Lessons about service design from bathrooms

I spend a lot of time silently assessing organisations by looking at their bathrooms.

That might sound like a strange thing to say but bathrooms are wonderful places to spot the indicators of good and bad service design and hints of a wider culture.

Every person, regardless of body or culture has an expectation of how a bathroom works for them, from how you get in (to queue or not) how the toilets work (paper or bidet? Sit or squat?) to how you wash and dry you hands, dispose of waste and leave. 

As spaces that meet a universal basic need, there is a huge amount of variation in how we meet those needs, so bathrooms make it easy to spot subtle cultural, functional or operational differences in the organisation that owns or manages them in ways that we might miss in other contexts.

Here are some odd things I look for and what you can learn by looking at them:

Soap dispensers

Want to see whether an organisation has considered long term maintenance, or the needs of its staff in the way it designs services? Take a look at the soap dispensers. Are there shiny built-in dispensers that someone lost the key for years ago that were since replaced with ones that are easier for cleaning staff to fill? This is usually a strong indication that the maintenance of that service was less important than the ‘project’ to deliver it

Emergency alarms

In many countries emergency alarms are needed in bathrooms in the case that someone gets into difficulty. Usually, they’re a long red cord suspended from the ceiling that is supposed to reach to the floor so that you can grab it if you fall. Most of the time though, they’ve been tied up to get out of the way when mopping etc.

There can be many reasons for this but it comes down to not thinking about the needs of the person who may need to use it. That’s either because those people aren't using the bathroom (how many times have I seen a disabled toilet in a building with no ramp?! a lot?!) or there’s another reason why we’re not considering their needs…its a thread (excuse the pun) to pull at and find out the cause.

Signs

A sign is an indication something has happened. You don’t put a sign up saying ‘please dont stand on the toilet seat’ if no ones done that before. But they’re also indications of things that people can't change. You can’t get rid of your septic tank so you need a sign saying do not to use chemicals. You can’t rewire the room so you need a sign saying that the lights go off automatically…Signs are a great indicator of problems that can’t be fixed, but once you’ve spotted them, the most interesting questions is, why are they there? 

It's hard to generalise an entire organisational culture form their bathrooms (particularly as they’re often a managed service in office buildings) but it is a great practice to notice the indicators of organisational culture that are around you and question what those things can tell you.

Making the case for service design often means showing where the maintenance and running costs of bad services are (hello non-fillable soap dispensers and accidents made worse by inaccessible pull cords!) costs us more money than the initial outlay of researching and designing the right solution.

What have you noticed in bathrooms (or other spaces) that give you an indication of an organisation’s culture around services?

If making the case and thinking through service maintenance costs is something you’re struggling with or intrigued about, check out our making the case for service design course where we talk about how to cost up the long term impact of bad service design