Visual Blogging: Real Life Layout

Two "everyday design" examples that I took a second, closer look at this week were Mac OS’s Dashboard and the vending machine at work.

The layout of Dashboard works quite well and is a joy to use. A simple click on the icon on the dock and voila… handy gadgets at my fingertips! I find that I use Dashboard a half a dozen times a day. As a calculator, calendar and quick weather reference, it’s incredibly handy.


On the opposite end of the spectrum is the vending machine at work. It definitely qualifies as “hopelessly confusing”. My main complaint is that I often get something other than the snack I was after. I know this is caused by the fact that the perplexing number of products they jam in there requires more combinations of letters and numbers than I’m using to working with.

In this vexing machine, the goodies are arranged by rows and columns. In order to select an item, you type the letter of the row and the number of the column. Pretty simple, right? Not when I’m the one pushing the buttons!

The kicker is that there are 12 columns of tempting no-no’s to choose from. And, somehow, I always seem to choose something from the three columns on the right. That would mean that I’d have to enter something like A+11. The problem lies in the user (me) and the fact that I don’t have an “11” on my computer keyboard. So, after typing work-related stuff all day… my brain doesn’t make the transition and expect to find an “11” key on the vending machine.

I start to type A+1+… oh #)*%&)(%#&! Again, I end up with the crappy animal crackers from the A1 slot! Sigh.

So, attempting to apply some design sense… I have two suggestions.
1) Switch the rows and columns to numeric and then alphabetical identifiers, respectively. Just the opposite of what I see today. This would still allow for nine rows of products… or even 10 if you use “0” as a row identifier.
2) Give each item a two-digit number.

Either way, I wouldn’t care… if the machine would just cough up my darn Skittles!