the user experience of a hotel shower
This morning, I found myself in yet another hotel room, staring bleary-eyed at the shower. I'm not a morning person. My brain doesn't begin working until post-shower at the absolute earliest, and often it requires both a shower and a coffee to get anywhere near functional. This means that figuring out the shower in a hotel room is almost beyond my morning mental capacity.
The taps in a shower are a really bad user experience. They're not standardised at all. The taps in this hotel room at the Westin in Bellevue, Washington, are nothing like the taps in a hotel room at the W in San Francisco. Every time I encounter a hotel room, I have to determine how to take a hot (not cold, not burning) shower. The taps don't give me an indication of how to work them. I have to figure out which way to turn them. This is mostly standardised, but not quite, as I discovered in a hotel room a few weeks ago. Then I have to figure out what the range is on the tap. The taps in this particular hotel room have a range of about 25 degrees of rotation, but the Westin in the Boston suburbs that I stayed in a couple of weeks ago on had taps with a range of over 90 degrees of rotation. And then I have to wait for the hot water to appear. Sometimes I think that I've adjusted the shower to the right temperature, hop in, and get scalded a couple of minutes later when the water temperature catches up to where I've unknowingly set it. It's a wonder that I make it out the door of my hotel room alive.
At home, the problem isn't any different, but I'm trained. I know where to set the tap to get a shower of the right temperature for my shower. I've been showering in that particular shower once a day for the past four years, so my pre-shower brain doesn't have to engage to figure out how to set the taps in the morning.
Wouldn't it be nice if there were a button near your shower that you could push and it would automatically give you a shower of the right water temperature? My car remembers where I like the seats, why can't my shower remember how hot I like the water to be?
