设计师视角下的卫生间体验缺陷与包容性设计反思

The problems plaguing the daily lives that most of us have stopped noticing.

I paused, leaving the bathroom. Something strange was happening, but what was it?

There was a woman in a wheelchair who had finished washing her hands. She seemed stuck, but she wasn’t stuck. She kept reaching and reaching, unable to get something, but what couldn’t she get?

“Can I help you?” I mustered up the courage to ask, realizing she must think I’m the most awkward person just staring at this interaction.

“I think” she reached a bit further, “I can get it.” With one large effort, she reached and finally grabbed a paper towel that was just out of reach.

We looked at each other. My curiosity passed, and anger rose in its place.

She smiled meekly. “They put the paper towels just out of reach.”

Today, this memory flashed through my mind as I held my daughter up to the sink. We’re in a restaurant bathroom and the sink looms over her. She’s too small to use it and yet there are no stools for her to use. She’s prevented from doing what we tell every child and adult to do: wash your hands for 20 seconds to help prevent the spread of germs.

This problem wasn’t just about hand-washing. It wasn’t just about changing stations or accessible stalls. It wasn’t just about aesthetics or form. It was about gender and cultural norms. It was about making the world a better place. This is why designers are so opinionated on bathrooms.

My bathroom experiences lead me to conclude:

1. In the United States, we categorize disability and people with children similarly, resulting in experiences that aren’t designed for either. For instance, almost every bathroom in the United States places the changing table in the handicap stall. This funnels women with children and people with disabilities into one stall. If that stall opens when there’s a line and there is someone with a disability or impairment or a someone who needs to a change a diaper, that stall is rarely held for the people who need this stall most.
2. We use men’s designs for women’s bathrooms, and the one size fits all is a fundamentally flawed paradigm. For instance, when there are changing tables in common areas, such as airports, women use them as a place for their make up. There is no where else in the bathroom that has this much counter space. (This one grossed me out and still does).
3. Our biases persist even after we’ve identified them; we often aren’t taking action to solve our biases. As an example, we still haven’t eliminated biases from automatic hand washers, which results in people of color having poor experiences while trying to wash their hands. (Bigotry Encoded: Racial Bias in Technology)
4. We invent new methods to solve problems, but they often don’t solve the problem and/ or create new ones. Take a look at the new handwashing machines that have driers, soap, and faucets all in one. The iconography is confusing and I myself am personally guilty of thinking the dryer icon was the hand washing icon.

Designers have tried to tackle different aspects of the bathrooms but to date in the United States, I haven’t seen an end to end beautiful execution that solves 1–4 of the pain points listed above.

Challenge 1: Many still categorize people with disabilities or impairments the same as people with children, resulting in experiences that aren’t designed for either.

I stood in the bathroom while my 3-year-old held her ears.

“It’s loud, Momma.” She complained, clutching her ears even tighter.

I tuned in to understand her experience. The hand driers were going off. Toilets were flushing loudly. Stall doors were banging as people went in and out. Then, the noise stopped. I reached for my daughter to have her stop covering her ears, then the noises started up again — multiple driers, toilets being flushed, doors banging, people talking.

Bathrooms are loud places and not just for kids.

“Many autistic people find everyday noise too loud, painful or hard to tune out: a 2021 meta-analysis estimated that 41% currently have hyperacusis (sounds are too loud or too painful) and 61% have had it at some point.⁠”

(Source: Dr. Sensory)

As a designer, I have to ask: Does everything need to be so loud?

A simple solution to the hand drier noise is going back to paper towels… but that contributes to more waste in our ecosystem. Hand driers reduce carbon emissions and save trees. In fact, according to Pinnacle, “A typical school using 30 hand dryers will save 17 trees worth of paper towels per year.” We solved one problem to create another. Woof.

The innovation didn’t meet the mark, so let’s keep trying rather than accepting good enough. What if we sought to solve the problem of the loud noises in the bathroom AND our environmental impact? What would we do? Patch the current problem and explore sound reduction options? OR could we think about loud and quiet areas in bathrooms? Could we rethink bathroom acoustics?

Along with loud sounds being normal, in the United States, we’ve accepted the premise that the handicap stall is where the changing station should be. We’ve created a singular, multi-purpose stall.

