I’m taking a thought-provoking class at the USDA grad school called “Information Architecture and the User Experience.” We meet on Wednesday nights and talk, basically, about how information is organized. Everyone has had experiences where we go to a website and after a few minutes of clicking around in search of whatever brought us there we realize that, hey, this problem may not be on our end: this information is just poorly laid out. This is a usability issue and may well prompt us to take our business elsewhere out of sheer frustration.

It’s not just websites, either. Now that I have usability on the brain, I notice it everywhere. In a public bathroom recently, I realized that the automatic paper towel dispenser — which was programmed to dispense a reasonable amount of paper towel as soon as the last one is ripped away — was positioned in such a way that the hanging paper blocked the hand soap dispenser. So after you wet your hands, you had to reach under the paper to get the soap (assuming you knew it was hiding there), inevitably getting the towel wet and soapy in the process. Usability police!

The circumstances that created this unfortunate bathroom sink situation were immediately clear to me. I could picture the process in my mind: the sink and soap had undoubtedly been there for a while, and when the building management decided to install automated towel dispensers, the only wall space available was right above the soap. Seemed like a great idea — but apparently they didn’t think it all the way through. And now here I am, along with every other patron faced with the need to use their facilities, wasting valuable seconds with wet hands trying to figure out exactly how to get the soap.

Interestingly, this experience immediately made me think of organizational websites, which often seem to evolve in the same way. Many times they are a hodgepodge of functionality compiled over time, tacking on new elements to the existing whole without much thought as to the impact this organization will have on the site’s usability. Why is this the case? How can we avoid it?

Problems like these are not the end of the world, certainly — I managed to wash my hands successfully, in the end — but little issues like this can alienate users, even if only subconsciously, and ultimately drive them elsewhere. Giving some basic thought to the user experience doesn’t have to take much time or resources, but it can yield major dividends for years to come.