Outside the box!

Does anyone have any suggestions for dissuading my chickens from laying outside the nest box?  They have all been laying for about 3 weeks.    One of them lays every time in there but the other two  persist in laying on the floor of the ark.  This means I have to limbo dance every day to collect the eggs.  I have taken the straw off the floor of the ark and only made the nest box really comfortable to try and persuade them this is the way to go but so far no luck!

Can you make the nest boxes darker i.e. by hanging some cloth over. I had this problem  but I was able to raise the support bar at the front of the nest box to make it deeper.  Also I was told to use wood chips on the floor and straw in the nest boxes. It worked for my hens. Having said that, if my Cream Legbar gets in the shed she always lays in the bag of wood chips!!!

Hi

I've only ever had this problem with 1 chicken. Mine are all Rhode Rocks except this particular chicken who was a Rhode Island Red.

At first i thought it was because they were queing to use the nest box. Although we have more than enough nest boxes they all insist on laying in the same box.
This hen in particular was at the very bottom on the pecking order and was always last to lay. She always laid hers under a bush rather than the nest box and did this from when she first started laying.
I now wonder if it was because the nest box was too small for her. I only wonder this because my Rhode Rocks are much smaller than she was and they seem to fill it (the nest boxes on the coop i am using at the moment are smaller than the nest boxes in my old coop which is standing empty)
I dont have that chicken any more otherwise i would see if she would have prefered to lay in there instead. Of course that may not have been the problem at all , maybe she just prefered to lay under a bush or felt safer there.

I still sometimes find the odd egg under a perch instead of in the box (yesterday) but this was because they were queuing and i found 2 hens trying to lay in the same box at the same time and had to move one on, probably hers under the perch.

If all of your chickens are the same size and the others are laying in there alright, i shouldnt think the size of the box would make a difference.

Maybe I should just wait a bit longer then?  I have never had this problem with any of my chickens in the past though.  I thought with a comfortable snug nest box it would have been preferable to a floor - obviously not.  I will report the outcome in due course!  I have quite often had three of them squashed into the nest box simultaneously with previous chickens!
Again - thanks for all the advice.