This has failed anecdotally for me. I have 2 children and brought both of them into the large, single bathroom stall in a restaurant with me. I started changing one daughter on the table while the other went potty. Then, I heard a woman crutch in. Uh oh, I thought. There’s only one stall the person on crutches can use, and I’m in it. I began to panic and as every woman does, I started apologizing even though this was also the stall I should be in. How else was I going to change my kid? The woman ended up waiting over 5 minutes for us. There was nothing that could be done because there was only one stall for us both.

This memory stands in stark contrast to the stalls in Europe in the airport. They decided that the changing stall shouldn’t be stuck in the bathroom stall or confined exclusively to the woman’s bathroom. Men change diapers too. They created a net new space for changing tables that was private and nested between the men and women’s bathrooms.

We can do better once we stop accepting that our current failed paradigm is sufficient. We can have quieter bathrooms. We can have better stalls. We can have better experiences changing our children. It’s not our gear that has failed. It’s our approach.

If we pull the changing stations from the women’s bathrooms, where will women put on their makeup? (great but gross question, my friend)

Challenge 2: Men and women have fundamentally different bathroom needs, and thus require different experiences.

Caroline Criado Perez in her book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men notes that women on average take 2.3 times longer in the bathroom than men do. This is due to women’s complex outfits (jumpsuits for instance where the whole outfit must come off), the fact that women are more likely to take their children in the bathroom, and also that mechanically women must sit to use the bathroom. It’s not just the outfits. It’s the desire to use the powder room, but those rooms have fallen out of fashion despite the need still being present.

The powder room came into vogue in the 18th century to fix one’s wig and one’s makeup. This room (now commonly half baths on the first floor) was a room in a convenient location, often featuring a couch where women could collect themselves or converse in privacy with other women. This still happens today, but the mechanisms and who is there are quite different today.

Bathrooms traverse more than male and female lines, more than parent and child; they traverse gender lines. A 2013 report from The Williams Institute UCLA School of Law noted that nearly 70% of transgender people have undergone verbal harassment in bathrooms and 10% have experienced physical assault. Many have tried to tackle this challenge and gender norms at once by making bathrooms for all.

These good intentions have been divisive. Proponents note that privacy is maintained and when everyone is brought together, it can aid in the reduction of negative interactions. It also supports caregivers and those with young children to have a more seamless experience — moms and dads will have equal access to changing stations. Moreover, it reduces costs, as there is now a need for one bathroom rather than 2–3 distinct areas (men, women, family). This is starting to sound like a viable solution. Then, societal and cultural norms start to break down the scalability and make this be the bathroom solution.

Women may find shared spaces more cumbersome to navigate. Ankitha Gattupalli writes in Designing around Debate: The Gender-Neutral Bathroom

Women may feel uncomfortable tidying up in front of the mirror or attending to their menstrual needs in unisex bathrooms…Many religions and cultures prohibit sharing intimate spaces like toilets with unrelated people of the opposite sex. Societal notions around menstruation may also make it difficult for the international spread of the multi-stall gender-neutral bathroom.

Unisex bathrooms are a highly divisive issue, which is why many have looked at another alternative solution: spatial equity v. fixture equity. Jonathan Yeung in his article Spatial Equity in Urban Infrastructures: Public Restrooms Addressing Women’s Needs defines these as: “Spatial equity provides an equal amount of floor area for different genders, while fixture equity ensures an equal number of stalls or fixtures for each.”

Spatial equity is what is most commonly employed — men and women get the same amount of space for the bathroom. For me, the biggest reason this breaks down can be seen at sporting events. I love women’s soccer games and most people who attend are women and children. When spatial equity is applied, this leaves women facing long lines while men don’t have them. Now think about football. These events are overwhelmingly attended by men and there’s a biological reason for that, according to the Times. When spatial equity is applied, the men’s lines are usually longer than womens. You need to apply the right logic at the right time to get the best output OR transition a set of bathrooms to meet the gender who attends. Taylor Swift frequently sells out football arenas and her base is primarily women.

Fixture equity is essentially stating — let’s have the same number of urinals in mens as stalls in women's. This logic starts to break down when men may need the ability to sit down and go. Not every man can stand either, so we’re employing exclusionary design tactics.

We’ve talked about how the current designs aren’t meeting our needs, but we have to ask why? Why are we still deploying known exclusionary and biased practices?

Challenge 3: Our biases persist even after we’ve identified them; we often aren’t taking action to solve our biases.

I honestly wanted to scream as I watched a woman of color try and get the automatic faucet to work. “These never work well,” she said smiling. I recalled why this didn’t work for her. “It’s not you,” I thought. “You are experiencing a biased in technology.”

