Chairs and Tables Everywhere, but Not a Spot to Work...

From Iris Bell and through Mark Hurst’s Good Experience Blog comes this oh-so-depressing image of hotel guests trying to make the best of a bad situation. The situation: the fact that hotel lobbies don’t accommodate the traveling laptop worker (perhaps their most common kind of guest!), offering the choice of either table or a chair but almost never both. Why the poor usability design? There are a few possible culprits: I’d expect that the architectural/aesthetic “space” was the driving factor in choosing those big useless tables and comfy deskless side chairs, rather than any attention to the users’ activities. However, it’s also just possible that the lobby was designed more than 10 years ago, when working on a laptop wasn’t the modus operandi of the business traveler; instead, they just wanted comfy chairs without tables in which to read a paper or magazine. And finally, there’s the possibility that the hotel designed its lobby this way on purpose, to discourage people from doing work there and therefore destroying the ambiance for newly arriving guests. In the comments on Good Experience, several people note that at many hotels the wireless is free in the lobby, but costs extra in the guest rooms – so it turns out the no-desk design may just be to keep the masses paying for their room connections while being able to say “Free Wireless Internet!*”