There’s this door on the 10th floor I just hate so much.
Goddammit!
Do you ever get this door wrong? “pretty regularly.”
How often? “like 30% of the time.”
Have you seen people misuse it?
All the time. Every day. Constantly.
I hate this door.
Me too Kelsey.
But here’s the thing: as soon as you start looking for confusing doors. They. Are. EVERYWHERE.
Why?
I feel like Roman Mars would know why.
Roman: This is 99% invisible, and those doors you hate are called Norman doors.
What’s a norman door?
Roman: Don Norman wrote THE essential book about design. He is the ‘Norman’ of the
‘norman door.’
Alright – and where is this guy?
Roman: ”You Must Go to San Diego”
Okay!
Don: Hi joe!
I’m Don Norman. I’m… gee it’s hard to describe what i am.
Roman: Well, he’s been a Professor of psychology, professor of cognitive science, professor
of computer science, a vice president of advanced technology at apple. But for our purposes
Don: I was spending a year living in Cambridge, England, and I got so frustrated with my inability
to use the light switches and the water taps and the doors even, that I wrote this book.
If I continually get a door wrong, is it my fault?
Don: No.
Roman: A norman door is one where the design tells you to do the opposite of what you’re
actually supposed to do, or gives the wrong signal and needs a sign to correct it.
Don: Why is such a simple thing, why does it need an instruction manual? That is, why
do you have to have a sign that says Push or Pull. Why not make it obvious?
Roman: It can be obvious if it’s designed right.
Don: There are a couple really basic principles of design, and one of them i’ll call discoverability.
When I look at something, i should be able to discover what operations i can do.
Roman: The principle applies to a whole lot more than doors.
Don: "And it’s amazing with many of our computer systems today, you can look at it
and there’s no way of knowing what’s possible. Should i tap it once, or twice, or even triple
tap? Discoverability, when it’s not there, well you don’t know how to use something.”
Roman: Another is feedback.
Don: So many times, there’s no feedback – you don’t know what happened, or why
it happened.
Roman: And these principles form the basis of how designers and engineers work today:
commonly known as User- or human-centered design.
Don: I decided user was a bit degrading, why not call people people?
It’s amazingly simple, and amazingly seldom practiced.” We call it iterative because
it goes around in a circle. We observe what is happening today, people doing the task.
And from that, we say we have some ideas. Here’s what we propose to do.
Joe: Then you prototype the solution, and test it.
And this process has spread all over the world, and is improving lives - from better every
day things like the ones Don wrote about, to using the process to solve huge problems
in public health in developing countries – water, sanitation, farming, and lots more.
So what’d be a better, human centered door?
Don: An ideal door is one where that as I walk up to it and walk through it. I’m not
even aware that I had opened a door and shut it. And I don’t have to be aware because
it’s so well designed that it’s just automatic.
So if you had a door which had a flat plate, what could you do? Nothing. The only thing
you can do is push. So, see? You don’t need a sign. Flat plate – you push.
Roman: This kind of push bar with the piece sticking out on one side works well too, so
you can see what side you’re supposed to push on
Don: Vertical bars could go either way. A simple little hand thing sort of indicates
pull.
Roman: But we still have terrible, terrible doors in the world. So many of them.
Don: There are lots of things in life are fairly standardized. Whether I buy this house
or not is not a function of whether it has good doors in it. Except for safety reasons,
doors tend not to be improved.
Roman: But the tyranny of bad doors must end.
I think that it’s a really shitty design the fact that the put A PULL HANDLE when it’s
a push. So it should be a flat panel here. And not a GODDAMN pull handle. that’s how
i feel about this door. it’s very misleading. (I agree)
Roman: You’re right becky. You’re goddamned right. And if we all thought like you, well,
we might just design better world together.
"It won't open because it's a security door!" "What the **** are you two doing in here?"
Hey, so as you can see, since I started making this video, they've since changed the door
a little bit. Guess it's a step in the right direction. Thank you so much for watching
and to 99% invisible, one of my favorite podcasts, it was so much fun getting to collaborate
with with them. Check them out on any podcast app or 99pi.org.