Voicethread: Frustrating Faucet

This hotel faucet design obsures a critical piece of the shower experience: how to get water to flow out of the shower head and onto you. The designer figured you would need no visual affordance to know that pulling down on the end of the all-too-hidden bath faucet head would cause the shower, some four feet above, to spray water. The feedback itself (imagine if the nozzle were extended only partially and it wouldn't work) is mediocre at best as the fully extended state looks basically the same as the fully retracted state from the vantage point of a standing user. The mapping between an event with the bath faucet and the outcome on the shower head is also dubious, but forgiveable since users are accustomed to numerous traditional fixtures that also involve something to do with the bath faucet fixture. Seeing as how there are very few constraints on faucet design, I think designer did a bad job, especially for hotel users who have no prior experience with this type of system before or after ther stay. See an image and hear this same commentary at Voicethread:

http://voicethread.com/share/101378/