This is a box fan.

This is a white box fan. Grated plastic keeps users from accidentally losing a finger to it’s high-speed spinning blades. Two little kickstands jut out of the back to keep the fan from tipping over. The strange part of this fan’s design is the placement of the dial with four settings, controlling whether the fan is on or off and how fast the fan is spinning.

The box fan control dial is placed on the backside, in the center of the fan. It’s reasonable to assume that the motor is also located toward the center of the fan. Thus, if designers were constrained by the amount of wire and protective coating, they would be required to keep the control dial close to the motor. It’s an inexpensive fan, and adding wires, coating, plastic tubes to ensure that the user won’t engage with wire by mistake drives up the price. User’s sacrifice having to reach around the fan or spin the fan around when they want to adjust the control dial for the low price they pay for this fan.

In terms of learnability, user’s pick up on the working of the fan quite quickly. Facing the control dial (backside of the fan), the dials settings are ordered off, high, medium, low. Generally, users are accustomed to settings that go from off to low to high. This fan jumbled that order, but from playing with the dial on the first use of the fan, a user can understand how to operate the fan. It’s possible that the jumbled order of fan settings stems from a similar order of settings on the motor.

Along the lines of memorability, the fan is memorable for being loud, placing the control dial in an inconvenient location, and shuffling the standard order of fan-speed settings. Is it memorable? Yes. Is that necessarily a good thing? No. Odds are, they weren’t intending for their product to be particularly memorable so much as they were aiming for a functional, affordable product.

Thinking of efficiency and accessibility, this fan is bit of a mixed bag. Because of the low price-point, it’s relatively easy to obtain. Accessing the dial at the back of the fan becomes problematic depending on the fan’s location. If the fan is wedged between the window sill and lower sash, then the user can’t spin the fan around to adjust the dial. The user has to reach outside the window to adjust the fan. However, if the window is too narrow for the user to reach out of the window to make these adjustments, then the user must move the fan every time they want to make an adjustment. Turning a fan on or off shouldn’t include picking up or spinning the fan. That alone makes operating the fan less efficient.

To remedy this design flaw, I would do two things differently. I would reorder the control dial settings from off, high, medium, low to off, low, medium, high and I would put the control dial on the front of the fan in the center of the fan.

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