Cavity Creeps, Interaction Strategy + Chunking
Remember the Cavity Creeps? Evil cartoon representations of tooth decay created as part of a marketing campaign for Crest Toothpaste in the seventies? A heck of a lot of people on the web apparently do. Enter the Creeps into a search engine, and you’ll find between 3500 (A9) and 23,000 results (Yahoo; Google, oddly, offers only 10,100). Good times. Anyway, the point of this post was not entirely to reminisce about pop culture. It was to praise the usability of the Oral-B 8000 Series electric toothbrush. There are many theories about why people don’t brush their teeth more often (one study even says it’s because people consider clean teeth a social, rather than medical, issue). My own is simply that it takes more of a certain kind of time than many want to give up. If you brush your teeth by hand, it’s a lot of work to do it for several minutes. And even if you use the average electric brush, you don’t take care of the impatience factor; indeed, it’s almost worse because you’re not actually doing anything while your teeth are being brushed. You can’t talk. You can’t really listen to anything either, because a power brush makes a lot of noise. So you just stand there, being tempted to shut the thing off.
This is where Oral B has been smart. This particular model, at least, pauses every 30 seconds so you know when to switch to a different “mouth quadrant.” This is an elegant interaction strategy; it chunks the process and so makes it more palatable (ha ha) and more efficient. The user learns to think of each half of a set of teeth as deserving individual attention. But they also get a sense of progress - which is important for the two-minute period during which you’re supposed to brush your teeth. When you can’t do anything else but stand and hold a brush in your mouth, two minutes seems like a long time. But, when the brush tells you it’s “done” with a quarter of your mouth after 30 seconds, it’s somehow more tolerable. Well designed all around.
