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Jared

Do these British studies/research cross cultural boundaries, including
cultures that may read bottom to top, left to right, or some combination
thereof?

Bill


> Peter-
> I agree with you about digital information not always being the best. Among
> the tidbits...I'm sure you've seen and used guages on various cars or other
> instrument panels. Supposedly some British powerplant study in the 60's
> determined that the most effective way to set up banks of power gauges was
> in vertical format, i.e.
>
> 9
> 8
> 7
> 6
> 5 (needle)
> 4
> 3
> 2
> 1
>
> with the needle floating up and down across the guage, like an elevator cab.
> The reason for this? The human eye/mind are set up to perceive DIFFERENCES
> and changes. So when you've got fifty gauges set up side by side, and they
> all should be on "5", the eye immediately picks up on anything that is
> literally out-of-line. Numbers are nice but they aren't the best way to
> present the picture all the time, especially when they are flashing and
> changing and presenting too much information. Rate of change is still
> easier to read from an analog gauge, even if an additional digital
> rate-of-change meter would be more accurate.
>
> Racing cars do something similar, they will rotate the round gauges so that
> all needles point to 12 or 1 o'clock when they are in the normal
> range--regardless of what number that is. Same purpose, you can scan them
> all with peripheral vision and the "odd man out" pops up quickly.
>
> After our Indian Point powerplant debacle, caused by some operator grabbing
> the wrong "they all look alike, isn't that nice?" handle, the nuke plants
> here LITERALLY used handles from bar taps! It's hard to mistake two
> different color/shape/size handles for each other.

   

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