What makes you push a button? What is ‘buttonness’? What is the cue that makes you, when faced with a vending machine, push the right bit of the interface - the button - so you get the right drink? I have always found this subject rather fascinating, from my observations about affordance to ketchup bottles to doorhandles, but this particular ‘buttonness’ is a good one as it gets me again and again, I never learn, and, in fact I don’t believe I can ever learn.
This particular vending machine offers about sixteen options or so, each represented by a square graphic area. The Gold Blend ‘interface’ has a large graphic area with two circles at the bottom. I always push the one that says ‘free’. And it never works. The button with the little cup is that one that works. When I first came to this machine I just pushed anywhere in the square graphical area, but I quickly learned that that didn’t work. But I never ever seem to learn that ‘free’ doesn’t work, and ‘little cup’ does.
On the other hand, the PG Tips ‘interface’ is very similar - large graphic area, two circles, with ‘free’ top left (apologies for the shaky picture, too much coffee…), but I never push ‘free’ on here, in fact I always get PG Tips right and press ‘little cup’.
Why is this? Well, I hope you aren’t expecting an answer, because I haven’t got one, only guesses. My best guess is that the PG Tips ‘free’ graphic has no real boundary edge and appears less pressable. The only other option is relative placement, and I find that hard to believe. But frankly, I just don’t know, and I can’t introspect into these aspects of my cognition. Like thin-slicing and neural networks, we just don’t know why. But the effect is immensely strong, and it does not appear possible to consciously override these ‘thoughtless’ actions using rationality and cognition. I think that I will always get it wrong, even though I know, rationally, that there is no such thing as a ‘free’ coffee.
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And why isn’t the entire label the button, anyway?
Comment by David Mackay — August 30, 2005 @ 12:29 pm
Indeed. After all my hand-wringing about which part affords pressing the most, the foolproof answer is make it all pressable!
From a practical point of view this makes most sense. If something ‘within’ the bounds affords pressing, anything at all, then some part of the large bounded area would get pushed.
But, even then, the philosophical question remains, why even the large area? Why do the areas between these large ‘buttons’ not persuade us to click? … and why, whatever attracts, is this not under conscious and rational control? Why do I ‘forget’ what to press in this situation?
Comment by David Hawdale — September 5, 2005 @ 8:59 pm
Well, from a visual standpoint, the ‘free’ button on the gold blend option is a dark brown out of a warm yellow background and it sits in a relatively uncluttered area of the backlit graphic. The button which actually dispenses the beverage is sitting under the Nescafe typographic mark which dominates it. It’s also sat bottom left. If we assume that us westerners read top-left to bottom right, then the little ‘free’ sticker is in the optimum location for pushing!
It affords pushing. It seems to be the logical thing to press.
Conversely the tea option is a very light and clean image, with the ‘free’ sticker (it looks like a sticker, rather than an integral part of the backlit graphic) plonked on at a bit of an angle. The fact that the text is a bit skewed may be a subconscious indicator that this is information and not calling you to press. The call to action here is clearly visible.
As for the whole thing being a button. I’d find that very unusual and uncomfortable. That would possibly require the use of more fingers, or even a palm press to activate the switch and get your dried leaves in boiling water. Apart from the mechanical aspects.
Perhaps it not so much a button problem as a sticker issue and the question should be why does the price sticker look like a button?
‘All my circuits are irrevocably occupied trying to work out why the earthman wants boiled leaves’
Comment by Simon Crosbie — September 27, 2005 @ 10:37 am