why toilet paper roll on top vs bottom -- a usability geek's explanation

I use to not be able to articulate why the toilet paper roll was better to roll from the top vs the bottom but I recently came to a very Jakob Nielsen heuristics explanation that I can use the next time this age old debate comes up. ;)

Simply put, Heuristic 1: Visibility of System Status.
With the next paper roll sheet coming from the top, the user can quickly, visibly establish where to grab for the next sheet. Whereas roll on the bottom, user needs to look harder, maybe even rotate the roll a full cycle, and look for the sheet often hidden at the back of the roll, towards the wall instead of facing the user.
Why is the next sheet most often laying visibly at the top of the roll, you may ask? The physics of tearing a toilet paper roll at the 'average speed' when rolling from the top naturally lands the next sheet at the top of the roll. When roll is at the bottom, the physics of tearing often leaves the next sheet by the back of the wall and hence more hidden from toilet paper user.

Now because toilet paper user can easily see the state of where the next sheet is at when rolling from top, we also automatically earn the following heuristic: Error Prevention. We prevent the user from having to roll or look behind for the next tp sheet to tear as again it is most often visible at the top of the roll.

Aren't Nielsen's heuristics so much fun when applied to non software contexts?! :)

Rolling on Traffic Stop Signs

I hate getting traffic tickets; it's not that I don't want to be a safe driver, there are just a lot of usability issues with driving. Driving is a great example where very often the user is not at fault.

Case in point: the 2 times I've gotten a speeding ticket were both unintentional; on one of these tickets, I even had my then 50+ year old mom look out for the speed limit sign with me. I remember being on the empty, many lane highway, car set on cruise, yet not being able to spot a speed limit sign. At one point of the search, I thought I saw a sign though I missed it as I was trying to watch where I was going ahead of me and also trying to catch the small blurred numbers on the sign at the far right.
Er, Fitt's law right? My eyes were trying to focus on 2 things ~90' apart, plus the emotional stress of trying to drive in a highway with 2 family members I wanted to ensure the safety of and all my packed stuff crowded high around them as I make the long distance drive from upstate NY to Pittsburgh.

Recently, I got another ticket for "rolling" on a stop sign. I know, it should just be ingrained in me to stop completely at a stop sign and I am at fault here, though wouldn't it be nice and helpful if there was more of an incentive around stopping at a stop sign?

Before I sound too disagreeable, I marvel in a lot of the great tricks used by the transportation system to make driving safer -- the sloped highways in LA make the steering wheel turn mostly on itself, the intricate but often very sensible reasons to exiting and entering a freeway -- i.e. the extra lane to pad the incoming traffic, to name a few.

And since it seems I cannot hope for autonomous vehicles just yet -- including the lack of a good business case: the insurance cost of a car failing may not work in the American capitalist system whereas the technology may be sustainable in more socialist and communist countries -- I suppose it would be more productive to dream about how to improve the rolling-on-a-stop-sign phenomena.

The first thought that came to mind was using a blinking red light instead of the stop signs. They personally are more effective to me because they remind me of the traffic lights where I am consistently reminded of the consequences of not stopping at a red light -- the possibility of hitting oncoming traffic from the other direction.  The downside to this is we may overuse the red light signal and drivers will learn to dismiss a blinking red light as a lot do now with stop signs. Without additional studies, I cannot be certain that learned dismissal may not be an issue, though my intuition is to not overuse a very important, life saving signal.

Another method then, though negatively rewarding, is to threaten drivers with the camera flash. If drivers know that  cameras are installed in all intersections, including stop signed intersections, perhaps this would motivate drivers to truly stop. There's something personally less stressful about an 'objective' computer telling me that I did something wrong than a policeman flashing his roof lights and confronting me with my mistake. I assume the traffic computers are rational and hence can admit my fault more easily than having an urge to argue with another 'subjective' human being that no sir, I did indeed 'stop' enough to know it was safe to move onward.

In any case, the transportation space always intrigues me. There are so many fun usability challenges to optimize for! This could be a full semester project which the under budget government could fund in the academia and surely come up with, in a short period of time, many great ideas.

DIY Red Envelopes

We're heading to a Lunar New Year party tomorrow and what do you know, we don't have red envelopes and we're in the US; I can't just go to the neighborhood convenient store and pick up a pack. So what do I do? Look through my hoard of craft material from all sorts of resources I've collected from and make my very own!

I scrounged out exactly 2 sheets of red packing tissue paper, folded them ~6 times and ended up with wintered - red envelopes, aka, red envelopes that appear to be wearing a winter red fluffy thick jacket! At least the fragile tissue paper seems less fragile now with all its layers. Very appropriate for this year's chilly winter. ;)

Hope the kids will love them!

 

I was also going to calligraphy the writing but alas, it's been too long since my last calligraphy class... I spy a kitty paw, do you? :)

Cooper Design Challenge

I took a stab at Cooper's Design Challenge and it was pretty fun! I was especially excited about Part 2 - designing a tourist service in popular tourist destinations. I also found it a bit more challenging since Part 1, on the other hand, was to redesign the Insert/Format table ribbon feature in Microsoft Word. I being very familiar with the feature, having worked on Ribbon Hero -- a concept test at Office Labs seeing whether we can use games to help people learn about features in the Office ribbon to increase their productivity -- and just using the Office suite probably more frequently than some people, Part 1 one was a lot more 'straight forward'.

The recommended number of hours to spend on the exercises was 1 and 2 hours respectively. LocalGuide also had a 60+ page interviews which I only went through 3 interviews. The interviews were really interesting though! If you're into reading about what people do when they travel, it's pretty insightful. I forgot about the people who traveled with children and I wasn't sure whether tour books were still popular among people -- I love tour books myself, embarrassingly, especially the ones with a ton of pictures :)

My design for the LocalGuide was purposefully unrealistic. I came to a form factor that just excited me and have been wanting to design for awhile so I just took a stab at it. There are a lot of issues that I didn't resolve at the end of the exercise and perhaps I will resolve as days go by and they haunt me in my dreams ;)

Here's the instructions to the design challenge: Cooper Design Challenge
Click for the slideshow of my design process: