What happens at zero? Any of us who live in an urban area are probably familiar with the crossing signals that give you a handy little countdown of how many seconds you have left as you cross the street. BUT, exactly what happens when the counting is done is a bit of a game of Russian roulette with vehicles as the bullets. Does the light turn green at zero, or do you have a few-second grace period? The answer is sometimes you DO, sometimes you DON’T, and you never really know. One wonders how this came to be. One things is certain–the User Experience factor was not addressed.
In my experience, MOST crossings do allow a few seconds before the light turns green. This makes it all the more startling when you’re at one of those unforgiving crossings, right in front of a Hummer and suddenly out of time.
One might say the wise choice would be to err on the assumption that zero is immediately followed by a green light and accelerating big metal things. [But in my case, Boston to be exact, where pedestrians really don't pay that much attention to any kind of crossing control anyway, that's not likely to happen]. It’s also infrequently enough the case that one tends to assume there’s a few seconds to spare.
This lack of a standard is a great example of what happens on some web sites when, for example, clicking on someone’s name gives you either their bio or opens an email program, but there’s no way to know until you click. Eliminating discrepancies such as these, whether life-threatening or merely maddening, is the work and the joy and the responsibility of the User Experience practitioner.
