Going Down by Jessica Schwingendorf

Yesterday I had to think.

I was in Young Hall for a job interview which was held on the 2nd floor. I used the elevator to get to the room with no problem. I stepped in, pressed the "2" button and exited per usual.

Elevators are pretty self-explanatory. It shouldn't take much thought to operate one, and I've had hardly any issues with them in the past.

However, upon exiting the 2nd floor post-interview, I was forced to think.

I walked in the elevator alone and went to reach for the button. I wanted to return to the main ground floor, which is often labelled as different things, depending on the building. Sometimes it's a "1". Other times it's an "L" for lobby, "G" for ground or "M" for main floor, and so on.

Whatever the label may be though, it's standard for the ground or first floor button to be accompanied by a star for clarity.

When I went to reach for the "G", "L", "M" or "1" I automatically just looked for the star since I don't often go into Young Hall and was unfamiliar with how its ground floor is labelled in the elevators.

But there was no star!

A wave of panic went through my body and stood there dumbfounded for about 2-3 seconds, which doesn't seem long, but in my state I had no idea how to get where I was going.

Did I want the basement? Where is the "1" button? What does "M" stand for? Mezzanine? Main?

I actually had to read the buttons and think about what floor I was going to and how it was

labelled. It wasn't the automatic process of reaching for the starred button like I usually experience.

I found this experience to be an excellent example of how we as humans are conditioned to follow a routine or standard, and when that routine is interrupted due to poor or variant designs, we panic and have to think.

This elevator, in general, follows logical signifiers that aided in my determination of the ground floor (after a few moments of thinking, of course). During my time abroad last semester I had to get used to the idea of the ground floor not being the "first" floor. In France, the ground floor was simply that, the "ground" floor. The floor above the ground was then the "first floor". I lived on the 8th floor of a
a French apartment building, but by North American story standards, I lived on the 7th floor.

Knowing this standard information, and the fact that I was in a North American building, I then had two choices: "B" or "M". This conclusion was reached because the floor numbers are laid logically starting with the bottom floors as the bottom buttons and the top floors as the top buttons. However, the "B" and "M" were on the same line of buttons.

So I continued to think.

Even if I did not know the definition of the "B" and "M’ floors, I could conclude that the "M" was the main entry floor above the basement because the lower floors on each line are located to the left. Thus, "B" was the lowest floor and I needed to press the "M" button.

After some research into the topic, I discovered that the five-pointed star I so longed for stems from the 2010 ADA Standard for Accessible Design. The star indicates the floor with the quickest available exit in case of emergency. This is namely the ground floor, where the main entry and exit way is located. This is the same standard that requires brail numbering on the buttons.

I am not familiar with the history of this specific building on campus, or why it does not follow this standard, but it nonetheless illustrates how standards and logical signifiers play such a large role in our daily activities.

It is important, therefore, to keep designs streamlined and consistent so that users don't need to figure things out for themselves. It is up to the designers to adhere to modern standards and follow the guidelines laws and logic law out for them. When designers deviate from the standards, people are lost and in other cases may not find a solution as quickly as I was able to do.

The signifiers, and therefore the instructions, should always be obvious. Users shouldn’t have to think referring to principles seen in Steve Krug's Don’t make me think, revisited: A common sense approach to web and mobile usability.

References

Krug, Steve. (2014).  Don’t make me think, revisited: A common sense approach to web and mobile usability.  San Francisco, CA: New Riders

　

Waging War on a Machine by Kaitlyn Neis

I got in an epic fight with my washing machine this week.

It seems a simple enough process, right? The user adds two things to the machine (soap and clothes), pushes a couple of buttons, and ends up with clean clothes. 

Not in this case.

There is no standard set for washing machines, meaning that manufacturers are able to take whatever liberties they like with them. Somehow these liberties never seem to extend to leopard print paint jobs or buttons with weird shapes. No, it's always the controls. Even though people will often say they find one setting they like and use it over and over again (see The Design of Everyday Things), manufacturers like to make it complicated.

I like having the option to wash my clothes in the appropriate temperature, or to do a gentle wash if I have nice clothes, but generally I don't need 60+ combinations I can use. Last time I did laundry, I discovered that the dial must be pulled instead of pushed to activate the chosen cycle. Not only is the pulling action not intuitive, but the button doesn’t recede inward once the previous cycle has ended. This results in the user pushing the dial and expecting it to start, user frustration as they attempt to reset the machine, and only then success as they try pushing the button in again out of frustration.

My issue this week arose when I set the machine to ‘extra spin’ which I understood to mean that the cycle would include an extra spin cycle after washing. Jeans don’t dry well if not spun extra, and I had several pairs of jeans. I added soap, closed the lid, and started the cycle. Simple, right? I heard the machine start and figured it was fine to walk away.

When I returned, I found that my clothes were entirely dry. No, the machine didn’t spin well enough to do that, the clothes were never washed in the first place.

Cue frustration. 

Of course, I assumed that I was wrong, that I had failed to turn the machine on at all. I was in the middle of homework, and it’s not unheard of for me to do absentminded things when I’m focusing on something else. I grumbled, reset the machine, and started it. This time, I stayed around and listened to it start.

I returned later to find that…my clothes were still dry.

What?

Whatever this was, I knew I had heard the washer start. Why hadn’t it washed?

Long story short, I eventually discovered that I had set the machine to spin…without washing the clothes first. In the end, I used the setting I'd previously discovered worked.

Why was the machine designed to allow users to do that at all? Perhaps if you felt that your clothes hadn’t been spun enough in the first place, you might add an extra cycle, but otherwise it only serves to confuse the users of an already counter-intuitive machine.

My experience brought a number of ideas to light in response to the work we've been doing on navigation. I knew how to do one cycle on the washing machine, and I was essentially punished for attempting to use a different pathway. Interestingly, this is one issue that could be faced with the OWL. The changing of known pathways and users' understanding of the website will have a serious impact on our initial decisions as we look at the current OWL design and determine what most needs to be changed.

On the current website, people may know one way of getting the result they want, but when they attempt to get the result in a different way they are unable to access the materials they need. Design should not only be intuitive, it should also allow the user to access what they need through multiple easily-discoverable means. With the redesign in mind, we need to take both returning and new users into account. 

For the OWL, this could mean on the webpage, such as being able to access things through the search bar as well as by using the typically prescribed path. It could also mean accessibility through different devices, ones that are fairly outdated or the most recent smartphone. There are a number of considerations when redesigning a webpage for usability, and I think that our class is finally reaching the point of digging into the meat of the matter.