Questioning the questions?
If you were to decide the position of a door handle for a mall’s washroom, where would you provide it, on the inside or outside? This is a classic ‘Norman door’ dilemma. Let’s stretch it a little further.
Usually, users’ hands are clean when they exit the washroom. They wouldn’t want to touch a (dirty) handle after washing their hands to open the door. It probably makes more sense to provide a handle on the outside and no handle on the inside of the door. The users might find it better to push it outwards with their shoulder or elbow.
Let’s now consider another user type for our door: janitors. They do not come to our minds in the first instance, for which reason they may be called as ‘extreme users’. They usually carry a trolley, a set of mops and wear gloves while entering the washrooms. Providing handle on the outside would force the janitors to use it to pull and open the door, contaminating the handle in the process. Would you like to use the same handle? I’m guessing, not.
The door should be easy to open and close and this process should be hygienic at the same time.
Going back to the first question, “Where would you provide the door handle, on the inside or outside?”
Let’s question the question!
Is a door handle even required? What if we provided a door that had no handles and swung both ways like the ones in restaurants and hospitals? If there’s no handle the only action that can be performed is a push. (Classic Norman solution). The users, including janitors, push it in the direction of their movement, with their elbow, shoulder or even the trolley.
Considering the extreme users automatically solves the pain points of the normal users (most of the time) which in this case was to not touch the handle after washing your hands.
Perhaps, if designers had considered extreme users to design their doors, we wouldn’t have seen so many washroom doors with handles. In order to get to these extreme users, one needs to understand the problem statement thoroughly. A powerful tool (among many) is asking the 5 Whys developed by Sakichi Toyoda. This helps the designer to identify the extreme users and root problems.
Now coming back to the solution for the door problem.
What we did there was just jump on to the first solution that popped up. What if there was a better way to solve the problem,
- The janitors had a separate entrance and never used that door
- An option to wash hands outside the washroom (after touching the contaminated handle)
- There is no door at all (considering privacy of each user is taken care of inside the washroom)
James Dyson arrived at the world’s first Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner after 5,129 iterations. There are many techniques that can help us come up with out-of-the-box ideas — Edward de Bono’s -Lateral Thinking is one among them which talks about solving problems by an indirect and creative approach, typically through viewing the problem in a new and unusual light. For example, randomly chosen word, picture, sound, or other stimuli to open new lines of thinking. This tool plays into the power of the human mind to find connections between seemingly unrelated things and come up with out-of-the-box ideas.
On the other hand, one quick ideation technique is the Crazy 8s- Crazy 8s is a sketching activity that enables individual participants to generate ideas mostly during brainstorming sessions. This helps prevent our minds from overthinking/ judging the idea at that instant. Validation of each idea happens later on.
Hence, starting with the right question is the key. It is an iterative process to arrive at the final solution, discarding several iterations along the way. Not just come up with one or two, the more iterations, the better.
To conclude, the essence of design is partly achieved by finding the right problems to solve and not stop at the most obvious solution. Design itself is an iterative process. It is also mandatory that the team that we are working with, is on the same page as well. No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it. Working on a design problem collaboratively brings in several more ‘whys’, extreme users and iterations.
