Story of two springs
There are at least 6-7 pairs of scissors in my house. I am not sure why we need so many of them. May be some of them belonged to my ex-flatmates. I don't even remember buying few among the rest. I guess we still don't have enough of them as I saw an altogether new pair in a drawer. My wife says that she probably got it from the school stationary and forgot to return it back before the start of the vacation.
The new pair has something novel about it which caught my immediate attention. There is a retractable cantilever spring between the two handles. Once deployed, it helps in automatically opening up the blades ensuring a little less effort by our fingers while using the scissor. A wonderful micro-innovation for customer delight.
I took some time to contemplate about the design of this additional feature which is something that users don't usually expect from a pair of scissor. At times, new additional features in an everyday thing do not go down well with users who are accustomed to a particular way of using the thing. But in this case, there doesn't seem to be any use-case where it would cause any inconvenience to the users. A small feature but it tells us few important lessons about design.
First of all, this new feature doesn't interfere with the existing functionality of the scissor. If the spring is not manually deployed (the feature may even go unnoticed by few), then the scissor would continue to work as any normal scissor. This is important as people have inertia. Even if a new design can improve the ease of use, people would still rather prefer the old way of doing things. Not all like to learn new ways no matter how trivial.
Secondly, if the spring breaks down due to whatever reason (fatigue, bad handling etc.), then also it would hardly make any difference to usual functioning of the scissor. The designer must ensure that the breaking down of "delight" feature should no way make the user feel that the overall functionality of concerned thing is impacted.
Third, the cantilever spring hardly adds to the cost of the scissor. As a designer, if you are adding a new feature that user didn't explicitly demand for and is more of a "delight" feature, you rather ensure that the cost increase is almost negligible.
While on the subject of spring, let me briefly discuss another spring implementation that I came across recently which, despite being innovative, leaves few drawbacks.
In our office, they have renovated the conference rooms with new center tables. For each table, they have added a lowered center box in the middle with a lid cover that houses electrical and LAN sockets. The lid is a robust metallic flap hinged on one side and ensures the aesthetics of the table. For ease of opening the lid, the hinges are totally free to rotate. This introduces another design challenge. There is a potential use-case where the lid free end would make loud noise as it closes down under free fall when someone just carelessly flaps it. To overcome this, the designers have added soft pads on the surface with which the lid would make contact when closed. They have also added two studs mounted on a spring-damper system below the lid that would dampen the free fall of the lid.
One paper, the design looks great expect that they made one minor flaw. The stud with spring-damper system is a separable component from the overall system. One can easily take out the component out of its socket and play with it. And given the office environment, within a couple of months, all the studs have gone missing!
At times, designers design a feature with specific functionality in mind and define the use-cases and failure modes based on them. What they fail to appreciate is that the users may come up with all together new set of functionalities for the same given feature. The use-cases and failure modes arises out the them are totally ignored. Same has happened here. The designers failed to appreciate that the stud with spring-damper system can also be used as a toy. And by making them easily separable from the lid system, they made it easier for the users to play with this toy.
What could had been is that they could had made the stud with spring-damper inseparable from the overall system. This also has some potential issue with it. What if the spring-damper breaks down and starts to interfere with the functioning of the lid ? (Second learning discussed in above scissor case). This can also be overcome by adding a locking feature to the separable assembly that would make it hard for the users to play with their "toy".
Anyway, the main take-away from this second spring story is that for any new feature, the functionality that the designers intend are not the only ones. Users can come up with their own set of functionalities for the same feature. And it is the duty of the designers to ensure that they try to estimate all such potential functionalities and cover them up in their design considerations.
The new pair has something novel about it which caught my immediate attention. There is a retractable cantilever spring between the two handles. Once deployed, it helps in automatically opening up the blades ensuring a little less effort by our fingers while using the scissor. A wonderful micro-innovation for customer delight.
I took some time to contemplate about the design of this additional feature which is something that users don't usually expect from a pair of scissor. At times, new additional features in an everyday thing do not go down well with users who are accustomed to a particular way of using the thing. But in this case, there doesn't seem to be any use-case where it would cause any inconvenience to the users. A small feature but it tells us few important lessons about design.
First of all, this new feature doesn't interfere with the existing functionality of the scissor. If the spring is not manually deployed (the feature may even go unnoticed by few), then the scissor would continue to work as any normal scissor. This is important as people have inertia. Even if a new design can improve the ease of use, people would still rather prefer the old way of doing things. Not all like to learn new ways no matter how trivial.
Secondly, if the spring breaks down due to whatever reason (fatigue, bad handling etc.), then also it would hardly make any difference to usual functioning of the scissor. The designer must ensure that the breaking down of "delight" feature should no way make the user feel that the overall functionality of concerned thing is impacted.
Third, the cantilever spring hardly adds to the cost of the scissor. As a designer, if you are adding a new feature that user didn't explicitly demand for and is more of a "delight" feature, you rather ensure that the cost increase is almost negligible.
While on the subject of spring, let me briefly discuss another spring implementation that I came across recently which, despite being innovative, leaves few drawbacks.
In our office, they have renovated the conference rooms with new center tables. For each table, they have added a lowered center box in the middle with a lid cover that houses electrical and LAN sockets. The lid is a robust metallic flap hinged on one side and ensures the aesthetics of the table. For ease of opening the lid, the hinges are totally free to rotate. This introduces another design challenge. There is a potential use-case where the lid free end would make loud noise as it closes down under free fall when someone just carelessly flaps it. To overcome this, the designers have added soft pads on the surface with which the lid would make contact when closed. They have also added two studs mounted on a spring-damper system below the lid that would dampen the free fall of the lid.
One paper, the design looks great expect that they made one minor flaw. The stud with spring-damper system is a separable component from the overall system. One can easily take out the component out of its socket and play with it. And given the office environment, within a couple of months, all the studs have gone missing!
At times, designers design a feature with specific functionality in mind and define the use-cases and failure modes based on them. What they fail to appreciate is that the users may come up with all together new set of functionalities for the same given feature. The use-cases and failure modes arises out the them are totally ignored. Same has happened here. The designers failed to appreciate that the stud with spring-damper system can also be used as a toy. And by making them easily separable from the lid system, they made it easier for the users to play with this toy.
What could had been is that they could had made the stud with spring-damper inseparable from the overall system. This also has some potential issue with it. What if the spring-damper breaks down and starts to interfere with the functioning of the lid ? (Second learning discussed in above scissor case). This can also be overcome by adding a locking feature to the separable assembly that would make it hard for the users to play with their "toy".
Anyway, the main take-away from this second spring story is that for any new feature, the functionality that the designers intend are not the only ones. Users can come up with their own set of functionalities for the same feature. And it is the duty of the designers to ensure that they try to estimate all such potential functionalities and cover them up in their design considerations.
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