Terrible Electric Plug Positions Revisted
Inconvenience: deliberate or accidental? – “Whether, in the case he’s discussing, the electrical outlets really were positioned far from the seats to stop people plugging in laptops and so on, or whether the positioning of the seats and the outlets were entirely unconnected decisions (badly-positioned sockets aren’t exactly uncommon) my intuition tells me that there will be plenty of other examples where a ‘convenience’ feature is deliberately crippled or implemented in a way that restricts customers’ ability to use it. When it’s done for strategic reasons (appear better to customers, or just save money on electricity), it’s certainly an architecture of control.”
There’s another reason that design is poor that is less obvious: ignorance. Ignorance means lack of knowledge which is exactly what I mean. It is also a lack of empathy. And finally, it is a simple matter of usability and lack of testing. After setting up these sockets, it is important that someone actually tests them out! Do they work?