Better Experience #19: Turn the Lights On 💡🔌

Improving our way to turn on the light

Sources

Better Experience Design is a collection of arbitrary encounters with everyday things that have given us either delightful or stressful experience.

Have you ever randomly clicking the light switches just to turn on the light that you want? Or somehow you feel that your office is quite bright today — because all of the lights are on — so you decided to switch a few them off. And in the quest to switch off those few lights you found yourself randomly flick the wrong switches and disturbed other people because of that.

Well, my friend, I have experienced the same and it can be annoying and frustrating. Despite you knowing well that the light switches have been stuck on the wall for god knows how long, but I could never remember which switches to press or flick. This isn’t a first world problem, but yeah let’s solve it anyway!

1. What Is it and what is the purpose?

Light switches are used to turn on and off the lights that are directly connected to the switches. Therefore when there are multiple lights, there will also be multiple switches.

2. Why/When I did use it?

I use light switches to turn the lights on and off, this is very obvious, duh. And when the light got too bright, I decided to turn off a few lights to suit how my eyes want it.

3. Was it Delightful or Stressful Experience? Why?

It’s an okay experience if there’s only one switch and it’s intended for one light only.

it’s simple when we have one light.

But it’s not an okay experience when you have multiple lights and multiple switches. It’s a bit annoying for me to flick the wrong switches every time I enter a room. In my case, my office can get a too bright and I might need to switch a few lights off and the switches are just too much.

Shit got real, when there’s multiple switches

Here are a few things that triggered the annoyance :

• Every time I enter a room, I need to randomly flick the switches to found which light is connected to the switch I just flick.
• It took quite an effort to find the right flick.
• I look kinda stupid for flicking randomly and had to guess which switch for which light.
• After finding out which switches are for which lights, my memory of the switches will go down to the abyss.
• Despite being in the room and the light for quite a long time, I still can’t remember anything about my light. I guess it really did go down to the abyss.

4. Can it be better?

Oh definitely yes my friend! here is the little detail that I would think will make things better.

Floor Plan Switch

As we can see below, by giving us the floor plan could possibly help us better understand the map of the light that existed within the room. Therefore deciding which switch to flick can be an easier task and you won’t have to randomly flick it anymore.

With this little detail attached, I hope in the quest of flicking/pressing the right switches will be fun and smooth experience and this time alone our memory of the switch won’t go down to the abyss.

So Simple so elegant. Source

so simple so useful.Source

5. What do you think?

We think this might be the best experience to turn the light on. What do you think?

Let us know in the comments if you have any idea about how to make it even better and let’s discuss 😆

Thanks for reading! If you have any idea about what we should cover next, you can comment below / send us an email: hello@betterexperience.design !

Better Experience Design is a collection of arbitrary encounters with everyday things that have given us either delightful or stressful experience.