A chat in the restroom

Yesterday, I had a most interesting discussion (to me) in the bathroom with a very handsome older lady.

The fact that she was handsome and older is not relevant, but the fact that it was in the bathroom is.

I was visiting the Getty Center, a wonderful architectural structure designed by Richard Meier, who by all accounts knows his stuff when it comes to architecture, and had to go "fix my face" shall we say.

The restroom was small, with only two stalls, not much extra room, with two very lovely marble (or most likely granite) sinks.

Behind the sinks, not next to them or on the walls enclosing them, was a trash receptacle built into the wall with a built in receptacle for paper towels in it.

In other words, after you washed your hands, you would have to leave the sink area to get a paper towel with which to dry them.

A conscientious employee had tried to fix this this "problem" by placing a free standing paper towel container right in front of the sinks so you didn't have to leave the sink area to dry your hands, and in the process made it more convenient for us, the hand-washers.

The handsome older lady I mentioned at the start of this "story" turned to me as we stood in front of the sinks washing our hands and doing the lipstick thing and said (about the paper towels being far from the sinks and there being a container of paper towels right in front of us) "Good! Someone finally understands it! Every museum is built this way. You can't just dry your hands, you have to walk away to do it. It's so inconvenient."

She made me think.

The moment she said "Every place does this" I started to wonder if there wasn't a reason for it being designed exactly in that way.

I was thinking out loud mostly, and I suggested to her that perhaps if it was done this way in places like this, there might be a reason, such as trying to get us to move away from the limited space by forcing us to flow away from the sinks and towards the door leaving the sink space open for the next user more quickly.

I wondered if it wasn't in fact, a clever manipulation intentionally built into the design by the architect or planner.

There are a couple of points to this story.

The first, and most obvious one is that you probably should never strike up a conversation with me in the bathroom.

Nothing good can come of it, and I enjoy it far too much.

The second is the meat of my observation about the observation of another person.

We are manipulated in a myriad of clever ways daily by architecture of our environment and the structure and placement of goods of the world we live in, and we, for the most part, don't think about this manipulation or even realize we are being manipulated.

And the third point is that there is a limit to the amount of environmental manipulation people will put up with, and there comes a point at which we will find ways around it if it causes us to behave in ways that aren't logical to us, often without ever thinking it through on a deeper level.

For the sake of my argument, I'm assuming the design of the bathroom was intentional.

I don't know that for a fact, and it could quite possibly just be an oversight on the part of the people who designed it because such design oversights are not uncommon, but for the sake of my argument, I'm going to say that it was intentional.

I have read that the seats in fast food and family restaurants are intentionally designed to be uncomfortable to a point so people will be less likely to hang around for a long time thus promoting a higher turnover.

This manifests itself in thousands of small ways that affect every aspect of our modern life.

Here's a little snippet from wikipedia and a link about this whole concept :

Environmental psychology has conquered one whole architectural genre, although it's a bitter victory: retail stores, and any other commercial venue where the power to manipulate the mood and behavior of customers, places like stadiums, casinos, malls, and now airports. From Philip Kotler's landmark paper on Atmospherics and Alan Hirsch's "Effects of Ambient Odors on Slot-Machine Usage in a Las Vegas Casino", through the creation and management of the Gruen transfer, retail relies heavily on psychology, original research, focus groups, and direct observation. One of William Whyte's students, Paco Underhill, makes a living as a "shopping anthropologist". Most of this most-advanced research remains a trade secret and proprietary

If you read about grocery stores and the amount of thought they put into how they stock each shelf and where in the store they place certain items, it absolutely boggles the mind how clever people trying to get us to buy more stuff than we had originally set out to are.

I'm not talking about the obvious "Impulse buy" placement of candies and batteries and razor blades at the checkout stand, I'm talking about how they intentionally place the basics of shopping, the eggs and milk and such at the back so you can't just breeze in, grab your basics and then breeze out but rather have to pass buy a bunch of goods you might not have first intended to buy just to get to them.

I've also read about how they average the height of their shoppers and place the items they most want them to buy at their eye level and switch this up for men and women. And how they'll put the items they want your kids to notice right at little kid height so they have help badgering you into buying something you didn't want to buy by using junior as a whine-powered convincing tool.

The examples are endless but I'll try to not bore you to tears here by mentioning more.

"Why is this relevant in my life?" you might ask.

"If you are a web developer or web marketer, it should be extremely relevant to you" is my answer.

Like actual architects, you and I need to think of both how to guide visitors around the websites we develop to where we want them to go, manipulate them to our greatest possible profit if you will, but we must also be very aware of how much forcing is too much forcing, and what exactly are the unnatural manipulations that people learn to get around.

While we may not have the option of using a different restroom when we are out in public, we ALWAYS have the option of going to another website while online.

And we, as developers, always have the option of moving the paper towels closer to our visitors, but we need to first be aware that it's an issue for them.

I'll go into this more and try to make a clearer point at some other date.
It was just a little thing yesterday that got me thinking and made me say "Hmmmmmmmmmmm..."