Wiper Confusion
I recently had cause to spend a few weeks on a ship, sailing the seas in search of scientific data. The crew on board were friendly, kind and generous to a man, and the officers allowed us onto the bridge to watch the waves and wildlife as often as we pleased.
Now, at sea the weather can often get a little rough, so like all good vehicles, this ship had windscreen wipers – six of them.
Very sensible, and controls for the wipers were placed all the way across, so anybody (including us land-lubbers) could clean the windows if we felt the need. At least, that’s the theory: in practice, we just asked the officers to do it for us. Why? One look at the control panel will enlighten you (click to enlarge):
This control is impossible to understand without training. It is possible to control all six wipers from the panel, which is presumably why there’s duplicated symbols on some buttons. Of those symbols, I could hazard a guess as to what some of them might do; the zero probably switches off the wipers, but how about the spot? What does the light bulb do? It doesn’t illuminate the panel at night – I tried. The horizontal lines are meaningless too – if I had to guess, I’d say they were something to do with wiper speed, but these wipers have only one speed. Their function remains a mystery. As for the duplicated buttons, they apparently control different sets of wipers, but there’s no indication of which ones. The officers had learned the mysterious art of controlling the wipers, but all admitted that it would take too long to teach us. If we wanted the windows cleaned, we just asked.
Now, some of the controls on the bridge are incredibly complicated, and need to be – ships aren’t simple things to work with. But if the windscreen wipers can’t be made understandable, or at least easy to explain, then there’s something amiss. Whoever Wynn Marine are, their interface designers leave something to be desired.
June 4, 2010
Tags:
design
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