No Ideas But In Things
I’ve been keeping an eye on Dan Saffer’s latest project No Ideas But In Things (Dan’s blog post about the project) - I think it’s worthwhile to look at what smart people have been developing for thousands of years and adapting that to the web rather than thinking we have to invent everything from scratch. There are some similarities between interaction in the “real world” and online; controls such as buttons, metaphors such as tabbed files (I mention that because I’ve been spending the last few days working on a tabbed navigation system).
So here’s my contribution; an elevator control panel:
What I wanted to bring your attention to is that the numbers are duplicated - there’s a number on the actual button and then a raised number above the button.
Why?
My guess is that due to the nature of the intended use of the raised number - that is, to be read through touch - that if the raised letter were on the button then a person may accidentally trigger the button whilst attempting to read the button and figure out what the button will do once pressed.
Now … think about translating that to the web; the concept of properly informing users of the functionality and consequence of triggering various actions is a core part of information architecture, but it’s just interesting to see this offline example and the correlation between how this elevator button communicates to the user in a safe environment the use of the trigger prior to the user then activating the trigger.
I guess to sum it up “Don’t make the user click the button to find out what it does!”
Afterthought: I also like how the button uses a border that turns red when activated; perhaps we can look at something similar with our active states on navigation buttons - using borders to communicate state rather than changing the entire background colour, generally resulting in a need to change the colour/contrast of the text. Though I’d have thought green would have made more sense …
EDIT: My post made it onto NIBUT. Cheers Dan!
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