real world columns: take-out service

If you are providing a service to a user and that service is embodied in a public piece of hardware how do you know that the user won’t invent their own service and just walk off with the piece of hardware? The short answer is that you can never be sure. So how can you prevent it in the design of the piece of hardware? Well, there are a number of solutions:

1) Don’t offer the service in the first place. No one is going to walk off with your tea-spoons if you haven’t got any to begin with.

2) Charge a deposit. Two dollars to use a luggage trolley means that people will be less inclined to use them for playing bumper cars in. The problem is that at that price people are going to be less inclined to use them for anything, even carrying luggage in.

3) Trust them. Not everyone is going to be a cad and take your pens, only a small few.

4) Make it a part of the service. Relish in the fact that people like your cups and saucers so much that they will want them for their own. Plaster them with adverts so that you can at least get some publicity out of it all.

5) Make them not worth taking. If the cups and saucers in question are chipped and cracked and greasy who in their right mind would consider misappropriating them? After a month you would still have all your crockery but would have lost most of your customers.

6) Nail them down. (The hardware, not the customers!) Put the pens on chains, put the tea-spoon on a chain, attach the computers and keyboards to the desk with super glue.

7) Make them disposable. If they are plastic and cheap it doesn’t matter what happens to them. Only trouble is that things that are plastic and cheap seem … well … plastic and cheap.

8) Make them unusable out of context. Aha! This is interesting. Design them in such a way that they function correctly in the context they are offered in, but that they lose the functionality if someone takes them home. Classic examples are the shoe shop with just one example of each shoe on show. Steal one to take home and it becomes worthless. Although the possibilities for a one-legged kleptomaniac are astounding.

Sleeper trains always try and offer a luxurious service, but to stop the passengers making off with the lovely, heavy, china cups they come equipped with a hole in the bottom and a thin disposable plastic liner. You are drinking out of a piece of quality earthenware, but try taking it home and it becomes useless. The only people even remotely interested in stealing such things are usability people like me who are fascinated by the implications of the design. In Russia I have heard that they used to operate a similar system with soup spoons in the diners. They would be drilled with a small hole to render them useless as soup spoons. To actually use them the customer would plug the hole with a blob of bread. The plug would just hold long enough to get through a bowl of soup before disintegrating.

Clothes hangers in communal wardrobes have to be removable by the very nature of their function. Fit them with the usual hooks and they can go walkabout. Fit them with an unconventional hooking method and no one will bother taking them home.

Dedicated headphones can be made with two, fixed, mono jacks side by side instead of a single stereo jack. You can’t take them home and plug them into your CD Walkman, and if you do decide to just use one channel and plug one of the jacks into a mono socket you are prevented from doing even that by the fact that the two jacks are fixed side by side. You can’t plug one of them in because the other will poke up against the plastic next to the socket you are using.

Isn’t it funny what goes through your mind when they give out the headphones for the in-flight movie?