I always wanted roller blades

A little girl dressed in warm clothes and woolly hat and wearing roller blade boots on. She is sitting on stone steps.
Image by Alexander Belyaev from Pixabay

When I was a kid, I loved my roller skates. They weren’t as fancy as kids might have today. Mine were two metal plates joined together with a butterfly nut so you could lengthen them and adjustable red leather sandal style straps; all designed so they grew with you.

A very old pair of metal roller skates with leather ankle strap.
Image by olgamir_2004 from Pixabay

I whizzed up and down the cul-de-sack having a whale of a time. That is until the council decided to resurface the road with stone chips and tarmac instead of just that lovely smooth tarmac, (invented by Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1902 in the UK). It seriously impeded my enjoyment. So much so, my roller skates were relegated to some dark corner of the garage. 

When roller blades (or inline skates) appeared in the late 1980s, I have secretly hankered after a pair ever since but never owned any… until a few weeks ago.

These are no ordinary roller blades and they are a lot safer to use (good as I’m rather accident prone). They are roller blades for my office chair. (please note, this link is to show an example, it is not an affiliate link and are not the exact make I have)

What? For a chair?

Yep, these are totally amazing. They’ve made a huge difference to my comfort when I’m working in my garden summer house office. It’s much easier to move around- so smooth. They are designed so they won’t mark wooden floors, are quieter so perfect if you are working from home. In fact, they are perfect anywhere you spend the majority of your day in an office chair.

Roller blades for an office chair

To change the wheels, you simply pull off the old wheels and push in the new. Easy-peasy.

This got me thinking about how there is always room for improvement and that we can borrow from the most unexpected of places. If there are barriers to success and enjoyment, what can we do to remove them or at least minimise them? Good user experience is important. We don’t usually notice good user experience (that’s the whole point; it becomes invisible), but poor user experience just gets in the way, disrupts our concentration and impedes performance.

What’s made your working / learning spaces more comfortable, easier, and a pleasure to be in?

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