Unaddressed problems

I am sure; each one of you must have encountered problems in operating switches in some place or the other. It’s always a challenge to work out which switch belong to what. In fact, it’s a problem faced by everyone whenever s/he go to a new place or the same place after a long time and in some extreme cases repeatedly. I can recall my experiences right from my childhood to this date, how it used to become a herculean task to identify all switches in a house and their controls. More than quarter century has passed but the problem has persisted.

Switches have covered a long way of evolution. But, this evolution seems to be lopsided only towards aesthetics i.e. ornamentation and technology i.e. how to make them shock proof, etc. But, usability is something which has been ignored again and again. It’s surprising that even being an omnipotent problem, no designer ever tried to derive any solution for this.



Users have their own way of reducing their memory load. Some uses permanent markers to write ‘T, F, L, etc’ on switch panel or some uses suitcases’ stickers to denote the connections. So, ‘answer’ is to simply make information visible and comprehensible. But, the vital ‘question’ is: who, designer or user, needs to do this job?