Taps and the case of boring magic in design

Taps are a brilliant design: simple, interoperable and ubiquitous.

However, as companies try to get more profit margin out of taps by adding features, many of them are becoming complex and unintuitive. This evolution of tap design serves as a prime example of where capitalism and design have gone wrong.

It’s likely that taps were invented by the Romans about 3,000 years ago. Their heavy investment in infrastructure and engineering transformed primitive forms of plumbing to produce the tap as we know it today.

For hundreds of years, taps remained largely the same, accomplishing the simple yet vital task of bringing people water.

The original tap design met everybody’s needs, in that it was virtually the same anywhere in the world, and required no instructions: You simply turn the dial and water comes out.

A rare innovation in tap design was the advent of the mixer tap in the mid 20th century. While a sink or a bath originally had two taps - a cold water tap and a hot water tap - the mixer tap allowed the cold water and the hot water pipe to feed into the same tap, making it easier to control the temperature of the water.

However, the list of decent innovations ends there.

Because the fact is that taps were already well-designed: simple to use, interoperable design, consistency of user interface and - crucially - providing a service that is indispensable.

It brings to mind a term coined by Steve Messer, Boring Magic, meaning products and services whose power lies in the fact that they are straightforwardly easy to use.

Given the boring magic of the original tap, it’s surprising that we frequently encounter taps today that are badly designed. Many of them are so unintuitive and complex it’s now common to see a set of A4 printed instructions next to a tap.

It’s a strange phenomenon that a design has become progressively worse - rather than better.

In the case of taps, there are two factors behind this trend.

The first is a hygiene-driven obsession with ‘no touch’ products in public spaces, particularly toilets.

The second is our design environment of capitalism. This incentivises tap designers to add more features to create a ‘new’ product which will stand out from competitors. This problem of ‘style over substance’ is one which affects many areas of design.

The story of taps provides a lesson for UX designers: in spite of the commercial pressures, aiming for ‘innovation’ at all costs risks creating a product which delivers radically less value than a ‘boring’ alternative.

It is in our power to resist the trend of bad design.

As users, we can make our feelings known. Organisations often want to know our opinions about their products and services, and give us the opportunity to flag poor design in feedback forms. Make use of those forms. Tell them their taps were too complicated to use.

And as designers, we can do our job and listen to that feedback.

In the first instance, we can be wary of losing sight of fundamental user needs in an effort to create something novel. The real magic in designing services and products - in taps and beyond - comes from being boring.