The new-style pedestrian crossing signs in the UK are the worst example of bad usability I can think of – to wit: they’re bad enough to get people killed.
I can’t remember if I’ve posted about them before, mainly because just thinking about them drives me into an apoplectic rage but Jeremy Keith has just posted about them again.
The first place I saw them was in Sheffield about four years ago (it was an early adopter apparently), but they’re just becoming more and more widespread – it’s pretty obvious that they’re replacing all the existing, excellent signs.
Let’s just spell this out:
- traffic in the UK drives on the left
- to cross a road, you must first look right
- the pedestrian crossing signs are at waist height
- there is only one of them
- they no longer make a loud beeping noise when it is safe to cross
- if there is just one person standing between you and the sign it is impossible to tell if it is safe to cross the road or not
- they are not deployed uniformly across individual cities, let alone the country, which means you have to hunt and peck to find out where your safety indicator is
- nightmare
There is quite genuinely nothing good about these displays. They are harder to see, harder to use, less obvious, give less notification and plainly dangerous.
