Brukarens förväntningar på knapporientering och dimringsfunktionen hos styrningspanel med fyra knappar

Sammanfattning: Introduction – Digital systems for lighting control are becoming increasingly common. One way to manually control these systems is through control panels with buttons. These panels can vary in both appearance (layout) and function (user interaction). These differences can create confusion and, in the worst case, result in the control equipment not being used. This study specifically focuses on panels with four buttons and aims to provide a basis for developing button panels that are as intuitive as possible for end-users. Method – To determine the preferred layout among users, a quantitative online survey with 60 respondents was conducted. Respondents were asked about their preferred button placement for controlling the dimming function on a 4-button panel. This question was repeated for three different button layouts: horizontal, vertical, and square. At the end of the survey, respondents were asked about their overall preferred layout. To determine the user's expected interaction with a button panel, an experiment was conducted. In the experiment, 36 participants tested identical panels with different types of interaction programming. They performed a task while the time was recorded, and in addition to the time, participants also provided a qualitative evaluation of which of the three panels they preferred and why. Results – The survey responses show that a vertical button layout is preferred by the majority of respondents. The top button received the most votes for the "dim-up” function, while the bottom button received the most votes for the "dim-down" function. The results from the experiment show that a panel with scene-based lighting was the fastest for performing the task. Scene-based lighting means that each button is linked to a specific lighting-scene without providing any fine-tuned manual control. A panel with continuous pressure to adjust the brightness took the longest time to complete the task. A panel with repeated "clicks" to dim the lighting fell between the other two panels in terms of time. The qualitative responses indicated that participants preferred the panel with continuous pressure, as it provided the highest degree of control. Analysis – Regarding button placement, women generally responded more uniformly than men, but the same option received a majority in both groups. Increased age of the respondents seemed to yield more ambiguous results for both button placement and layout. For the experiment's results, ANOVA tests showed that the differences in time among the different tested programming approaches were statistically significant. Discussion – Overall, the study shows that the most intuitive 4-button panel is a vertical panel with the dimming function placed at the top or bottom of the panel. The interaction with the panel should be through incremental "clicks," which represents the best compromise between the user's intuition and their own experience of control. However, the study has a significant issue with skewed participant demographics in both the survey and experiment. Therefore, this is something that could be revisited, and it would also be interesting to repeat the experiment using symbols on the buttons and compare the outcomes with this study.