They built a new tram in my town, and it is pretty fantastic. It has a modern look, runs smoothly, has little delay between two trams, inside heating, is spacious and well lit, is kept really clean etc.
But for some reason, the engineers that designed this tram thought it would be a good idea to make the door buttons "detect" your press rather than actually get pressed down. This means that even though you have pressed the button, the feeling under your finger is that nothing has moved! So naturally, you try again, harder, but obviously the button doesn't move any bit more.
Eventually, the door opens because the button does in fact work, but it feels like it doesn't and for me that's a huuuuuge pet peeve.
The only things in place to tell you "the button is ready to be pressed" are a measly flashing green light that quickly turns red as you press (like did I do something wrong?) and a repeated beep. These two things are definitely unclear as I've seen countless people trying to press on the button before the door could be opened and then panic that they won't be able to get down and start pressing frenetically until the door finally opens.
And I mean, of course you would do this, it's the morning, the tram is full of people, you are tired and maybe a bit late, you ain't gonna pay attention to the flashing light or notice the beep over the sound of people talking.
At the same time, I get why they built it that way:
But like come on, you could at least have given me some haptic feedback right? A vibration to tell me it has worked or something like that.
But I guess that's just not the world we live in, I'm sure the designers didn't mean to create a bad experience for the user, it's just that "user delight" is pretty low on the company's priorities list.
It's a thing in life in general though, human happiness isn't really put at the forefront of things. For some reason, we have decided that time and money would be more important and we have all accepted that fact!
But could you imagine a world where this thinking is reversed. A world where each human tries their best to do good around them and not just do good for themselves?
I'd be happy to discuss this matter with you if you have ideas on how to imagine a better world ^^
I hope you have a nice day, bye 👋