Opening Train Doors

What is the best place to put the open button for a mechanical door? A simple question you may say but in fact it can have a huge impact on the response time of someone opening the door.

Going home from uni the other day I was on one of them older style Central Trains where I noticed the difficulty a few of the passengers had when approaching the internal doors of the train which separates the seating area from area around the doors.

A girl walked up to the door expecting it to open, but on realising it was not automatic she started looking for the button to open it. Naturally she looked at her eye level, which must have been about 5' 7", for a button but she did not find any on the door itself. A boy who was seated on the luggage area seeing the button, which was actually closer to him than to her, pressed it for her.

This raises a couple of points for designing an interface, firstly that the system should do those things automatically without need for user intervention which the user expect the system to do. Furthermore, buttons, menus, etc should be at the user's eye level, or more importantly somewhere where he/she expects it to be.

They happen to have solved the problem on the latest model of the trains by putting the button on the actual door, but better still making the door automatic so that as you walk towards it opens at the appropriate speed. One problem I've noticed however, is that if you stand directly beneath it, the detector doesn't notice and starts to close the door.

Also they use much brighter colours and bigger signs on the new trains making it easier to see the button and realise at a glance what to do.

That is probably the purpose of HCI, that at a glance the user is able to understand what to do and how to do it. This may be a reason why computer games seem to exhibit good HCI behaviour, especially when talking about FPS or Adventure games where the person becomes the character in the game