Adventures in Electrostatic

It is interesting how changing something as little as when a LED turns on or off greatly affects the interaction of a device. What does blinking mean?… green or red?… text or no text? I can understand (a little) how these little decisions get overlooked by electronic and appliance companies, but it seems as though most could be fixed with just a little user testing… or at least a competent designer. We all know its possible, Apple does a great job at it, and yes their stuff is more expensive; but look at Ikea… their stuff is cheap AND designed well.

It may just be the nature of the beast for most design processes to rush the last 5% of a project… especially in the technology realm where engineers are focusing on the ‘big’ problems… like wireless-ness and such.

I know for sure in my own process I often rush into full on production and skip the paper and user prototyping steps I know I should take; its mostly because I am so excited to get started with the ‘real’ work and not some ‘preparation’-which is the wrong attitude to have. I hope I can learn to value the prototyping steps more in this class, because I’m sure it will save me time in the long run

Time is another tricky thing: I’m not sure I value it as much as I should; maybe because I’m young and think I have lots of it… I wonder how much I waste? And what is wasted time? Blog derailed!

So now for the explanation:
Part C:
The changes I made to the projector’s interface were very simple. The general functionally and placement of the buttons was good… it was their feedback that was the problem. As stated in parts A&B, after the projector is cooled and ready to be unplugged, the green power light sits there just blinking… and that is confusing… what does blinking mean? I figured I could just change that aspect and the whole process would be much more clear. The other confusing bit out the powering-down process was the ‘fan cooling’ part. In the current system there is nothing to inform the user of what is happening… so this can be a stressful time… another thing to change.
So this is what I did:
I moved the ‘power status’ LED from next to the power button, to around it… this way the user knows what its signifying… power status. In its place I added a LED with the words ‘cooling lamp’ next to it. After those minor physical changes I reworked the LED states. When the projector is on the power LED around the power button is full on green and the cooling lamp LED is off. When the user presses the power button twice (guided by the screen) the fan comes on, the power button goes off, and the ‘cooling lamp’ LED starts to blink. Blinking suggests movement and time… ‘wait for me’ it says… and thats what the user has to do for 90 seconds. After the lamp is cooled, the fan turns off and so does the ‘cooling lamp’ LED… so now NO LEDS ARE ON… that is important. I think that is really the only way people will be comfortable enough to unplug the device.

Parts D&E:
I was right, the powering off process goes much smoother when the LEDs are playing nicer. You can watch the video to see how it went; the users seems to approach the projector with a obvious sort of attitude. Some of that I suppose was because they were touching a piece of paper instead of a real, expensive, ITP owned, projector. I am fairly confident, however, that the changes I instituted help the user complete their task by using their preexisting assumptions and experiences with electronic devises. By taking advantage of symbols like ‘blinking’ and ‘off’ in the right context, the users felt more comfortable because they thought they knew what was going on. Just little simple changes.