Usability means sustainability: a note on world usability day

Today is world usability day, and the theme this year is sustainability.  I can undertsand if that might seem like a bizarre combination, or if it might appear that world usability day has jumped on some kind of bandwagon.  I don’t think the two are wildly unrelated, and I think it is timely that world usability day recognises the relationship.  The relationship comes into play in a number of ways, from better designed living spaces and cities down to feedback to technology users about their real impact, but today I want to focus on two issues: efficiency, and computer supported co-operative work.

Efficiency is, in my opinion, a really big way better usability can contribute to improved sustainability.  Consider that Ben Shneiderman found out 8 years ago that the average person spends 5.1 hours per week grappling with computer problems.  If even 25% of those people would otherwise spend those 5.1 hours doing something that didn’t require electricity, that is a huge environmental saving.  Consider also the case of Lufthansa flight 2904 where cockpit usability problems constributed the death of two people, and the scrapping of an aircraft or the Therac 25 usability problems which caused the death of two people and necessitated considerable medical treatment for two others; both of these cases highlight social, financial and environmental sustainability problems that might have been avoided with better usability.  More mundanely, consider workplace injuries caused by poor ergonomic design, or the tim you spend looking up help files: each of these is a loss in efficiency due to poor system design and lack of usability testing. Every loss in efficiency we suffer due to poor system design or technological troubles is a way that usability (measuring how real people interact wit that system)  might have produced a more sustainable product or system.

Computer Supported Co-operative Work is another area for significant growth in sustainability.  This research field has a rich hsitory of contributing to the ways in which we work, and promotes some real sustainability gains.  CSCW has been the genesis of ideas that allow us to travel less (because we can collaborate online–there are some things for which you have to be there in person, but meetins are no longer one of them), print less (because we can share and review documents online) and share ideas more readily (because electronic dissemination is so lightweight). In their own ways, each of these advantages of sharing an electronic workspace contributes to sustainability (particularly given that travel and paper are not incosiderable contributors to environmental problems) , and I have no doubt that CSCW will continue to provide stepping stones to sustanability gains in the future.

I could talk about any number of other ways that usability helps create a more sustainable world, but I need to get off this computer and go and do something requiring no electricity.  In the meantime, I thoroughly recommend this post on ways you can check the usability of behaving sustanably in your area.  What are the barriers you face in living sustainably that could be improved with better system design?

Global corporate challenge not that global: Where on my dress do I put this pedometer?

Today is the first day of the global corporate challenge (or GCC), a challenge where you team up with six of your closest workmates and try to walk 10,000 steps (or more) per day each.  The theory is that by increasing workers’ average number of steps from 3,500 (the stated pre-challenge average on the GCC web site) to 10,000, those who participate in the challenge will see an increase in health and wellbeing from their increased activity levels.

Making people feel better is an admirable goal, and despite the wider issues with the GCC (for example prioritisation of walking over all other forms of activity, as evidenced by the ridiculously stingy cycle to walk conversion, the “speeding ticktets” issued for those who do too much exercise, and the relatively rigid defninition of an athlete) both testimonials and research show that it is helping at least some of its participants to feel better, and that’s a good thing.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that I am regular exerciser (on average 6 days per week) who does a variety of types of exercise (cycling, walking, aerobics, weight training, swimming, yoga…), who is female, and who is participating in the GCC.  As a participant, and as a usability consultant I have one major problem with how things work within the parameters of the GCC:  The pedometers we have been issued.

The rules of the GCC state that steps can only be entered from the official GCC pedometer (each participant gets two pedometers at the beginning of the challenge).  Given that one could reasonably expect that approximately 50% of participants are likely to be women (or maybe slightly more, if we take into account that cross culturally, women appear to walk more than men (PDF)) the choice of pedometer design for the challenge seems less than ideal.

The pedometer is the type designed to be worn on a waistband, completely upright, at one’s hip.  Moreover it does not have the type of clip that opens and closes, but rather it slides down over the top of a waistband.  This makes it considerably difficult to wear with a wide variety of women’s clothing:

• Women’s trouser styles are much more likely to have trousers stop at the waist (or above the hip) than men
• Skirts are often held up by women’s hips, meaning they too sit higher than the ideal for pedometer placement
• Dresses leave nowhere to clip the pedometer at all. Given that this is a coroporate challenge, and women  are in some corporations required to wear a skirt (and that even where it is not required, in some places it is recommended), the pedometer not really working with a dress seems a considerable oversight)
• Belts and sashes make the pedometer difficult to clip on because of the thickness of the material
• The style of clip means the pedometer is much more likely than an open-close clip to come off when trousers are pulled down–arguably something women are likely to do more often than men.

