UX is omnipresent — What I learned from a traffic problem
Bangalore is one of the fastest growing cities and popularly known as India’s Silicon Valley is having more than 2 million IT professionals. On average, travelers spend 1.5 hours on the road for their daily commute.
For a fact, my daily commute in a bike is around 25Km and I end up spending hours in the traffic signal (Gosh! It’s a pain). So it’s always common that when the signal suddenly turns from Red to Green, people start honking just to indicate to move.
A couple of days back I was in the signal, it turned from red to green and comparatively, there was less chaos. Later I observed that BBMP had upgraded the system, for a red light there was a timer, showing time for the green light.
In the long wait for a signal to go green, later this observation all of a sudden prompts me of Jakob Nielsen’s 1st general principle of interaction design (Heuristic principles), that is visibility of system status. This feature would indicate the driver to start the engine in the right time thus leading to less of chaos.
Now getting back to the real problem area
- Signal was creating chaos because it suddenly switches from red to green without any alert to be in a ready position thus surprising them out. This results delay in the traffic movement and a lot of honking (Pheww!! That’s the worst practice people have adopted here in the city).
- No indication of signal turning green enables the car engines to be running while waiting which in turn leads to both fuel consumption and emission of CO2 and then the global warming.
There was no indication for the people in the signal that when would the Red signal turns Green. This is something we see in our digital product where the user is kept informed about the status while waiting. For example, when loading Gmail, where loader informs the user about the “Data is Getting Loaded”.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, we are the users of our daily activity and whatever we do or confronts shapes our user experience. A red light signaling for ‘Stop’ and turning green for ‘Go’ is a very basic real-life user experience. A small usability fix would bring in a rewarding experience. I believe, UX is omnipresent and If we look a little closer at our daily lives we can observe UX in all areas, we can definitely draw inspiration for improving the UX of the digital solutions we’re building.
Let me know in the comment section below if you have observed any real-world UX problems.
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