Clever. Disturbingly clever. The Fly UI invites being peed on:
I have seen one of the finest instances of user interface design ever, and I saw it in the men’s room at Schipol airport in Amsterdam.
In each of the urinals, there is a little printed blue fly. It looks a lot like a real fly, but it’s definitely iconic – you’re not supposed to believe it’s a real fly. It’s printed near the drain, and slightly to the left.
I asked a user interface designer I knew at Nortel about this, who happened to be Dutch and who was familiar with this particular piece of toilet technology. And he told me that washrooms are much cleaner when these flies are there. Presumably because they encourage, in a very subtle way, good aim.
Now I love this kind of interface, because it’s so psychologically clever. If they had put big circular targets, and arrows with a little printed message “pee here!” (like it would probably be if anybody ever tried such a thing in America), it would backfire. A certain percentage of men would deliberately try to disobey this instruction.
But this innocuous little fly just invites being peed upon, if such a thing makes any sense, but in a non-insistent, gentle, and entirely effective way. If you’re the user interface specialist Donald Norman, I suppose you’d say the fly affords being peed on.
This is particularly funny if you’ve read Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things.