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Slanty (and underhanded) Design
I’ve been entranced with the notion of Slanty Design ever since I read Russell Beale’s article about it in Communications of the ACM in 2007. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Slanty Design is kind of anti-affordance, a difficulty-of-use employed to achieve certain design decisions. I think even the acknowledgment of such tools mark a maturity of interaction design: it’s not solely about making things easy to use. (Just, perhaps, mostly?) Unfortunately, the use of slanty design isn’t always to encourage better behavior. Sometimes it’s just greed.
While waiting for a prescription at Walgreens I drifted across the aisle to see the following product shelving.
Note that it’s only the top-tier brands of foot cream that are under lock and key. If you want any of them, you have to find a store employee and have them unlock the case for what some customers might consider an embarrassing product. But just below that are other options, most notably Walgreens’ own “no-name” brands of the same products. Something tells me that the hassle is enough slantiness to get more people to buy the Walgreens brand instead.
Filed under: Critiques, Platforms & technology
Chris Noessel is a senior consultant at Cooper. His industry experience ranges from owning a small, museum-focused company in Houston to working with Microsoft's futures prototyping group in Seattle. For marchFIRST he was Director of Information Architecture, conducting research and design for notable web sites such as Apple, SEGA, and Harmon Kardon. He was one of the founding graduates of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. He teaches interaction design at the California College of the Arts.
More entries by Chris
Comments
In general, Slanty Design isn't always evil like this example shows. The name itself comes from...
...an apocryphal story that some desks in the US Library of Congress in Washington, DC, are angled down toward the patron, with a glass panel over the wood, so when papers are being viewed, nothing harmful (like coffee cups, food and ink pens) can be put on top of them. This makes them less usable (from a user-centric point of view) but much more appropriate for their overall purpose.
But in this case, yeah. Pretty evil.
The Walgreens design is not only slanty; one could argue that it's anti-competitive.
In regard to f-ing iTunes, I can only say that iTunes has so much slantiness -- DRM-related, navigation-related, basic file management-related -- that it's practically vertical.
A local grocery store puts its expensive items, like multi-bladed razor packs, behind a transparent plastic panel. The panel is hinged at the top and not locked and when you open it an alarm sounds - a fairly slow, soft 'ding... ding... ding...'. Not loud enough for the whole store to hear it but loud enough for people around you to hear it. I suppose it is to discourage shoplifting but it always feels like I'm doing something I shouldn't when I open the panel.
Design for evil's sake?
Similar to the challenge of copying music from one computer to another with iTunes. Love that.