Who are you designing for?

Near where I’m working at the moment, there is a restroom with one of those stacked toilet roll dispensers that are a public bathroom mainstay and a complete nightmare to use. I’m sure you know the type I mean – there’s a tiny gap at the bottom that, owing to the combined friction of multiple stacked toilet rolls and the perforated nature of the product, you can never seem to be able to get more than one or two sheets out at once (i.e., not enough to get the job done). We’ve all had to grapple with one, I’m sure.

This afternoon, I noticed that the users of said restroom have taken matters into their own hands, and the dispenser now looks like this:

It strikes me as an interesting example of a design intended to meet the needs of the owner, not optimise the experience of the user. I can see the design brief would have had goals as follows:

• Ability to store multiple rolls at once. This means cleaning staff don’t need to come and replenish the dispensers as often.
• Minimise paper wastage. By making it more difficult to get paper out, you’ll ensure people only use the bare minimum they actually need. This saves on the toilet roll budget, while also stops excess paper getting all over the floor.

By these criteria, the above design would get a big tick, however, the solution is heavily weighted towards the needs of the owner (who wants to keep their toilet paper budget down) rather than the needs of the user (who wants to easily acquire the paper they need, and yes, may end up wasting some from time to time).

The result? When a product doesn’t meet users’ needs, they either stop using it, or when that’s not an option, they create their own workarounds, which might create more hassle for they owner than if they’d just designed it with user needs in mind in the first place.