There are alternative styles of pedometer (including those that can be worn around the neck or placed in a bag, and watch-style pedometers), so I assume that the pedometer chosen by the GCC was based on some combination of accuracy and price. In my opinion, neither accuracy nor price can justify the difficulty presented to women by this model of pedometer (when alternatives are available.  Clip-style pedometers are only accurate when worn at all (impossible with some women’s clothing), and worn in the right place, so many women’s readings will not be accurate.  The entry fee for the GCC was nearly $100 AUD per person, and for this it would seem considerably more sensible to supply participants with pedometers that actually count all their steps accurately, rather than providing backpacks, hats, water bottles and extra pedometers.

Like the clip-style ipod shuffle, it feels like the organisers of the GCC just didn’t think about the whole population when they were making design decisions, and as a result of this women participants are disadvantaged (at least in terms of their step count, if not in terms of their actual gained benefit).  To let the organisers know for next year, I will be emailing a link to this blog post to their follow up email, included on the pedometer box, and I encourage all other participants to do the same.

Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to participating in the challenge, and perhaps learning something about my daily habits (I’m well over the 3,500 average workers make without having done any actual targeted steps, so it is nice to know that I am not as sedentary as the average worker, for example).  If only I could figure out where to clip the thing for those two weddings I have to go to…

On signs, and the need to carry my camera everywhere

Recently, as part of my work, I have commented on a signage policy for my workplace. Signs fascinate me.  It’s a basic usability premise that simple objects should not need signs, but so often I see a sign that either isn’t working, or which (with a little thought) doesn’t need to exist in the first place. I really do need to carry my camera with me more often so that when I see signs like this I can take a picture, but in the meantime I will describe a couple of examples to you:

There are two ways ofr a sign to fail: not provide the information that is needed, or provide information which may be actively misleading to some or all of the population.  A library I frequent has only a male cleaner; as such when he cleans the women’s toilets he must hang a sign to alert them to his presence in the toilets.  The sign he uses reads “not in use”, and I suspect that this is supposed to mean that it is not in “circulation” (to borrow a liubrary metaphor, but hung on a library toilet door, it reads more like “vacant”.

Signs that don’t work are interesting, but signs that shouldn’t need to exist raise my usability analyst ire something awful.  Recently in a public building I noticed a photocopier with not one, but two signs on it letting users of the space know that the copier wasn’t working.  Now, it’s excellent that the people responsible for the building let users know the copier isn’t working, but two signs seems like overkill, and given that the copier is on wheels, why didn’t they just move it out of the public space?

Are there signs in your work or recreation spaces that make no sense?  I’ll leave you with one I found on flickr, taken by brionv:

The bottom sign reads "door is alarmed"

Voyage: A road to nowhere

Voyage is a novel feed reader that displays content in a 3D-appearing space, and despite my well-documented reservations about 3D interfaces, I tried to give Voyage a go.  I have to assume that Voyage is not actually a production-level RSS service, but rather a demonstration system, because it is lacking some fundamental features of RSS readers including:

• Personalisation: You can’t create your own account on Voyage, which would mean you had to re-add your feeds every time you visited the site.
• RSS search: Voyage forces you to know the RSS URL of the feed you want to access–not the name of the site or the site URL, but the RSS URL.  This is a big ask of the average user
• Reading: To actually read any interesting RSS feeds you leave Voyage and go to the original site, even in cases where the feed is full-text (rather than an “atom”).
• Pictures: The site does not display pictures. This is a bit of a problem for picture-oriented blogs like I Can Has Cheezburger

Given these limitations, this display feels more like a discovery service for new blogs (along the lines of the liveplasma music and movie discovery service), but it does not have the back-end database of recommendations.  Either way, there are considerable usability problems with this interface:

