I have seen one of the finest instances of user interface design ever, and I hope to see it in the men’s room at Island bars.

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. (hmmm..why to the left do you suppose?)

imageI asked a user interface designer I knew and who was familiar with this particular piece of pissoir technology. 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 a Government building), it would surely 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. I would love to know if toilet user interface designers (there’s a title for a business card!) tried focus groups with other icons - bees, smiley faces, eye icons, circles, letters? I would love to know what process they used to decide that it should be slightly to the left.

There may be an IRAP project in the making!