January 25, 2005
How Hard Can This Be?
When it comes right down to it, few products are as simple as a pencil. If you were to sit down and list the priority 0 features of a mechanical pencil-- the things you absolutely must have in your product to satisfy your customer-- you'd probably come up with something like this:
- Graphite withstands normal writing pressure without snapping
- Additional graphite can be dispensed to simulate "sharpening"
- Expended graphite can be easily replaced
- Top of pencil features an eraser
- Eraser can be replaced when it wears out
But we all missed something. Something so basic, it's blazingly obvious in retrospect:
- Using the eraser should not cause graphite to be dispensed
The Papermate Top-Notch Grip-- though it features a delightfully spongy region that makes it comfortable and secure to hold-- utterly fails the basic usability test because erasing is a nightmare. Graphite is dispensed by pressing down on the top of the pencil. Where the eraser is. Guess what happens when you erase something? Suddenly your pencil has Pinnochio Syndrome.
It's inconceivable that this flaw wasn't noticed early in the pencil's design process. If I were the president of Papermate, I'd have called all my people into a room and not let them back out again until they'd redesigned the product so that it worked properly. But these things are still being cranked out today in droves, in iridescent and metallic colors. And apparently they're being sold for cheap, because our office supply room is full of them. And by "full", I mean "if you can find the one supply room in the building that actually still holds supplies in the wake of corporate cost-saving measures which, apparently, include purchasing sub-standard mechanical pencils to save a few pennies and removing supplies from all rooms but one so employees spend valuable time scavenging for basic needs instead of getting work done."
Posted by Peter at January 25, 2005 11:25 AMWhen yer in college, one of the cool things about the college bookstore is that they usually have an absurd number of different types of mechanical pencils. When I got my very first professional baseball scorebook, I made my way there to assemble a pencil pouch's worth of gear for it, and pondered long and hard over the various and sundry models available. I ended up selecting what PaperMate is now apparently calling the Logo series. It fills your spec pretty completely, and has a nifty gimmick where you can rotate the top of the pencil to extend the eraser (refills, about an inch long each, were readily available), but also, since the top was about three inches long, and when you flipped the pencil over to use the eraser most folks would then grip it by the top, erasing did not cause pressure on the lead-advance mechanism, and therefore the extended lead remained pleasantly at the exacting length you had set it.
I note now that the product has evolved to include a "(u)nique shock-absorber tip to reduce lead breakage", something I'm rather good at with mechanical pencils. Perhaps it is time for an upgrade.
Posted by: Chris Lemon on January 25, 2005 03:31 PM