Swipe Access
Every Brown student must struggle at least once when swiping into the buildings and dorms. Now that I have been living on-campus for two full years already, I have over time learned the direction to swipe my card. Therefore, while the product does have good memorability, it lacks greatly when it comes to learnability. It wasn’t until the other day when my mom tried to get into the building using my ID that I noticed how unclear the interface for the card swiper truly is: Stripe facing in? Stripe facing out? Swipe up? Swipe down? In fact, she first tried tapping the card against the swiper, as the interface didn’t even make clear that swiping was a necessary component to its use. The only indication that swiping might be needed is the fact that the machine itself has a slit in it, which vaguely resembles a credit card reader. Yet, with chips on credit cards becoming more and more popular, the swipe card reader is becoming more and more outdated. The engineers behind this interface likely assumed that users would have a basic knowledge of what credit card swipers look like, but as technology improves, consumers will less easily recognize this interface as a swipe reader. One way to better this design would be to add a simple icon in order to not only indicate that the card needs to be swiped but also which way the card should be facing and in which direction the card should be swiped. This would increase the overall learnability of the product.
One component of the design that is successful is the use of lights to indicate whether a swipe was successful. For example, the light remains yellow at all times, but when a card with user access attempts to open a door, the light turns green. But when someone who does not have access to that building attempts to open the door, the interface instead shows a red light. This color choice mirrors a stoplight, allowing the user to associate green with “go” and red with “stop”. However, the logic behind these lights rather disappears when a door is held open — yielding the interface to flash each color in an alternating pattern. Since a user would expect that the door should not be left open, we should perhaps expect that the light would flash red — in order to indicate an unwanted action. Instead, the alternating pattern of lights does not indicate to the user that having the door open is bad. Perhaps the engineers believed that the use of various colors would gain the user’s attention and inspire them to close the door, but I’ve found that it more so confuses the user as to what the interface is trying to communicate. Therefore, a better design for the interface could be to change the response to extended door openings to flashing red. This could also increase the learnability of the product, since new users might not make the association that flashing lights only appear when a door is left open.
