"I only have to look down the barrel while loading the gun" is still less better.
(Yes, yes, airsoft - pellets and gas are separate things - but can you always be totally 100% sure that every last one of the pellets is out of the gun, and there's nothing in the barrel, and an accidental triggering of a compressed air puff directly into your eye won't be painful, or carry dust, or something? And even if ALL of those things are true, should you really have a device whose usage is DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED to every single standard safety procedure - the airsoft equivalent of "disable your antivirus scanner, enable ActiveX, and using IE6 navigate to this page. Ignore the SSL certificate warning, ignore the application signing warning, and tell the application to run as administrator"?)
If that's the case, and if (as it appears) there's no other location to put the guage, then the better design course to take would be to cap off the guage when the cylinder is engaged. That eliminates the temptation to do something stupid.
-- Steve knows that the guage is intended to be read from a wide angle, but still the design does strongly suggest "peer down the barrel" to users.
That's the point. The point of the design is to say, if you know nothing about guns, this design makes sense--which, if you do, clearly it doesn't.
It's up there with Norman's teapots that have the handle and the spout on the same side, or the couples bicycle where the two riders face each other.
Too often designers are called in to "sprinkle some magic usability dust" on a project late in the cycle, and without proper understanding, you're likely to get coaxial pressure gauges...
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-16 02:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-16 03:21 pm (UTC)(Yes, yes, airsoft - pellets and gas are separate things - but can you always be totally 100% sure that every last one of the pellets is out of the gun, and there's nothing in the barrel, and an accidental triggering of a compressed air puff directly into your eye won't be painful, or carry dust, or something? And even if ALL of those things are true, should you really have a device whose usage is DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED to every single standard safety procedure - the airsoft equivalent of "disable your antivirus scanner, enable ActiveX, and using IE6 navigate to this page. Ignore the SSL certificate warning, ignore the application signing warning, and tell the application to run as administrator"?)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-16 06:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-18 01:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-16 03:26 pm (UTC)-- Steve knows that the guage is intended to be read from a wide angle, but still the design does strongly suggest "peer down the barrel" to users.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-16 06:37 pm (UTC)It's up there with Norman's teapots that have the handle and the spout on the same side, or the couples bicycle where the two riders face each other.
Too often designers are called in to "sprinkle some magic usability dust" on a project late in the cycle, and without proper understanding, you're likely to get coaxial pressure gauges...
(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-16 04:53 pm (UTC)Also:
"Do you feel lucky, punk?"
"Well, yeah. You've barely got enough propellant to reach the end of the barrel."
(no subject)
Date: 2012-02-16 05:15 pm (UTC)