This is the light control for Paresky Center. I first became familiar with this light control when I was pulling an all-nighter in Paresky and the lights suddenly turned off at 3 am. Another student turned the lights back on in Paresky. On another occasion, when there weren’t other students in Paresky, I had to turn the lights back on myself. When I looked at the light control, I was bewildered as to which button to press. I think this is a bad design because, as seen in the picture, there are no signifiers indicating what each of the buttons mean. Because of this, the only way to find out is to test all the buttons. However, having done this previously, I once accidentally turned off all the lights in Lee Snack Bar with one of the buttons and was unable to turn them back on despite once again going through all the buttons. As a user, I felt frantic in wanting to resolve this issue because I’d left other students in the dark. (In the end, I never figured it out, but other students were just talking in Lee’s). On another occasion, another student tried turning on the lights, and I was sitting in Lee Snack Bar trying to write my essay. In the end, the student couldn’t manage to turn the lights back on, and I had to move to upstairs Paresky.
In addition, the mapping of the buttons to the lights in Paresky isn’t naturally obvious. I will say that the two light controls stacked on top of each other indicate to the user that the top is used for upper Paresky and the bottom is for the main level. However, beyond that, the buttons don’t indicate which subsection of Paresky it controls. Moreover, we can further see that this is a bad design because someone had to create their own sticker label and had to write in what the settings mean. From a user’s perspective, this light switch isn’t intuitive. The best way to discover how it’s use is through brute force, which requires the user to spend significantly more time trying to figure it out than they probably want to.