Years ago, I made a control panel for a laser system. The lab director, Dr. Ken ~~~~, had a habit of randomly changing settings on your perfectly calibrated equipment. To prevent this, the panel had a toggle switch that was labeled “TUNING” and switched between “MANUAL” and “AUTOMATIC”. There were three very fancy knobs that even had little Vernier dials:
They were labeled something like “OFFSET”, “DEAD BAND”, and “GAIN”, if I recall correctly. There was also an LED that could change from yellow to red.
Of course, the switch and knobs weren’t connected to anything and the light was connected to a little circuit that had a photocell. If someone stood in front of the panel for a couple of minutes, his or her shadow would cause a capacitor to drain until a transistor would reverse the polarity on the LED and it would change colors. Since there was no label about whether red or yellow was good, Ken would wander by on occasion and tweak the knobs until it changed to the other color.
The whole thing had been built as an April Fools’ prank and was quite satisfactory. Access to the real settings required you to unscrew and remove the aforementioned panel, whereupon you could change the actual controls, which were mounted on the electronics chassis itself. Since this was usually accompanied by considerable swearing and yelling across the football-field sized basement laboratory, it was never done except late at night, so Ken never caught on.
Because we were funded by the Department of Energy, which would send bureaucrats from Washington to ensure that we were spending the money properly, all of our gear was abundantly outfitted with dials and blinking lights, which twitched and flashed in dramatic fashion. This reassured the bean counters, who had absolutely no idea of what they meant. This was all the way back in 1979 and almost certainly represented my first explorations into the difference between user interface and user experience.
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