Usability – designing for people

OnOneMap.com is a great UK property search web site which raises the bar in its field. Call it a Web2.0 mashup if you must, this uses the excellent Google Maps API to give an expansive search/browse/drag experience which plots property locations right on the map.

The site also offers additional layers of information, including the location of supermarkets, schools and mobile phone masts. Of course OnOneMap just pulls all the data together, so when you click through on a property for details, you end up on the Estate Agent’s site, or another property search site where the experience starts to rapidly degrade.

There are a few sites doing this now, but OnOneMap.com is has been around for a while and is probably the best example of its type. This is a big leap forward in usability and a great tool for finding properties and researching the area. I just hope Estate Agents embrace this kind of initiative and participate fully in it.

Incidentally, I might have picked up on this site earlier if it had a .co.uk domain – I suspect the .com domain made me dismiss it as US-centric.

Hand dryers are nasty, environmentally unsound and surprisingly unhygienic machines. Dyson’s Airblade is the antithesis of this.

I really like it when someone takes a product which has evolved little for decades, turns it on its head and comes up with something substantially better in almost every way.

Airblade uses significantly less power than a conventional dryer, dries hands quicker and is considerably more hygienic. Oh, and it’s British too.


So, why are conventional dryers so bad?

1. They use a lot of power, typically 2000W or more. They also use very little of that energy to actually dry hands and most of it to heat the room, which if air conditioned, wastes even more energy cooling the room down. This is not very green.
2. Hygiene is questionable: airborne bacteria gets sucked into the machine – where it can multiply in a nice warm environment – and is then blasted back out on to the user’s hands.

The only negative I can see with the Airblade – and this could be a big problem – is that it needs to be used in a different way to a conventional dryer: you place your open hands in the slot and raise them slowly up through a sheet of air which acts like a squeegee.

For obvious reasons, I have not hung around to watch how people use a Dyson Airbade, but I would guess that despite the clear and simple instructions on the front, quite a few people will get confused and attempt to wave their hands around in the slot.

I have no connection with Dyson, but I hope people see the light and Airblade takes off.