• The text is not clear and readable
• The 3D-ness of the interface doesn’t add anything (the only dimension that appears to have any meaning at all is the forward and back one), and does make things harder to find (indeed, included in the 23 things task is the “add a feed and try to find it” puzzle).  Given that 3D interfaces perform deomnstrably (PDF) worse in information organisation tasks, and this interface does not have to be 3D, this is a serious usability concern
• The feeds area looks as though you ought to be able to click n the feeds to go to them.  Instead clicking on them deletes them, which given that you need to know the feed URL of a site to add it, is a high cost error for a simple action
• It simply isn’t clear what many of the interface elements (space, colour, the horizontal line) mean, making the interface difficult to learn
• it is difficult to navigate back “out”once you have selected something, meaning that the navigation is difficult and actions cannot be easily undone

Each of these concerns is in contravention of at least one of this excellent list of usability first principles, meaning that basically Voyage is hard to use.  Not only is it difficult to use, but it doesn’t offer either a decent feed reader or an interesting discovery service, so there is nothing in the user experience that is compelling enough to entice users back.  Maybe in a couple of years this concept will be more fully fleshed out, but in the mean time I am going to stick with Google Reader, which does reading and recommendations very well indeed.

Not that helpful

I was filling in an online form the other day and I got to the anti-spam device. This is what I saw:

If I literally “can’t read” then the way out isn’t going to help me much. On the other hand if I am (for example) red-green colourblind (as many people are) I may have trouble reading the text they presented here regardless of my reading abilities. I think it’s probably best to stick with the stock-standard “can’t read this?”, personally.

VuFind: An interesting case of open source usability

We all know that library users are consistently frustrated with library systems, and cannot find what they want, particularly since the advent of Google (PDF). Some academics berate and despair of their students’ information seeking practices, and claim that Google is ruining young minds. In my opinion, as I have stated before, berating students (and Google) is going after the wrong target. It is human nature to maximise benefits while minimising effort, and for many students the time they will spendf searching a number of interfaces for relevant resources–particularly when the interfaces are confusing, archaic, and unhelpful–is simply better spent reading the resources they find on Google, and writing their assignments. The only way to change this “satisificng” approach and reveal the vast range of library resources available to our students is to make them findable through interfaces that do not confuse or humiliate users, and do not require a librarian to operate. While libraries can’t expect to compete with Google while they are buying information from a multitude of vendors that do not have standardised search results or formats, library search interfaces can offer some additional features (such as metadata-based faceting and primary browsing) that Google doesn’t offer–and if the information is better, or gets better results (like higher grades) that will also prove an incentive to use library interfaces.

Typicall I expect library catalogues to be ugly and cantankerous, I see that as the price I pay for finding the books I want(and don’t even get me started on finding journal articles–usually I start with Google Scholar). This is why, when I looked at VuFind on the National Library web site, I was so impressed with it: it is clean, attractive, and very usable:

• It searches more than one type of holding; my search results included books, online resources, and microfilm. This is much closer to the “one stop shop” expectations that users have than any library system I have used in the past.
• I can choose between my search results based on metadata facets–that is, I can choose books, or works by a certain author, or items from a specific subject. This means that single term searches are much more likely to be successful, as I can easily disambiguate my search and bring the results that are most relevant to me to the top
• Results are relevance ranked (don’t laugh, some library systems don’t do this). This feature is the one that has given Google search engine market dominance; their excellent relevance ranking meant that people found what they were looking for in the one to two pages of results they typically view.

These are just a few of the features that make VuFind feel like a breath of fresh air. Another thing that is unusual about VuFind, though, and one that makes it especially exciting to me, is th fact that it is open source. This basically means that you can get the software for free (though if you want support you will generally pay for it), and that if you want to change something about it, all you need is a willing programmer.

Open source software provides large scope for improving usability of software locally, because unusable features can be altered, however generally speaking open source software is not as usable as its “closed source” or commercial counterparts (a problem that is recognised, but not well handled, in the open source community). Dave Nichols and Mike Twidale, colleagues of mine, have long been interested in usability in open source software (and indeed how to open source usability bug reporting). In a 2003 paper they published (which anyone interested in open source or usability should read), they suggested several reasons why open source software might have usability problems:

• Open source communities, famous for comments like “RTFM” (read the **&%@& manual), are not generally welcoming to experts from other backgrounds, as usability experts often are
• Design for usability generally has to start before design for coding
• Open source communities are populated by programmers, who generally cannot see the problems that users with a lesser understanding of computers might have
• Open source software programming is often done to meet a need of the programmer, and as mentioned above, programmers have very different user interface needs to other users
• Design by committee and software bloat are not usually good for usability, and open source software is prone to both

In another paper on open source usability, Dave and Mike noted that it can be hard to report usability bugs in the same way as technical bugs, and that open source interfaces may be prevented from innovating by playing “catch up” with their commercial counterparts.

