Conscious Design Decisions

Few days back me and three of my friends – Anup, Neha and Harshit – were going to see a waterfall nearby. Anup was driving the car, Neha was sitting next to him. My self and Harshit were in the back seats. After some distance, Anup asked Neha to turn on his Android tablet and check the route on the map. It was number locked, so Anup shared the pass code verbally.

Neha punched the code and shouted– “Damn it! Error”. She repeated the action for another “Damn it!” And, she did that again for a one more “Damn it!”. It took Neha 4 attempts to punch a simple four digit number code in Anup’s tablet and it took me merely 2 minute to assume that Neha was a dumb.

On the way, Anup asked to check the route couple of more times. And, every time Neha took more than 1 attempt to successfully punch the number code. This was hilarious and at the same time I was curious to know – why on earth, a post graduate techie was struggling with 4 innocent numbers. So, I asked Neha to show me the tablet.

In a blink of a second, I understood the problem. Following is the screenshot of the lock screen.

Neha, just became a victim of a bad design. Every time she entered the code, she was subconsciously pressing 0 key to submit. And, when she realize this, she use to hit OK button without deleting the accidentally entered 0. As a result, error!

Who-so-ever designed this screen did 2 things wrong:

1. OK key and number keys are treated the same way. No difference. Ok or Submit is a special key with a special function and thus has to be treated accordingly so that user know where to tap once s/he has entered the digits. Giving a different color would have solved this issue.

2. 0 key has been given undue importance with a bigger size. Now, why is 0 more important than other nine digits? If anything that should stands out is…you guessed it right – The ‘Ok’ key.

Following image is my take on this with a simple change.