The spectacularly poor design of this Avalon water dispenser

I attended a publishing conference last week in which many of the meeting rooms were provided with the Avalon water dispenser you see here. Based on the buttons and displays, you’d probably imagine that this device dispenses hot, room-temperature, and cool water. And it does.

But whatever you guess next about it, you’re probably wrong.

Field testing

All I wanted was a cup of cold water.

The first thing I did was too peer at the markings on the front, seeking which one would dispense cold water. The little white cup icons, in particular, seem to promise that if you could somehow push them, water would come out. I thought that’s what the arrows were telling me.

They’re not buttons. They’re not indicators. They’re just decoration.

Eventually, I gave up on the front and started to examine the buttons on the top. I pushed the right-hand button while holding a cup under the center of the underhang, above the drain. The water came out all right, but not from the center of the dispenser where I’d held my cup. I got a wet hand but no water. I then realized that the only possibility was that the three buttons dispense water through three different nozzles, and you need to put your cup under the nozzle 12 inches or so directly below the button you’re pressing. Once you figure that out, you can get the water you were hoping for.

I felt like an idiot, having been bamboozled by a simple water dispenser.

But as I was standing next to it with my cup of cold water, a woman came up and started peering at the machine. She attempted in vain to press the cup images on the front, discovered the buttons on the top, pressed one, started spraying water all over, and eventually realized where she needed to place the cup to succeed. Luckily for her and anyone else in spraying distance, she hadn’t pressed the boiling water button before generating the virtual fountain.

Apparently I wasn’t the only idiot.

Immediately after that, a second person approached the dispenser and replicated the same sequence of steps, including getting water on their shoes.

Now we had a small but significant sample. A reasonable hypothesis based on three observations is that editors, publishers, and vendors serving the book industry are unable to successfully operate a water dispenser. But I reject this hypothesis, because I’ve generally found such folks to be well-read, intelligent, and creative individuals. If you understand the arcane processes of book publishing, getting a glass of water should be easy.

An alternate hypothesis is that this dispenser has a design flaw that will mislead most first-time users. Perhaps the problem is not the water-dispensing skills of writing and publishing professionals, but a device whose design is confusing.

Calling Don Norman

If you’ve read any of Don Norman’s brilliant books on design, you recognize the problem here. We expect the pictures of cups above the nozzles to control the nozzles. When we finally find the buttons on the top, we think they’ll make water come out in the center of the dispenser. These things make sense based on our experience, but not for this device.

Design is hard, but testing can help. Given my small but compelling sample, I’d guess that if the Avalon folks had set up a prototype of their dispenser in a place where people could use it, they would see exactly what I saw: that it confuses people and wastes water.

This would give them a chance to redesign the device in a way that intuitively makes sense to people.

I’ve done plenty of product testing in my time. You give people a task. You watch them try to accomplish it. You ask they how they think it works, and you don’t help them (because in the field, you won’t be there to help them). If they’re confused, you go back and think again about how your mental model of the system differs from what they were expecting. You revise what you created to make it work in a more intuitive way. Then you test again. You don’t go into production until people can intuitively “get” it.

I don’t know how many Avalon water dispensers like this there are in the world. But I do know this: For each one, there are plenty of people with wet hands and water on their shoes. A little testing could have fixed that.