Friday, June 18, 2004
Everything we know about traffic-calming is wrong
Summarising, this suggests that by mixing traffic and pedestrians, motorists are more aware of their environment and so go slower, looking out for people. Separate them and try to use speedhumps, and motorists concentrate of going quickly and do not pay attention to the outside conditions. Interesting in itself, but what interests me is whether this has much wider implications for design, and in particular interaction design and HCI.
Perhaps we are actually making things worse by seperating thing out - in an effort to simplify, perhaps the users are expecting us to resolve all the issues for them and hence make more mistakes. Instead, if they had to pay more attention and understand more about what was actually going on, it may be that everything would improve.....
Summarising, this suggests that by mixing traffic and pedestrians, motorists are more aware of their environment and so go slower, looking out for people. Separate them and try to use speedhumps, and motorists concentrate of going quickly and do not pay attention to the outside conditions. Interesting in itself, but what interests me is whether this has much wider implications for design, and in particular interaction design and HCI.
Perhaps we are actually making things worse by seperating thing out - in an effort to simplify, perhaps the users are expecting us to resolve all the issues for them and hence make more mistakes. Instead, if they had to pay more attention and understand more about what was actually going on, it may be that everything would improve.....
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(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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