Category: Simple Things

Garments that are folded for shipping are often held together with metal pins. But what do you do with these pins when you unpack a shirt or blouse, etc., at a store to try it on?

During a recent visit to a clothing store I noticed a great solution to this problem.

This pin holder is mounted to the inside wall of the changing booth. Placed right next to the booth’s door, you can hardly miss it, and thanks to the big, simple label, it is easy to tell what this device is for even when it doesn’t hold any pins.

The pins are held in place by a magnetic strip, which makes the pins adhere flatly to the mounting plate. As a result, it is much less fiddly to pick one up than grabbing one from a disorderly pile, and the risk of pricking your finger while doing so is reduced as well.

If a pin happens to fall off the magnetic strip, it will likely drop into the bent-up lip at the bottom of the mounting plate, instead of falling onto the floor where someone could step on them.

The bent-up bottom lip may also help prevent someone, who inadvertently bumps against the pin holder, from pricking herself.

Thanks to a thoughtful designer’s work, this device lets customers dispose of pins safely and conveniently. And because it collects all pins in one location, it also means less hassle for the store’s personnel when picking them up.

As part of a regular health check, I went to the hospital for a scheduled blood test this morning. Surprisingly, when I arrived, the lab was closed. Or so it seemed to me.

The door to the lab reception room was shut, and a sign mounted next to it stated that if the lab reception was closed, one should press the button on the adjacent intercom panel to get help.

I went ahead and pushed that button, heard a ringing tone through the intercom’s speaker, and waited; and waited; and waited some more. Until I heard that tremendously annoying sound of someone picking up at the other end, and immediately hanging up again. I found that rather peculiar and quite confusing.

I knew I was in the right place, because the sign above the door clearly stated “Laboratory.” I also knew I was there at the right time, because I had an appointment, whose time and date I had double-checked.

So I pushed that button again; heard the ringing tone again; and waited again. And then, just to be sure, I decided to give the door a gentle push to see whether it was actually locked, or just closed.¹ I wish I could have seen the expression on my face when the door swung open without much effort.

What had gone wrong here?

One detail I have not mentioned yet, is that the door had one of those round knobs that (usually) cannot be rotated, and a safety door lock. My mental model of such a type of door — at least until today — says that if the door is closed, it is also locked, and that to unlock it, you must have the matching key. Which is a pretty accurate mental model, unless the specific door’s lock catch mechanism can be set to an “unlocked” position.

Consequently, just seeing this specific door made me assume that it was actually locked, and it did not occur to me to even try pushing it open.

I feel that the explanation on the sign further reinforced my assumption, because it emphasized that, at times, that door is, in fact, locked. To fix this, I’d suggest adding a single sentence to the instructions panel: instead of “If the lab reception is closed…” it should say “Please push the door open and enter without waiting for you to be called. If the lab reception is closed…”.

The difference is this: the first quote can be interpreted as “If the door appears to be closed/locked…”, whereas the second is closer to “Do check whether the door is open/unlocked. If not…”.

Ironically, the very moment that I left the lab through that door, another patient walked right in. What a shame that I could not observe them arriving at the door alone, so that they would not have seen the door being opened. It would have been interesting to see if they would have made the same “mistake” that I had made.

Sometimes, intelligent design helps users avoid mistakes, even though the original reasoning behind it had nothing to do with the mistake the user is about to make. Take fuel pump nozzles, for example.

Just recently, I had borrowed someone else’s car, and to show my thankfulness, I had volunteered to refuel the vehicle. At the gas station, I was a bit lost in thought when I grabbed the pump’s nozzle and placed it in the car’s fuel filler neck. Or, rather, tried to, because the nozzle wouldn’t fit.

As soon as I looked down at label identifying the type of fuel for that nozzle, I was glad it wouldn’t fit, because I was holding the wrong nozzle: the car I was about to refuel has a gasoline engine, but I had instinctively reached for the Diesel nozzle, because my own car runs on Diesel.

What prevented me from filling the car’s tank with the wrong type of fuel is that the Diesel nozzle has a slightly bigger diameter than the one for gasoline: an insert inside the car’s filler neck effectively reduces the inner diameter of the neck, so that, even though you can insert both nozzles into the wider top section of the filler neck, you can only fully insert the narrower nozzle for gasoline.

This design dates back to when unleaded gasoline was introduced in Germany. Pumps for unleaded fuel were equipped with nozzles sporting a smaller pipe diameter than those for leaded gasoline. In combination with the reduced inner diameter of the filler neck, this prevented drivers from filling up their cars with leaded gasoline, which would damage the catalytic converter, rendering it useless.

The nozzles for Diesel were not modified and retained a pipe diameter that was similar to the original, leaded gasoline nozzles. So, even though the original motivation for introducing a differently sized nozzle was about leaded vs. unleaded gas, and had nothing to do with Diesel vs. gasoline, it prevented me from filling up the borrowed car with the wrong type of fuel, which, in the worst case, might have caused major damage to the car’s engine.

As a neat extra, the insert in this car’s filler neck is equipped with a spring-loaded door that seals the pipe, and which is pushed aside when inserting the nozzle. This would prevent spilling fuel in case the driver would drive off after refueling without putting the filler cap back into place.

What’s more, if you take a closer look at the picture above, you can see that the designer also invested a lot of thought into the handling of the filler cap: by attaching it to the car with a cord, you cannot lose it or forget it at the gas station; while refueling, the cap can be placed in a round hole on top of the door’s hinge, so it does not get in the way when inserting the nozzle (which sometimes happens when the cap holder is located on the inside of the fuel filler door); and the bright green color of the inner part of the cap and the receptacle work as a highly visible reminder of where the cap belongs when refueling the car.