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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

If you want an illustration of the problem, here's one sourced by the very scientific method of finding the closest men's restroom:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0iripy6m7fu5f3o/2017-01-19%2016.57...

There are over 20 individual controls on that unit (which is, FWIW, common and reasonably expensive). If you do not read Japanese, good luck at finding flush... and finding it will not help you finding it on the next machine you use.

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I've never seen this unit nor anything even remotely this complex in a public toilet. The vast majority of toilets I've seen are the basic washlet features and a few give you the added option of spray pressure. The pressure options I've only ever seen in hotels. Not only that, but the vast majority of public toilets are auto-flush.

Having said that, the "bidet" label on the "ladies" button is highly misleading ;-)

This use case (use by people who are not literate) is one of those few circumstances where worse-is-better, because public toilets (like one might find in a train station or department store) are typically either mechanically operated (trivial to use) or the lowest-scale models.

That said, this is not a rare, exotic toilet in Japan; it's something which would be unremarkable in an office building or a restaurant that you could reasonably use for date night.

Living as I do in the inaka, I am rarely blessed with such things. Sometimes I think Tokyo is a different world ;-)

Don't you like the washiki toilets? ;) (seriously, I live neither in a big nor a small city, but there are way too many of them still, in this century)

I don't :-) But that's the reality of the izakayas around here. Actually the virtually brand new (7 years old???) onsen near me has exclusively washiki toilets (very nice new ones). Apparently the older patrons like them. They have handlebars on the wall too, which is a nice usability touch.

I see one like this in nearly every Tully's and Starbucks in Kyoto. They don't have as many bottom-washing options, though.

Still waiting for someone to explain the difference between "bidet" and "behind"...neither one seems to function in the advertised manner.

Behind is for anyone's rear end. Bidet is for women. Not sure I want to explain more fully ;-)

It.... takes some experience... But definitely worth it in my experience :-)

Yeah, I figured that's the theory, but in practice I've found no consistent aiming for either function. Also, most washlets with both also have an independent forward/backward function.

Besides all that, is there some targeting system going on down there? Machine vision? Lidar?

> Machine vision?

God please no. Don't give people ideas, lest we want to have a cloud-connected startup doing just that...

The rise of self-aware bidets will end poorly...

Simpsons did it? https://youtu.be/BPLrNWAsBWU?t=18

There's also that Adult Swim infomercial... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

It's going to happen sooner or later. I'm pretty sure the $8000 models employ some kind of computer vision to adjust the sprayer to the correct "human output interface".

A cloud toilet that examines your feces and urine probably isn't far off (and is probably already in the works).

So I guess that beyond Cloud-to-Butt, we'll have a Butt-to-Cloud extension...

None that I know of. A combination of adjusting yourself and using the forward back buttons usually works. There are also some with pulsating streams for extra scrubbing power.

Just wiggle your behind around until you get the right spot

On the majority, if not all of Japanese toilets I remember using, the actual flush was just a normal flush. The buttons were just for the various washlets mounted in the toilet seat, and could be safely ignored.

Obviously you have more experience than my one holiday, but it seems surprising that I wouldn't have encountered this problem if it's widespread?

> The buttons were just for the various washlets mounted in the toilet seat, and could be safely ignored.

Unless they were shared toilets and some asshole had cranked the seat heat all the way up, hot enough that it felt scalding.

flush is the leftmost button on top of the remote, to the right side of it is also flush, if you only need small amount of water. To the right of that "little" flush, is even more "eco" flush.. This is why they need standardization.

I've been to Japan recently and saw all kinds of toilets. I encountered types like that as well and honestly it's not that difficult. I don't speak Japanese but you'll quickly figure out that the dots represent the water amount for flushing, that there are probably two bidet functions per gender (water more spread out or not), that the "sliders" control the pressure etc. There are other buttons for deodorization, sounds and whatnot but well, that's just the cherry on top. I miss them!

I don't read Japanese at all, but it seems pretty obvious the the three buttons on the top left are big flush, middle flush and eco-flush.

Yep, as soon as I seen 'eco' you could figure out what is flush.

If eco wasn't there I can see how it would be confusing though.

Confusing Japanese toilets were my favorite part about visiting. I don't mind having to it a few random buttons. But yeah having standardized iconography for visitors is probably a good thing.

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-ih456yW-1fM/TeNNzvbwQjI/A...

sym for big is up, sym for small (urine only) is down - I see them right away on your image at the top, usually the flusher is not on the seat controls itself either.

I'm having a chuckle imagining Mr. Magoo getting sprayed every which way as he tries to figure out how to flush the toilet.

The slightly grimy buttons give me the heebeegeebees.

What does the button with the orange square do? What does the button with the 9 dots do?

When you tap the rear/front cleaning button, water doesn't stop until you press the orange one, which means "stop". The 9 dots is the biggest flush.

The orange square is to stop the current bidet function. The 9 dots is a big flush, as opposed to the one beside it which is a small flush and then an even smaller 'eco' flush beside that.

> finding it will not help you finding it on the next machine you use

流す is just as much as an arbitrary pictogram as anything else. And it didn't even need a standardization process.

Yeah but the odds you can read it if you aren't from East Asia are pretty low.

Also Japanese writing has gone through multiple standardizations.

https://youtu.be/gdnuOa7tDco?t=12

Oh, come on. It's pretty obvious that "eco 小" with the three dots means eco flush. It's also one of the larger buttons. Which means that the four and nine dots mean larger flushes. Which means that "流す" means flush. There you go, problem solved. Just take a note of 流 on a piece of paper, if you're not good at remembering symbols.

Oh, oh, and let me guess: A home FTP account with curlftpfs and cvs is just as good as Dropbox.

Please stop blaming the user for UX issues.

The user is expected to be able to read basic Japanese. You are of course welcome to use the product without that prerequisite; just experiment.

If you are a lady not much can go wrong; for us blokes… well you might get your ball-sack rinsed, but that, while surprising and slightly awkward, is fairly harmless on the whole.

What's the fun in being a tourist if you understood everything around you.

Not everyone attempts to flush while sitting down on the toilet.

I believe most models will refuse to turn on any washlet function if there's no pressure on the entire seat (not sure exactly what the predicate is, but something along those lines). Certainly my model[0] in SF is that way.

[0] - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007HIKPQC

I'm inclined to agree. Convincing someone to use a space-age toilet for the first time without giving them instructions is hilarious.

What are you talking about? The user is always to blame, when the functionality is there in the first place.

UX is just a fancy term to invent new jobs, or to sell more products to dumb people.

The Design of Everday Things is a fantastic read that disagrees almost entirely with you on that.

This is the dumbest coherent thought I have ever read. Edit Look, I don’t know you, but if I presume you are a smart young hacker… your own attitude toward technology as something that can and will be understood, conquered, and mastered will serve you well, but you must also come to realize that your own creations will never matter unless they work for an entirely different audience. And no, you don’t have to be dumb for a poorly designed interface to confuse and disorient you.

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