Doors are a favorite topic of Don Norman’s, and he has multiple stories about doors in his first few chapters of DOET. I have also encountered a number of poorly designed doors, and I have a few stories myself. This is one of them, but I’m unsure whether to call it a failure or success, hence the quotes.
Here is a door at the entrance of the building where my dentist works:
Here’s the problem: the signifiers on this door are all wrong. An affordance is any action a user can take with an object, due to the relationship between its properties and the capabilities of its user. Handles afford pulling — the user can easily grip them and move them towards or away from themselves. Handles therefore also afford pushing, but due to cultural standards, they usually indicate pulling. There are other signifiers that indicate whether a door should be pulled or pushed, but in this situation, it’s clear that the majority of people interpreted this situation as a time to pull. This is despite entering the door from the outside, where there is also a handle that must be pulled to get in. Even though the same people first pull the door to the outside, they still try to pull it when they’re on the other side. For this reason, the regular users of the building thought it important enough to contact a company to get the small sign installed telling users to “PUSH.”
The door was initially a design failure, but installing the sign acknowledged the failure, and fixed it. Even though the people inside the building weren’t the original designers of the door, in general, this is an important point in design. Being able to acknowledge failures and move forward is of utmost importance in the design process. As a designer, you will be tempted to think that your design is great, and that the users are the problem. User-centered design says the opposite is true — see where users fail, and iterate the design. The dental workers here didn’t have the ability to change the design, but they took the next best step, so I am willing to call this a “success.”
There will be a lot of overlap in any subsequent stories I have about doors, but since I consider each to be a unique case, I think they are all deserving of a post. To avoid overlap as much as possible, I kept this brief by not expanding on every signifier doors have in detail — I will examine these more in upcoming posts.
