Non-use in the wild: The case of the occupied lockers

Lately, I have talked a lot about the relevance of non-use not only for social media but in general, regarding the design of services, processes and physical social artefacts. Therefore, I was happy to encounter a brilliant case example right downstairs at my Alma mater.

Even though the departments of Aalto University’s School of Art and Design provide personal lockers to their students, I have long observed that all but one of the visitor coin lockers at the main entrance hall seem to be permanently occupied.

Calling for release of the occupied lockers

Now the facility management has decided to empty these lockers on December 5 and posted an announcement on one of the school’s intranets:

Pääaulan vaatesäilytyksen kaapit on tarkoitettu vain vierailijoiden tavaroita varten. Kaappeja on kuitenkin otettu vakituiseen käyttöön. Kaapit pyydetään tyhjentämään. Vahtimestarit poistavat kaapeissa olevat tavarat 5.12.2011.

But, surprisingly, no note has been attached to the lockers themselves nor has the message been translated into English. Alas, more than one week later, not a single one of the occupied lockers has been released.

Disclaimer: As an alumnus, I do not have access to all intranet channels of Aalto University, therefore cannot evaluate whether messages have been sent to other intranets or by e-mail lists. My intention is not to discuss about or judge on the quality of the school’s internal communications but to present a very obvious manifestation of non-user phenomena in real life.

How non-use phenomena messed up the process

From my point of view, this reveals a whole set of non-use related phenomena that give pointers for improving the design of such communication flows:

• A user assigns more value to a particular intranet portal than it has to those people occupying the lockers; frequent users are tricked into assuming a wider reach of a channel than it really has – an issue discussed under the label “reachability” in my study on non-users of social network services.
• The process applied fails to consider how much and how regularly different groups use this particular intranet (ever since the merger of three universities the number of internal communication channels has increased at a rapid pace and the channel in question here appears to be mainly used by a small sub-group of very engaged staff and students) – the call for release of the lockers has been read 119 times in a school of 2500 staff and students, a reach of under 5%.
• It has not been taken into account that non-users of the intranet portal could still be users of the facilities, i.e. they could be reached using different channels.
• The process of calling people to release their lockers does not include actionable metrics to measure the “conversion rate” of the intranet message (apparently an alarming 0%) and take additional action.

This is a welcome illustration how relevant the conceptual consideration of non-use as a design factor is not only for social network services, but also for service design in a broader sense, both in regard to planning for non-use and to measuring the impact of an action.

Have you made similar non-use-related observations? I would be thrilled to hear about them in the comments below!