The Confusing Switch Board Conundrum -Signifying Stickers
Let’s try to make switchboards simpler by adding Signifiers.
Spoiler Alert: We haven’t even touched the surface of complexity.
Confusing Switchboards
Electric Switch Boards can be very confusing. We live in 2023, and yet the simple switches that help us turn on the lights confuse us every day. Take a look at the following image:
See, it looks elegant and stylish, and the switches are bigger so that it is more convenient to use, and yet, they are very confusing. Besides the Ceiling Fan Regulator and the Power Socket, every single switch in the picture looks the same. How do you differentiate them? And this was supposed to be solved ages ago. But it wasn’t.
So, without testing and mentally assigning, you don’t know and remember which switch works with which electric appliance. This causes us to get frustrated because there is no mental mapping of the switches with their functionality.
Adding Signifiers
Nowadays, electric switches are better because of their better affordance. They’re bigger and so easy to push. They make an excellent click-y sound that gives good feedback. These are all of Don Norman’s Principles of Interaction. They applied multiple of them and yet forgot to implement one that is also one of the most crucial. That is a Signifier. There isn’t any sign like the Ceiling Fan Regulator that identifies what the switch does. So, we thought that adding a signifier could be a solution to this problem.
As we had two kinds of lights inside our room. One is a round-looking bulb, and another is a long flat light. Both are LEDs.
So, we drew the shapes. Put glue on them to improve texture and improve accessibility.
After that, we put the stickers directly on the switchboard signifying the switches properly. The shape of the sticker acts as a signifier for the types of lights they are. How neat, eh?
Behold, Complexities, and Difficulties!
We thought that the problems regarding the stickers would be that there are many shapes and sizes of switches that we have to address before making a sticker. While the image from Google contained long switches, we can see shorter switches here. But those are problems we could solve.
A twist happened when we reached the hallway of our building. We saw that there were five ceiling lights of equal shape and size, and there was no correspondence between the switches’ location and the lights’ location. So, here the signifying sticker solution won’t work.
I mean, really? After so many tries, we have to go back to Square One.
Why is this such a hard problem to solve?
The real problem lies with not thinking of usability before designing the building, at least not in Bangladesh. And as it is a niche problem to solve, nobody bothers solving it. And that is why these frustrations happen. The solution is to put a single switch under the appliance, as shown in the following image.
The switch is directly under the light, and many buildings follow this design pattern which doesn’t even need an additional signifier in the first place. But this is a costly design choice, especially in hallways or large rooms with tens, maybe hundreds of lights.
And on top of that, going to every switchboard just to turn on/off all the lights is a big chore. And so, in this case, the user experience you can’t have is both easy to identify and easy to control altogether. You have to choose one or the either.
Conclusion
User Experience has always been an iterative game. It might seem hopeless, but we’ve come this far through an iterative process. Creating mental mapping and improving the overall usability of switchboard signifiers is a step in the right direction.
We also made a YouTube short that funnily shows our journey with Signifying Switches. See if you can find the easter egg of ‘Design of Everyday Things’ inside the Short here: Signifying Confusing Switches.
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