Taylor Synclair Goethe notes in “Bigotry Encoded: Racial Bias in Technology” why this happens.

The dispenser used near-infrared technology to detect hand motions, an article on Mic read. The invisible light is reflected back from the skin which triggers the sensor. Darker skin tones absorb more light, thus enough light isn’t reflected back to the sensor to activate the soap dispenser. Which means that dark-skinned restroom users will have to skip washing their hands with this not-so-sensitive soap dispenser.

Most of the creators of this technology did not set out to bias or exclude a group. However, they created this technology without a diversity of opinions or perspectives. As Goether continues, “The less diversity there is in a workplace environment, the more likely major design flaws will be present that only affect people of color.”

For me, as I stood there watching this woman struggle to use the faucet, I couldn’t help but think this bias has been known and identified and even viralized on social media. Yet, it still persists.

The most aggravating part to me is that technology companies have solved this problem using radar, ultrasonic or capacitive sensors, but these solutions are more expensive. Add higher cost to biases being dismissed as “glitches” or “unreliable sensor issues” rather than a failure of equity, and you see companies waving aside inclusive technology (Uprooting Bias in Artificial Intelligence).

Right now, many companies are on a trajectory where all roads lead to the bottom line. If it’s not saving dollars, it’s not a company priority. But (shakes fist in the air) we have to do better. We have to stop accepting inequitable experiences as normal. We have to care about the entire human experience, rather than just one subset across age, sex, identity, or race division.

Part 4: We invent new methods to solve problems, but they often don’t solve the problem and/ or create new ones.

Meet the faucet that feels straight out of Wall-E. It is touchless and integrates the soap dispenser and hand drier all in one. Unlike the inventions in Wall-E, this one doesn’t meet the mark.

According to Lila Vaugh in Why Some Automatic Faucets Cause More Complaints Than Manual Faucets,

Touchless faucets were originally introduced to improve hygiene, modernize restroom infrastructure, and reduce water waste. In theory, automatic faucets should create a better user experience than traditional manual fixtures.

Yet in many airports, malls, schools, office buildings, hospitals, and stadiums, facility managers continue receiving frequent complaints about automatic faucet systems — sometimes even more complaints than older manual faucets ever generated.

Users commonly report delayed activation, weak water flow, random shutoffs, false triggering, temperature inconsistency, and confusing operation. In high-traffic public environments, these issues quickly affect restroom satisfaction and building perception.

Enter every designer ever.

I’ve watched and experienced this interaction so many times. The icons are often confusing, and the water icon looks like the dryer, so I’ve started washing my hands by drying them. Then, if the experience doesn’t work, I panic and start waving around like a mad woman. I’m sure there’s a great SNL skit waiting to be made of my behavior interacting with a technology failure. This failure however has an easy solution — the right icons.

For non-designers, one of the principles of iconography is to use universal icons. Examples of these include the magnifying glass for search or the ubiquitous medical cross icon to signifying where to get medical help. All other icons should follow the 7 principles of iconography:

1. Clarity of meaning
2. Visual clarity (or readability)
3. Simplicity
4. Familiarity
5. Alignment and balance
6. Consistency across the board
7. Personality and branding

And yet (deeply sighs while putting her index and thumb on the bridge on her nose), we have chosen to use conflicting icons in public bathrooms for users. Each bathroom has a new set of icons and faucets to learn. My favorite is when companies must write: “Please turn off faucet” because patrons continuously leave on their manual faucet. We sought for progress. We ended up with a bunch of people waving their hands around fighting with a bias technology.

Conclusion

Now that every designer feels personally seen in their annoyance with bathrooms and every non-designer feels annoyed, let’s talk about what we can do about it. To me, these apply to a lot of design problems, not simply the bathroom.

1. We have to start designing for the 20% and using ethnographic research (observing people while they complete a task) to create meaningful experiences. If we continue to design for 80% (often the able-bodied community), we will continue to litter biases and inequitable experiences.
2. Learn from Dr. Seuss. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” We must stop accepting biased experiences as “normal.” It’s not normal to exclude a group of people. Let the people wash their hands!
3. Employ best practices with design and AI. Some of these known issues are really simple solves and make the experience so much better, such as choosing the right icon.

P.S.

If this article made you mad, good! We have to care to change our course. I also want you to leave on a positive note, so please enjoy one piece of humor I stumbled upon while researching this topic.