The design of a confusing light switch.

Last night I attended a Scottish Usability Professionals' Meeting with an excellent talk and group discussion lead by Andy Bright of tattie+toppin which was hosted by Scottish Enterprise in Edinburgh. While there I had to use the facilities (apparently that's a polite way to say I went to the toilet...) and discovered a very irritating light switch design. I'll apologise for the poor photography up front, you would never know I'm also a professional photographer when I'm using the camera in my phone!

Here's a front view of the switch and it looks perfectly normal. That's what I thought when I first encountered it. Now quite sensibly the building has a policy of turning the lights off when not in use, so the first thing I needed to do was turn it on. This is where a little bit of psychology comes in: when you encounter a new light switch you've never used before, I suspect that most of the time you just use it and gain the desired effect without having to think about it. This is generally because the most common light switch design is a simple rocker and all the way through your life you've learned to quickly and automatically recognise which way you need to press it by sight or feel (the sticky out bit needs pressing) and by whether the light is currently on or off (changing the switch direction will change the light state). After some thought and testing, it would seem that you flick down to turn on and flick up to turn off, although the direction does vary from switch to switch and doesn't seem to matter as long as that sticky out bit is clear to see and feel.

We now reach the problem of this particular switch. There were two sticky out bits. That's right, the switch naturally lies centrally and is sprung to return to the centre after being pressed and released. It's not too clear in the second photo as the top part is sticking out more than the bottom, but look closely and you'll note the bottom part is also sticking out. This is the state regardless of whether the light is on or off.

On my first encounter of the room I was working automatically and must have noticed the top was sticking out more than the bottom, so pressed the top part, and stood waiting for the light to come on. It didn't. I pressed again in case I simply hadn't pressed correctly. No change. Eventually I started to actually look at the switch and noticed the almost central sitting of the rocker, so pressed the lower part and lo, there was light!

During the talk I noticed that style of switch was common in the meeting room as well, so spent a few minutes looking at it and playing, just to ensure the behaviour was fixed rather than acting as a simple on/off switch by changing the state of the bulb regardless whether the top or bottom was pressed. It was clear that that the designer had followed the “normal” preference for pressing down to switch on and pressing up to switch off, yet decided to provide no clue to this in the design itself.

I do feel I should make the point that my initial encounter with the light switch and working out how it operated after my first attempts failed took no more than three or four seconds, so nothing more than a minor irritation. However, had the designer chosen to include the standard visual and touch clues we've been used to for decades rather than being “clever” and making it a “nice design”, there would have been no irritation at all and I would not have just spent time writing this article.

This is a simple case of a designer wanting to be different and apparently putting no though into how people actually use the device. It's frustrating, it's unnecessary and it shows a complete lack of care for the average person. This is the same situation and problem with designers in all areas when they choose to believe that good design is more important than the ability to use it and it is a mindset that needs to change. Until it does, I will have no shortage of articles to write for this usability blog.