Usability Problem
I love little examples from every day life that show good or bad design that can be related back to well designed machinery. On the machinedesign.com blog, Leslie Gordon gives a great example of poorly thought out usability in an elevator alert light. It’s supposed to show which elevator is about to open, but because of the column, you can see the light.
We can't see the light behind the column
This happens when designers and engineers work inside of a bubble. They worked on a perfectly useful feature that is rendered less useful in the context of the structure around it. This happens all the time in our industry where a typical automated packaging line consists of machines designed by many different vendors. How can we make sure our features are still useful in the context of where they’ll be installed? What are some good design practices to use to achieve this?
Tags: elevators, machine design, packaging, usability