Life as a WNUR DJ

I'd like you to take a step into the WNUR control room with me for a second. This is where the DJs sit, talk on the air, and frequently play obscure music. This is also where the DJ has to interact with the OACR Control Board, a nightmare in user centered design. This thing has 100s of different buttons and knobs. That's a whole lot of stuff to press and turn. Having had a show for 2 years now, I'm still not sure what the majority of the buttons do. As I was starring at the Control Board last Wednesday there were a few simple features that I thought were very counterintuitive and could easily be improved upon.


First, in order to get a channel to be on air you need to press either the red or the green buttons at the bottom the Control Board. If you had never used this piece of equipment before, which button would you think put the channel on air? If you said green then you would be wrong. This obviously conflicts with our mental model of what a green light and red light mean. One would think green would be go (or ON in this case), but in this case it is actually red that means go. I wish I knew how they decided on that.

The sliding buttons just above the red/green buttons used to control the volume of the channel also needs improvement. When you have the button pushed all the way to the bottom there is no volume on that channel. As you push the button farther up, the volume increases until you reach the top. Ok, that makes sense. Until you take a look at the scale alongside the button. The scale reads 70 at the bottom (when there is no sound) and 0 at the top (maximum volume). I don't know about you but that seems kind of strange to me. I would have expected the button to go from 0 at the bottom and then increase to 70 as the button was moved up. But hey, that's just me.

Luckily, all DJs are trained on the board and it's pretty easy to get the hang of. Just like some of the users of the Miller welding machines, you get a sense of where to place the sliding volume button based on experience. And just like the Miller welding machines, this control board can benefit from a redesign of the user interface.

Oh, and if you're not busy Wednesdays from 9-10, check out our show.