Why the world is full of buttons that don't work
cnn.com
cnn.com
Engineers and builders don't care about "placebo effects on users" except for in the most carefully built UX scenarios. We're talking about basic infrastructure here, no one really cares about UX that much as long as it meets basic requirements. All these buttons exist as an accident, or they're detritus from an era when they did work, or it was just cheaper to get the panel with a button than a blank.
"Let's put a placebo button in to make people feel better." said no traffic engineer, elevator installer, motel HVAC installer, ever.
From The Jargon File (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/Hanlons-Razor.html):
At http://www.statusq.org/2001/11/26.html it is claimed that Hanlon's Razor was coined by one Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, PA. However, a curiously similar remark (“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.”) appears in Logic of Empire, a classic 1941 SF story by Robert A. Heinlein […].
In both an element people often overlook is the keyword adequately. Sure anything can be attributed to stupidity, but in many cases it’s too beneficial to the “stupid” party and/or too persistent to be adequately explained by something other than malice.
It seems like it deserves a name since in nearly any thread online involving a supposition of malice someone comes out of the woodwork with Hanlon's razor.
PS: I think I had a better name for this in the past but have forgotten it.
I heard that loading bar is just a placebo to emphisise the creation of a new droplet as being important. Apparently the droplet is finished initialising long before the loading bar's 4 or 5 second length. It's probably why this loading bar apprears to load so perfectly -- it's not timed on anything but a counter.
In fact I had to draw out the experience of topping up in our app. It happened too quickly and people didn't know what was just happened. They clicked their pay button and were brought to the balance screen.
They all panicked for some reason and ran back to history to check the transaction went through. We put in a success message before being brought to balance screen and panic is gone. The success messasge is just elaborting on what already happened -- it's a placebo.
I think you're right about the real world. Real buttons are often just broken but in the world of software theres lots of bright and dark patterns behind the buttons -- no software button broke from mechanical failure.
A placebo would be adding a button that says "accelerate droplet launch speed" that does nothing. It's something that the user takes action on that is irrelevant.
If anyone at DO is listening why does this take time at all? Why not have instance types pre-provsioned and booted and just run cloud-init when the user makes the droplet? Instant provisioning would be incredibly useful for scaling and fault tolerance.
Given that the estimated useful life of an elevator is 25 years, it is likely that most elevators in service today have been modernized or refurbished, rendering the door-close buttons a thing of the past for riders, Ms. Penafiel said.
But as The New York Times reported in 2004, the city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals. More than 2,500 of the 3,250 walk buttons that were in place at the time existed as mechanical placebos. Today there are 120 working signals, the city said.
About 500 were removed during major construction projects. But it was estimated that it would cost $1 million to dismantle the nonfunctioning mechanisms, so city officials decided to keep them in place.
Most of the buttons were scattered throughout the city, mainly outside of Manhattan. They were relics of the 1970s, before computers began choreographing traffic signal patterns on major arteries.
But note the bit about dummy thermostats!
Depending on where you work, you might find the thermostat in a plastic case under lock and key, but if you’re lucky you might have control over one.
Well, you might think you have control.
The Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration News reported in 2003 that it asked readers in an informal online survey whether they had ever installed “dummy thermostats.” Of 70 who responded, 51 said they had.
Also, these new "smart lifts" are horrible, much slower than the previous ones and seemingly not built with the concept that 1 elevator request could involve multiple people travelling.
As for elevators, I have encountered exactly one building where the door close button works even in the default mode (not independent service).
Or left there for future flexibility.
A crosswalk near me was just switched to where the button does nothing. (You can tell because now the walk signal shows on every cycle of the light. Previously, it would be skipped if you didn't push the button.)
If they had removed it, it would make things harder if they ever want to reverse this decision.
They'd have to reinstall the buttons, which could involve locating it in storage or even buying a replacement, plus sending out a crew, etc. And there are signs that go along with the buttons, so you've got to make sure those are reinstalled correctly. Not insurmountable problems, but they have a cost, and it's not clear this would be the best use of limited money.
If I forget to click the pedestrian button, cars in the same direction as me will get green light, while I wait for red.
Most elevators don't have a close button in Denmark. But it definitely worked in Japan.
I can't remember ever sitting in an office with a temperature control knob available.
[1] ... or am I just fooling myself on these accounts?
This isn't the same as pressing the button indicating that traffic will be stopped in 20s or similar, but I don't know of anywhere traffic lights ever worked like that. You're still going to have to wait for the allocated "pedestrian" time, but it will never come without a button press
Some traffic lights are just for pedestrians crossing, away from a junction. Normally those work pretty quickly - traffic stops in 10 seconds, so long as the last stop was at least 30 seconds ago.
In some countries, pedestrians can get a green light while cars are still allowed turn across them. I'm not sure if that's the case in New York, but it might explain some of the confusion.
edit: found it - https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/do-...
