#usabillity

[dasistux]

A small piece of information that makes me feel happy about my decision.

[usabilla-blog-blog]

Each month, we are adding new terms to our existing glossary of Usability and UX definitions; terms we deem useful, interesting or a mixture of the two!

[painfulux-blog-blog]

Vacuum cleaners were designed for people with short hair.

Culprit: Vacuum cleaners.

Guilty of:  Inability to handle long hair without forcing people to do extra work. 

If you or someone in your house has long hair, you have probably at some point in your life experienced the unfortunate task of unclogging a drain or cleaning out a hair filled rolling vacuum brush.  I, like many people, learned from an early age how to combat these inconveniences of long hair:

I put a cover on the bathroom drain to catch hairs before they get into the pipe. 

I make sure to throw away loose strands after I brush.  

And, I spend the 15 minutes painful minutes with a razor cutting out hairs wrapped around my vacuum's rolling brush so that the motor doesn't burn.

Yes, these are just some of the mundane tasks that we long-haired people have had to learn to deal with in order to support our desire to have a luxurious head of hair.

I always thought these little tendencies were healthy habits and a fact of life.  Until the other month, that is, when I found myself purchasing a broom to scrap hair off my carpet just so that I could avoid getting more hair caught in my vacuum.  Why the hell was I cleaning the carpet twice? And why hasn't anyone solved this problem yet?  What kind of short haired, pet fur, and cereal obsessed vacuum cleaning world is this?

That's when I realized that despite all the technological advances we have in new vacuum cleaners today, it seems like the Hoovers, Dysons, and Sharks of the world are more concerned with sucking up nuts and bolts over solving my everyday problem of long hair getting twisted up into that god damned rolling brush.  

Take for example, my friend's Hoover WindTunnel Air that I borrowed the other day.  It's a vacuumer's dream come true.  After pushing this fine piece of machinery just 10 sq feet around my apartment I discovered that I had to empty out the dust bin because it somehow sucked up a shit ton of skin cells and dirt that I didn't even know existed.  But, you know what?  I didn't care.  It only took a walk to the trash bin and a push of a button to empty it out.  Easy as cake.  Every tube, every attachment, every filter, every piece of the thing opens or slips on with just a simple squeeze of a clasp or push of a button.  It was one of the best vacuum cleaners I ever used...until I flipped it over to clean out the brush.  Locked away behind four Phillips head screws, the brush was the ONLY thing in the vacuum that didn't come out.  Not so perfect of a vacuum cleaner after all!  So what did I do?  I accepted my fate and spent the next 15 minutes with a dirty vacuum cleaner across my lap cutting away at long strands of hair wrapped around a dusty vacuum brush.

Food for thought:

The world would be a lot more simple for us long-haired folk if the vacuum geniuses of the world would just stop focusing so much on sucking up nuts and bolts and instead figure out how to get the benefits of rolling brush to clean carpet without the pain of cleaning out long strands of hair.  Why shouldn't we be able to benefit from a clean carpet as well?  Some easy first steps:

Make it easier to remove the rolling brush.  Cleaning the brush would not be so painful if it didn't require a screw driver to remove or the owner to lay on the floor with a scissor in hand.  I know there are models without rollers, but they just don't cut it on a carpet.

Investigate designs with retractable bristles.  The hardest part of removing hair is maneuvering the razor/scissor around the dozens of bristle heads.  If there was a way to retract the bristles and pull off the hair in one fair sweep, I would be one very happy woman.  :)

Until then, let us all suffer with our long-haired friends and family, together.

[basl]

apparently splash screens are super-vampires that can haunt users from beyond the grave

Jakob Nielsen, on iPad Usability