Here are a couple things that I immediately thought of, just in my own dorm room that could definitely be more user friendly.

1. The bedside tables provided by the college

This is meant to be a table for you to place your stuff on while in your bed so you don’t have to get up, which is great in theory, but they fully made the opening too wide so it doesn’t lay flat on the side of the bed. It’s actually meant to go on the back panel of the bed, and it fits there well seeing as on my bed it works, but because of how the room is laid out, for my roommates bed, the side is the only location for this which is very frustrating seeing as it’s difficult to place anything on it with the slant. To fix this, they should have taken into account where the beds were placed and made 2 different sized trays, one that fit on the side and one for the back for the 2 different bed setups in each room.

2. The mirror placement in our room

Our mirror was placed RIGHT next to my closet which is unfortunate for a couple different reasons. For one, it’s just awkward to have to stand in a corner so close to the dresser to even see yourself in it. Additionally, it’s the one mirror in the room so my roommate has to fully go over to my side of the room to use it which hasn’t been a problem but it would be difficult if I needed to use my dresser at the same time. Adding on to that, if I want to have my dresser open at all the mirror becomes unusable. My proposition is that they should have put the mirror on the back of the door. This way it wouldn’t be in anyone’s way and it would be easier to share between 2 people.

This exercise really has made me think about all the little things in life that could have had more thought put into them. I hope if I go down the HCI path and I can talk to the users of my product and figure out what I didn’t think of in terms of ease of use.