So VuFind is positively fascinating for its usability, both among library systems (though some of the newer commercial systems look interesting), and among open source projects (Koha is similarly fascinatingly usable and open source). Why is it that VuFind is such an exception to the rules?

• It was created by a library, under one umbrella, and not in a typical open source community. Being under a single umbrella demonstrably helps open source projects’ usability (Dave and Mike again, there), largely by ameliorating design by committee and imposing some order on the process. This will also have meant that the community was different — VuFind’s website comments that it was developed “by libraries“, and thus not just programmers, meaning that feedback from other disciplines was likely welcome
• Typical library system websites (though again, I can’t speak for some of the newer ones) are not effective for users, so VuFind didn’t have to play interface “catch up”
• VuFind was developed “for libraries” not “for programmers”
• It looks suspiciously (to me) like VuFind might have had a formal usability process, though I can’t find any evidence for this one way or another

In the end, whatever the specific differences are, VuFind is not just exciting in terms of its user experience, but fascinating, and an exemplar of how to do usability in an open source project. I don’t know if it is the way we will go with our discovery layer (and not having seen many of the other possibilities, I can’t comment on whether it is the way we should go either), but it certainly is a fascinating project, and I will be watching it further.

CVs, career opportunities, and connections: LinkedIn

LinkedIn, when all is said and done, is just another social network, though it has a more clear-cut purpose than most social networks: It is business and career focused. I’ve been a member of LinkedIn for some time, so while I would normally adderss the usability of the relevant tool in a post like this, instead I am going to talk about the purpose-focus of LinkedIn, and how the interface reflects that.

Let’s begin with an example of LinkedIn in action: as I said back in my post on social networks, I have it mostly so I have a CV that is online and up-to-date. Despite my skepticism in that post, though, I can now say from experience that a LinkedIn CV does open up career opportunities: I was recently approached about a job by an in-house recruiter from a large, presitigious and lucrative company looking for someone with my skills. We set up a phone meeting through LinkedIn, and I discovered that the timing of the opportunity was not right for me, however it was not a wasted call for the recruiter because (on her request) I passed her details on to two others who may be a good fit for the role. Certainly this experience gives me more incentive to keep my CV up-to-date.

So, why was it that I trusted this person enough to give them my mobile number, and why did she believe that I was who I said I was, when “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog“? Partly it works based on our connections. The recruiter was able to determine that I am likely to be who and what I say I am based on my connections to some big names in my field, and to some people in my field who knew people she knows. Sure, I could still be lying, but it is a lot less likely when I am connected to these “known” people. Equally, I was able to determine that she was who she said she was based on our connections within LinkedIn.

How is it, though, that LinkedIn encourages such a businesslinke atmosphere (including connecting only to people you know, and not engaging in “friend philately“)? Partly it is the tight control of the interface that the owners of the technology have maintained–the applications are limited , and there is no way to personalise your profile to be neon pink and yellow, and according to the New York Times there was considerable doubt about whether to allow users to put photos on their profiles. This tight control means that despite the web 2.0 style rounded buttons, LinkedIn has a text-heavy, businesslike feel. LinkedIn users are subtly encouraged to only accept invitations from those they know by the ‘I don’t Know <name>’ button at the bottom of every invitation, it is a reminder that (unlike many social networking sites) you don’t have to be friends with everyone. Not-so-subtly, in the questions and answers interface answers can be marked as “connection building spam”–friend philately is clearly frowned upon. On top of all this, LinkedIn is lightweight — because there are no built-in blogs or status indicators or anything like that, LinkedIn doesn’t generate tens of emails per day, nor is there any pressure to interact with it any more frequently than required to update your own CV; it is clearly designed as a tool rather than a playpen.

While LinkedIn has been very successful in deliberately designing a businesslike interface, some people that I work with have found the lack of space to create their own content or have “nuanced interactions” offputting, one even said that LinkedIn caused them to realise that they were not a professional and they did not care.

So what would be a good balance? Is it okay that the LinkedIn interfaces alienates some people with the purposefulness that makes it so effective? Are those people likely to join anyway, since interactions are so lightweight? The answer is likely to be different for different users, and without testing a wide range of professionals, it would be impossible to tell exactly where this balance falls, but I hope that LinkedIn haven;t gotten it wrong and disenfranchised a whole class of creative professionals. What do you think?

