Most people use the same shower every day, so they only have to learn a new shower UI when they move to a different house (or are visiting someone, etc.) Ease of first use and ease of habitual use are not the same target. Once a user has learned a particular shower UI, they can probably operate it half-asleep.
Once installed, a shower stays in operation a long time. I’ve used showers that were 50+ years old in the past year. (Contrast with cars, which have an average lifespan of 12 years.) So even if there was some massively better shower UI developed today, that was so great that 100% of new showers used it, for most people it would remain unfamiliar for a long time.
Because of the long lifespan of showers, any “beneficial mutation” (UI improvement) would take a long time to reach fixation. So showers evolve slowly, aesthetic design trends may overrule functional improvements, and knowledge may get lost: maybe the best shower UI design of 50 years ago is not available today because it was tied to a particular 1970s aesthetic.
Hmm …
Most people use the same shower every day, so they only have to learn a new shower UI when they move to a different house (or are visiting someone, etc.) Ease of first use and ease of habitual use are not the same target. Once a user has learned a particular shower UI, they can probably operate it half-asleep.
Once installed, a shower stays in operation a long time. I’ve used showers that were 50+ years old in the past year. (Contrast with cars, which have an average lifespan of 12 years.) So even if there was some massively better shower UI developed today, that was so great that 100% of new showers used it, for most people it would remain unfamiliar for a long time.
Because of the long lifespan of showers, any “beneficial mutation” (UI improvement) would take a long time to reach fixation. So showers evolve slowly, aesthetic design trends may overrule functional improvements, and knowledge may get lost: maybe the best shower UI design of 50 years ago is not available today because it was tied to a particular 1970s aesthetic.