I've been places where it seems to do nothing. I've been places where it starts a signal change. I've been places where it enables accessibility features, as described in the article. And I've been places where it does absolutely nothing to alter the light's timing, but it does control whether the pedestrian light will turn white or not.
The last of these is my least favorite, because it seems to engender the most confusion.
I have several pedestrian crossings where the if you as a pedestrian don't hit the button... you'll never get a signal to cross and the traffic is not impacted. But if you do push it, it does give you time to cross and holds the cars longer.
One place traffic never stops, until you hit the pedestrian crossing button, and then they have to stop.
On the other hand in some pedestrian dense / slow traffic areas I know the buttons don't do anything as the pedestrian crossing lights just change with the lights, but only during high pedestrian traffic times.
I think it has more to do with policy and how you want to time your lighting systems and it varies wildly in the US
Some of the buttons are there solely for the visually impaired. Some of these will always play a beeping sound and then play it louder when you press them, others will only play the beeping sound if you press them. These buttons are generally placed in cities or at busy cross roads wherethere is never no-traffic sounds.
Others tell the signals you want to cross. In some cases, the pedestrian lights will never turn green unless you press the button, this is typically in the suburbs or in the country on streeets that are busy in one direction. Others will shorten the traffic cycle of the lights.
Here’s the thing though, most traffic lights are guided by data science to make traffic flow optimal. So often the pedestrian button is turned off during rush hours, where the signal is operating to maximize flow. Then during off hours, one direction may get prioritized because it has more traffic, and then the pedestrian button in the other direction gets turned on to shorten the cycle. Sometimes that setup alters multiple times during a day.
Many of the buttons combine functionality.
Aside from that they sometime get turned off for maintenance, maybe the button broke, maybe the traffic light got updated and the button needs to get changed. Maybe we’re testing a new traffic flow. Since 90% of them aren’t high priority, they can be turned off for quite a while, waiting to get fixed/updated. Hell, even the ones that are required for green lights aren’t necessarily fixed the same day, because the other 3 directions still work (we do fix these within a week though).
Finally there are the decommissioned buttons. As you might imagine they can be there for quite some time. It’s ridiculously expensive to remove buttons from just one cross section, so we pool them together. Of course this means that they can sit there for years waiting to be removed.
So it’s confusing. I know how they work, and I’ll still press the ones that are only there to give off sound.
None of them are installed for the reasons stated in the article though. In sidewalks where people have trouble waiting, we install visible timers that tell you exactly when it’ll be green instead.
Most buttons in Australia work - or rather, the lights won't work for pedestrians who think it's always automatic. And on my visit to a couple of places in America last year for the eclipse, I easily found some buttons that also worked - but most crossings had no buttons at all.
The elevators I use definitely have buttons that are responsive - I can and have counted the difference in seconds thanks to articles like the above that seem to echo a certain untested dogma.
I don't think most city councils care enough to install real infrastructure let alone placebo infrastructure.
What makes me think that is the attitude to weather in the UK, where the polarity shifts as soon as summer transitions to winter and vice versa. As in, thermostats in most UK shops and pubs and bars in the summer are set to levels of cold you would only begin to experience as November approaches; they're practically icy and an amazing example of desert conditions when night falls.
But then winter approaches and everything is fired up to the point where you're practically sweating if you're wearing full on winter wear. The total lack of humidity prevents the sweating but the heat goes beyond cosy.
I hate this, so my idea of getting a comfortable temperature doesn't align with the normal situation. But if I was to change it to suit my needs then that would have a negative affect on everybody who justified the need to freeze their ass off every time they walk into a shop when the sun takes its hat off.
So when it comes to local climate control, it's practically impossible to please anybody. You can't give one person the power satisfy their taste at the expense of everybody else, that's why air conditioning fucking sucks. The best you can do is maintain a comfortable average, remove or restrict the thermostats, and provide other solutions that allow comfort without changing it for all.
I'd just rather have nothing at all than something which both pretends to do something while also making it very clear - via the temperature display - that it does nothing.
At least at a crosswalk or in an elevator, I can pretend that what I'm doing has an effect.
Well in an office there is a thermostat somewhere. But if people know where it is they will try to get access to it and then get involved in power struggles over controlling it.
The dummy thermostats aren't really placebo thermostats but rather are decoy thermostats. Their purpose is to distract people from finding the real thermostat.
In a former job, people just opened the windows when they didn't like the temperature. So we had cold in winter, heat in summer and I guess a pretty high energy bill. But no wars, people opened their window. Oh and I was just a contractor so no chance to complain.
[0] https://intelligentsoundengineering.wordpress.com/2017/08/15...
Also, when I press a "close door" button in an elevator, I expect a so-fast-it's'-silly Star Wars closing speed.
