A Story About Wastafel

Don’t hide your helpful features

A wastafel (bathroom sink), mostly we use it to wash our dirty hands, face and brushing teeth.

But sometimes, we need to hold the water on basin of a wastafel by closed the hole on the bottom for any purposes, as a washbasin/washbowl.

Somehow, I miss the button to open or close the hole. How to hold or release water on the basin.

For reason of design simplicity, most of wastafels hide their this helpful button behind the faucet. I need long enough time to search it. Observe the design, push me to think about it and create cognitive drain, just to found this “f*cking” button. A discoverability problem.

May be this (holding water function) is an additional feature while we use a wastafel, but this will be a main feature while we cleaning it.

It works for digital product/service too. Sometimes, we need to clean-up our email inbox for example, select them all before delete them:

Because, in this world, there are two kinds of people:

Remember to reserve features for maintenance, not only features for using a product. Don’t forget to make sure your users realize their existence. Often a feature is useless not because of its function, but its visibility.

Know your users’ behavior, provide helpful features that make their life easier.