29 November 06
As a web developer, you can kind of forget how user interaction isn’t just something that gadgets and computers need. Small interactions between real life objects can be just as important.
Whilst my example can seem a bit trivial – it’s about a bendy bus – it’s still an important reminder of how small changes can make a large difference.
As I get the 73 bus from Angel to Oxford Street, and back again in the evenings, I’ve been noticing a weird event that happens at nearly every stop. Double ringing. The bell goes twice. At first, I thought it might be people pressing twice or that one of the bells was a bit faulty. But no! It’s all due to the fact that the bells have a delay on them, only the delay is stupidly longer than a human’s reaction time. Meaning that when a person first presses the bell, it doesn’t ring until they’ve pressed it again because they thought they’ve not pressed it first time. It’s actually quite funny watching people get confused in a way – getting angry (well, slightly annoyed) with a bell because it doesn’t work properly.
But seriously, did anyone even test the bells? I know the bus companies are incompetent at the best of times, but how hard can it be to check if the bell works correctly? It’s such a minor thing, I know, I don’t want to give myself a migrane over it or anything, but it’s all about these tiny details. These types of things makes people not want to use the bus ever again (that and high fares, overcrowding, smelly people, etc).
Obviously, I can draw parallels to web design here. If your site misses the small details, then it will put people off using it. Even more so on the web, no one has to use your site, I don’t need a site to travel to work. Look after the details, guys.
Do you have any examples where real life usability has let you down so much you have to write a blog post about them?
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Well, originally I thought it may have been two people pressing different bells at the same time, but with my scientific investigation of watching people pressing the same button twice in confusion, it’s just bad design. Plus, moaning about two people pressing the bell would have made a (even more) boring post. I did notice the bell was working properly this morning, maybe they’ve been reading this…
That’s pretty interesting, and people really ignore user interaction way more than they should. And you’re right, it is the tiny things.
One example that I can think of, is coming up to a door, and not knowing whether to push or pull. Now, sometimes they have tiny little signs of what to do, but I often see people doing the wrong thing, and I think this counts too.
To put it in another context, just think if you were running late to a meeting, and you pushed instead of pulled, and how frustrated that two seconds would make you. Maybe signs should be more visible sometimes…........the little things.
The convention with modern doors is that the side you push has a push-plate and the side you pull has a handle. This is pretty much an architectural requirement these days, and most people intuitively know the convention.
The problem comes in those odd instances where people fail to follow it, and put for instance a handle up instead of a push-plate.
oops. i didn’t proof-read that one, it hardly makes any sense.
That kind of reminds me of a story at my house. When I was a kid, the door between our kitchen and front room broke, the handle didn’t work properly. As a temporary measure, a handyman put a handle on that was for a door which opened the other way, meaning the door would open by pulling the handle upwards rather than down. After a while, everyone in our house got used to it, and it wasn’t changed for years, but any visitor got terribly confused thinking the door was stuck, or the handle didn’t work. It was seconds of entertainment for us, and a bit embarrassing for visitors, which is probably why no one ever visited again.
Mark, I understand that it should be requirement, but that’s not always followed. For example, my new job has “pull” handles on both sides, and I got it wrong the first time.
Yep, had a similar thing at a hospital a while back. All switchplates around the room had a combination of plain white switches and a few red switches. We all know red means ‘Danger Will Robinson’ so I was too scared to use any of the red ones in case they called a really angry old nurse or perhaps switched off some poor guy’s life support.
Packing to leave, I finally plucked up the gumption to ask a nurse what they did. “Um,.. oh, those switches are connected to the emergency generator too, so if we lose power they still work”.
{insert rolling eyes emoticon }
So, basically some guy designed these switches to constantly and urgently broadcast information that is only ever useful or even meaningful under extremely rare circumstances — power outages. A small LED behind each switch that illuminates the operational switches when the generators are on (a handy thing in a dark hospital) apparently never occurred to them.
Comment by mark0 on 30 November 2006, 12:18
I suspect the interaction is more subtle than that. On many buses, the first person who presses the button will cause a bell-ring, and later presses won’t. I suspect this is to prevent all passengers and drivers being driven mad by crazies, kids, and crackheads hammering away at the bell from here to kingom come (or Angel). Perhaps the bendy-buss bells have a limit so they can only be rung a certain number of times per minute?