Social engineering and usability: a post about toilets.

I’ve been away from this blog for far too long again, I know–sadly I have had things happening at work that have demanded my attention more urgently than this blog.  Now I’m back, and I am going to write a post about something I never thought I would see on this blog: toilets, specifically the dual flush ones.

The first dual flush system was designed in Australia in 1980, and modern ones are estimated to save households up to 67% of their annual water usage–a lot in a country that suffers chronic drought, but favoured by environmentalists everywhere.

Early dual flush system by necessity had to clearly mark which button gave a whole flush, and which a half flush, meaning buttons usually looked something like this:

The images on the buttons clearly dwmonstrate the concept of “full” versus “half”.  It might not be obvious to unfamiliar users exactly what this does, but once explained is likely to be relatively obvious (apparently, too, it is relatively easy to train new users–even children–to use “one button for pee-pee and one for poo-poo“).  The particular model displayed might have a minor design flaw, though.  The half flush button, the one an average user is likely to use most often is on the left as you face the toilet–further from the dominant hand of approixmately 90% of the population.  While this is a tiny inconvenience, it may affect behaviour in some cases, meaning the full flush may be used slightly more. Conversely in much design left is less and right is more–consider the volume knob on your car stereo, or the speedometer on your car, for example, so maybe this left-to-right design has consistency advantages that outweigh the convenience issue–experimentation would be the only way to know which side induced the “best” behaviour.

More recently, though, manufacturers have been moving toward circular designs, presumably in response to the fashion of the day.  Unfortunately, not all these circular designs are clear, as evidenced by the signage in this picture.  This design really does have a design failing; while the designers have kept to the left-half right-full convention, the half flush button (again, the one likely to be used most often) is a smaller target, on the left, and therefore harder to hit.  On the positive side, for at least some of these toilets, hitting both buttons (which is possible in this style of design) triggers the half flush, rather than the full flush (as scientifically tested by an army surgeon).  So again, this toilet may be discouraging “good” behaviour by its design, in the first instance because it is marginally confusing, and in the second because the correct usage of the toilet is discouraged by its design.

Recently, though, I was in a pub and I saw a dual flush toilet that is entirely based on the principle of encouraging “good” behaviour (in this case only using the double flush when you need to).  Because I have not been able to find a picture of this design (and strangely enough, I don’t routinely have a camera with me in the toilet), you can see an approximation of the design at left.  This design is quite clever, in that most of the time it does not require users to understand the concept of the half flush–provided they hit anywhere on the button but the small square, a half flush is what they are getting.  This may be particularly beneficial in a pub, where judgement may be impaired, and the amount of water per flush is probably the last thing on patrons’ minds.  Basically, this design is a clever little piece of social engineering, because unless you really want a full flush (enough to hit the relatively small, off-centre target that is the full flush button), all you get is a half flush.  There is a downside to this, though–it could make life harder for users with fine motor control impairments, for example tremors, Parkinsonism (or even drunkenness, ironically).  The fact that this design relies on the small square being pushed as well as the big circle (as opposed to instead of it) makes this somewhat less problematic, but users having to flush multiple times when they need a full flush (because they have poor aim) may cancel out the general benefit.

This flush design highlights the tension that can sometimes arise between what’s best for the group, and what’s best for the individual in interface design.  As to whether people do have trouble with the full flush, or whether this design really does save water, I don’t know, but it made for interesting thinking on a Friday night at the pub.  What do you think?  Would you put this flush in your house?  Is there anywhere it shouldn’t go?

Boolean search made easy to understand?

Recently a colleague sent me a link to a little tool called ‘Boolify‘. Boolify is a visual representation of Boolean search and is meant to be an educational tool to help people learn how boolean search terms work together.

Boolean logic (and one of its common applications, Boolean search) is a common ground field between computer scientists and librarians, particularly those who try to teach it. Boolean search is hard to understand for most people, but if users could understand it it would be one of the most powerful tools in their search toolbox (particularly when they are using a search term that has more than one meaning). Good search engine interfaces try and get around it by offering a more ‘natural language’ advanced search interface that lets users do some Boolean searching (see for example the Google advanced search interface below), but the true power and flexibility of real Boolean searching is somewhat lost even in these interfaces.