Or realistically at least a reaction within 0.5 seconds or I get instantly annoyed.
1. There's a major crossroads (junction of a bypass). The natural phase design means that vehicles will be stopped before each crossing in the phase anyway. So the buttons _almost_ do nothing. Why "almost" ? Well, in the middle of the night with almost no traffic, the phases stop being automatic, bypass traffic gets a green all the time. If something comes on the side road, the phases will happen, but you don't want to wait for that as a pedestrian, your buttons will cause all the phases (even the ones you don't care about for crossing motor traffic) to happen so that you can cross. In practice of course at this hour few pedestrians push the buttons anyway, they can see there's no traffic.
2. The high street nearby has an old-fashioned Pelican crossing, and the buttons work as expected. A Pelican is a familiar design, traffic lights control the motor traffic and red/green lamps are attached for pedestrians, facing them from the far side of the road, the pedestrian presses the button, a timer starts, and after some configured delay the traffic signals bring motor traffic to a halt, then you can cross.
3. But it also has a newer Puffin crossing. The Puffin crossing is superficially similar to a Pelican, and road vehicle operators need no extra training, but for a pedestrian the operation is improved in one immediately visible and one invisible way: Visibly the red/ green lamps are moved to the pedestrian's side of the road, positioned so that when looking at them the pedestrian can also see the road with oncoming traffic (in the UK this will usually be to their right, but in some cases it's the left and the Puffin is adjusted appropriately). This reduces the hazard of pedestrians stepping in front of traffic when they have a green light but a motorist hasn't slowed. Also, the timer now starts when the crossing is used, and inhibits further crossing activations. For a busy crossing this makes no difference, but at a quiet crossing it means if you arrive after a long lull it will activate immediately, since the traffic has not recently been interrupted. A big improvement.
Elsewhere in my city I've also noticed examples of the Pegasus and Toucan, which are similar to the Puffin except that they're intended to also accommodate horses (Pegasus) and bicycles (Toucan) where routes allow these in addition to pedestrians.
Pelican crossings go through a flashing amber phase on their way from red to green, imitating the behaviour of Belisha beacons from Zebra crossings. Puffin crossings remove this behaviour, instead opting for the typical red -> red+amber -> green phase, using pedestrian sensors instead of solely a timer. This also means that the system can cancel the crossing sequence if the pedestrian pushes the wait button, but then leaves.
They therefore require looking down, whereas farside displays keep the head lifted which makes it easier to transition to looking at the road. In all directions. Which is why nearside displays aren't used at junctions.
Puffin crossings are an excellent example of a system being redesigned to reduce cost and then having bogus UX 'justifications' pasted over it.
The Puffin displays are replicable, which is how Pegasus crossings work (a person on a horse obviously can't reach down to the level of a pedestrian button, the crossing is functionally similar to a Puffin but adds a picture of a horse & rider, and is replicated higher up the pole)
The key one is Tube train buttons. For indoor stations, they are effectively placebo buttons, but once the weather gets very hot or cold and the Tube train is outdoors, they tend to become active. By the inconsistent way they're activated, I believe it's the train driver in control but that may be different on different lines.
The part that interests me is just how many people fail to notice they have no effect indoors - whilst it's potentially difficult to spot with an isolated button (eg at a road crossing), it's blatant for the Tube as everyone's door opens at the same time and everyone emerges at basically the same time just after (with tiny variations).
What stitches to tourists in London, is that it's the other way on UK railway trains (near London at least) - they usually do work always, and thus the inconsistency provides a further barrier to figuring it out!
Unless I'm living in a different version of London to the authors, it is unfortunately not the case that pressing the button invokes an interstitial foot massage.
It's an aplication of the placebo effect. It gives people the feeling of having an impact on critical systems which work better automated when they have not, like on traffic lights. A net-positive effect is widely observed.
It adds another level of confusion and doubt in technology, since occasionally people will figure out what's going on or read articles like this one.
How about showing a timer on the traffic light when they will turn green, or temporarily disable traffic lights when there is little traffic (using live data).
In some areas they have these and it's really nice.
CNN...
Now that I’m back, I notice that elevators in the US often close immediately upon pressing a floor button. But also, most elevator close buttons do actually work.
In a normal elevator I imagine they also do work when in a privileged mode (such as an EMS key override).
[1]https://www.wikihow.com/Operate-an-Elevator-in-Fire-Service-...
Surely pedestrian presses button is a valuable input to any such semi-smart traffic management system?
If the system is smart enough to know about late buses and their routes then this very binary input should be easy to integrate...
Any time this so-called "Pedestrian Council of Australia chairman" (Harold Scruby) is covered by an Australian reporter, doubt should be heavily cast on the validity of the entire article or reporter's credibility.
Look up who Harold Scruby really is. I'll say no more.