dealing with the broken hinge, not caring about the discolouration, being fine with the rust stains… that’s all part of the grand compromise. After all, how many times are you going to complain or feel badly about bad design?

But we’ve paid a price for this quiet neglect. Because we put up with poor design, many of us think that other will too. The people we build products for , for instance. In Information Technology industries like Hardware and Software, especially when dealing with export markets, that is absolutely not the case. How do you get a crack QA team from a group of people, the majority of whom, have seldom experienced products that have really good design? It’s an exposure thing… and for an organization, it can quickly become a DNA thing.

So think about this the next time you design something. Make it beautiful, make it cool and make it functional. Put some extra thought into how it will weather over time. If it is a physical object, think about how someone will hold it, what it will feel like when held, how heavy or light it should be. Every attribute of an object is affected by its design. Surround yourself with stuff that works, and stuff that’s designed well. It can be an inspirational exercise before you launch into a QA cycle on that Web 2.0 product you did for your Norwegian customer…