So I was sat on a plane recently going from Paris to Toronto when the big guy next to me started to play around with the touch screen entertainment system in the back of the seat. As he started to navigate around the system he seemed to get a bit lost (though it wasn’t that intuitive to be honest) so eventually he looks over and asks me for a bit of help using it. So I took him through how you choose movies, play a game etc. I had to bite my tongue however when he pointed at the big round coat hook in the back of the seat and asked “Is that the volume control”!
You just can’t help some people
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sometimes i wonder, though…if a person can’t recognise a coat-hook for what it is, could it also partially be the fault of the designer? whatever happened to user-centric design…
then again, there’s users and then there’s extremely dense users…
I think this is partially due to bad design also. To be fair the “coat hook” didn’t look like a traditional coat hook, it did look more like a volume control, but then probably on a plane you don’t want to have a sharp object like a coat hook in front of your face! I also think that having a touch screen system in the back of airplane seats is a bad idea. It’s fine if the passenger “touches” it gently, but if you have a passenger like the one above who hammers home every menu choice than it quickly becomes annoying for the passenger in front as their head gets constantly jolted forward!
Bren / 26/04/2004Why is there a coat hook on the back of an airplane seat anyways? Does someone need their coat handy to go for a smoke? There are better places to put your coat on an Atlantic flight (like the overhead compartment).
Despite the bad design of the hook, it shouldn’t even be there in the first place.
Good and bad designs are everwhere, but do they always need to be there in the first place?
I was only winding you up man
I knew it was a coat hook honest really
YOu said you wouldn’t tell anyone . . .
. . now wheres my coat gone !
big guy / 23/04/2004