The Usability of door handles in old Brisbane trains
Wednesday, January 10, 2007There are two kinds of train I catch to work in Brisbane: the old ones and the new ones. In the new ones the doors operate automatically. There's a button you push to indicate your desire to open the door when the train stops and it is surrounded by little lights that illuminate to indicate your request has been registered. When the train stops the lights start flashing to indicate the door opening is about to occur, and then they spring open automatically and every one detrains.
The old trains are different. They have a chrome lever door handle like a 1960's Morris Mini. When the train stops I watched people yank them, pump them up and down, grasp them, crouch slightly and heave sideways. After all there's a slight amount of anxiety that is generated when you are waiting for your stop; will the doors open in time for me to get out and make it safely home? In the old trains, anxiety starts to get the better of people, and the second the train stops they are struggling and straining for a second until finally the door opens and they almost fall out with relief.
The thing is, next to the door, up hight, is a square glass face plate over a metal box, jutting out from the inner wall of the train. It's normally black or white, but about a second after the train stops it's illuminated from inside by a red light and stenciled on the glass is "Doors Released. Turn handle to open".
Passengers obviously see the old chrome handle and assume the doors are manual, but in reality they are semi-automatic, you just have to release the door catch with the handle and the door will spring open under it's own power - supplied by compressed air, as long as that sign is illuminated, no exertion required. But no one ever looks at the sign. It's made even more difficult when some of the doors get stuck and the compressed air doesn't have anough force to open the door requiring the passenger to apply force to open them manually. This experience an efficient source of negative reinforcement.
I see the same people every day on the train and some of them have still failed to grasp the concept of these semi-automatic doors. I don't know why but this whole spectacle seems like a big usability lesson to me. I've tried to get all the points down here:
- Anxiety makes people make rapid assumptions and then stick to them, no matter what they are experiencing.
- Anxiety does not a happy learning environment make.
- People get angry when something doesn't match their expectations.
- People are focused on outcomes and are not interested in learning the process (only nerds try and work something out).
- If an object has poor usability, each use of an object will either reinforce the original assumptions or lead to confusion if assumptions are not met... there doesn't seem to be a middle ground - a happy experience of surprise learning or discovery.
- The thing must appear to function exactly like it does.
- The thing must be one thing, automatic or manual, and people will be happy - being half a thing, even with good intentions, does more harm than good. I honestly think anxiety would be far lower if the doors were just manual.
- Help must be right in the context of the action, anywhere else is just useless.
- Things need to work the same way each time, problems should be obvious, not confuse.
3 Comments
Interesting, I caught the train from south brisbane to woombye (2hrs!) for the last six months of last year and never thought about the usability of the door handles.
Mind you, I knew about the sign to the right of the doors and yet I've still struggled with the doors. Now I realise, it was when they got stuck as you describe above.
The other thing is I don't think there's an indication on the *outside* of the train to specify when the doors are released (is there?).
Hey, you're right ko. I never thought about the doors from the outside. And since there's pretty much an equal amount of anxiety about getting on the train as getting off, that's terrible usability! The only indication of door release is the hiss of compressed air. But that's only valuable if you are intimately aware of the workings of the door.
Yeah that used to bug me about Brisbane trains too. People do tend to panic a bit, they want to get off the train and not get taken another stop away! :)