Design: it’s the simple things
Posted by: clare on: December 5, 2011
Not so long ago, I was struck by some traffic lights near to the TU/e. More accurately, I was struck by how waiting at this particular set of lights seems to go much faster.
I’m sure it’s because the lights include a countdown to when you can cross: you can see it below the red man in the image below. It’s a tiny change, but having an indicator of time remaining somehow makes (to me at least) a huge difference.
It’s the same with waiting for lifts: in my building at work, lift doors on the ground floor have indicators of where the lifts currently are, but the floor with my office includes no such indicator. I remain surprised by how much longer the wait for a lift seems when the only difference is that I don’t know where the thing is.
Looks like the small things really do make a difference.
Locals patiently wait to cross the road
2 Responses to "Design: it’s the simple things"
December 11, 2011 at 12:31 pm
It’s great to reflect on your own experience of these things in a different context isn’t it? You think about the progress bars in Desktop operating systems, watching them advance as software installs. In many tech cases, this can be a hard thing to get right – hence the 80% to 100% syndrome, when the progress bar seemlingly jumps forward to the end, or the worse case when it seems to halt earlier in the process.
One of our clients runs a travel agency specialising in custom trips built in consultation with their customers. We added a feature whereby as a customer you could download your specific itinerary on the website by passing in some credentials. Because of some of the constraints in the design, we were actually streaming the PDF to their computer (rather than serving up the static file whole), which meant that a download dialog didn’t appear on their browser. Since the PDFs could be a few MBs in size, we added a holding page with an animated GIF saying ‘Loading’. Although that holding page wasn’t really doing anything, it gave the appearance of progress (which is something the customer otherwise wouldn’t have had).
Feedback is important to our impatient minds :-> I also think that the resolution of the feedback is important: note that the subway system in Barcelona tells you exactly when the next train will arrive to the second, and that this is much more satisfying than the Tube’s “2 minutes”.
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December 6, 2011 at 10:17 pm
when I went from yours to the station, I got to the lights with the ladybirds behind a bunch of motorbikes. none of the pressed the button. I thought they would know what they were doing so I waited but I was watching the traffic and it seemed like it should be our turn. So I edged around the bikes and reached for the button/pressed it. The lights went green!