Google’s advanced search interface

Now it’s debatable whether the power users lose in an interface like this is even that much of a problem, given that the vast majority of users enter short queries and don’t use advanced search. Arguably there is a chicken-and-egg problem here; users may not use advanced search because (in many cases) it is too hard, meaning they never learn to use it, meaning it is too hard…Whatever came first, I think the answer is that users can usually (at least with Google) find the information they want (or something close enough) without having to get into Boolean logic, and therefore they don’t learn it.

There are some people, though, for who a good grasp of boolean logic is essential. Computer programmers are in this group, as are the librarians to whom people turn when their own searches fail. Potentially students and researchers should have some understanding of Boolean search as well, though I would generally argue for better search interfaces for these groups. So, given the difficulty of teaching Boolean logic (and having taught first year computer science I have first hand experience of this difficulty), anything that would help make it easier would be great.

At first glance, Boolify looks like just such a tool. It would be more awesome if it had a predefined results pool to play with (as well as providing an internet search), so students could see how query reformulation affects what is included in the results pool, but that is pie in the sky, and this thing looks like a good first step. It has puzzle pieces that show how you can interlock different bits of a boolean search, and the horizontal and the vertical can act like brackets in a real search term–the thing at the top is in the innermost brackets, and so on down.

Sadly, though, the promises Boolify makes are not delivered upon. Despite the puzzle pieces providing every promise of being interlockable, queries can only be developed in a linear fashion, and so the pciture below is what happens when you try to develop the query ((libraries OR museums) NOT gallerys) AND ( user experience OR usability). It simply isn’t possible to do, despite the puzzle pieces having every visual and logical affordance needed–you can on develop queries in a line, which means this tool does not represent the full power of Boolean logic.

Trying to develop a complex Boolean query using Boolify

Usually I would not be so hard on a tool designed to teach something difficult in a novel way, but this tool is a poor teaching aid. It doesn’t allow users to do what it looks like they can do by clicking bits of puzzle in anywhere–thus not showing the true power of Boolean queries, and having a significant usability problem. It also (and I think this is more important) doesn’t let users reformulate queries by moving puzzle pieces around, thus denying a real opportunity to learn how Boolean operators work together by reformulating queries and seeing what happens to the results. I can honestly say that until this tool fulfilled more of its promise, I wouldn’t use it teaching–it is bright and colourful, but it doesn’t bring much more than that to the table.

So, what does everyone else think? Should we leave Boolean logic to the geeks and logicians? Who needs to know Boolean logc, and how should we teach it?

A good (and surprising) user experience: Laundering the shuffle

Yesterday morning (a Monday no less) I had one of those “oh, $%#@*” moments while packing my work bag.  I was ready to pack my iPod shuffle (a second generation, for anyone considering trying this at home), when I realised it was not with my phone and my wallet, and I knew exactly where it was: In the pocket of a polar fleece jacket that had been laundered the night before.  Having heard a few stories of miraculous technology survival, and knowing that the shuffle is essentially just flash memory, I thought I would see whether it was still working.  I pressed the play button, and though no sound came from the headphones, the light came on.  It turned out that both the iPod and the headphones survived, but that the headphones took a day longer to dry out and begin working again. I’m not sure if this is a designed part of the iPod shuffle second generation user experience or not, but I sure am glad of it.

While I wouldn’t recommend laundering your shuffle deliberately, I have seen more than one example of people with a similar story to tell.  Given that (as one of the posters here says) ’shuffles are designed for pockets’, designing them to be as laundry-resistant as possible (and not advertising the fact that they are) is an excellent user experience strategy:

• It takes into account the likelihood of error — it is probably not unlikely that these devices that fit easily in a pocket and are light enough to go unnoticed will get laundered (or dropped into a lake, or exposed to the rain or–in one case–run over).  Not only is this error taken into account, users do not (always) suffer catastrophically for it.
• The user’s expectation (that water will bust their iPod) is surpassed, rather than not met.  If Apple had labelled their devices water resistant, in cases where this failed (and after all, who knows if I would be enjoying music right now if it had been a hot water cycle) people would be disappointed.  Instead, people get something they don’t expect and are delighted (this is not to say that it is necessarily a good idea to set expectations lower than what will always be delivered–an unusual pleasant surprise will be remembered, a common pleasant surprise will eventually become an expected experience).

Like I say, I don’t know if this is a design feature or a happy accident, but either way, right now I am seriously impressed with my iPod, and that is always a user experience win.