Interaction design

Lets talk about electronic toothbrushes. Why? Because we can.

Most, if not all electronic toothbrushes neglect the group of people who have used the old fashioned toothbrush. This group is used to operate the toothbrush by moving the toothbrush in and out of the mouth. You have to manually move the toothbrush to clean your teeth, this has been like this for decades.

Suddenly the electronic toothbrush came to the market and people started using the product. Although it might not damage the electronic toothbrush it certainly is strange (or funny?) to see people moving their electronic toothbrush in and out of their mouth like they did with their traditional toothbrush. It shows which role previous experiences with products can have on human behavior. People tend to use the behavior that was successful in a similar situation again, this includes product interaction experiences.

Stupid users? That is what the designers might say but the truth is that the designers failed to see the role existing experiences. The ideal toothbrush would actually use this previous experience to its benefit or at least point out to users that the best performance is achieved by keeping the toothbrush still.