The Design of Everyday Doors
Back when I first started learning about software design, someone recommended I read The Design of Everyday Things. This book forever ruined doors for me, because up until the time I read it, I felt like a doofus in situations like the one below. But then I’d get on with my day, having chalked up the mishap to my own obliviousness.
After reading the book, I stopped feeling like a doofus. Instead I’d feel frustrated at the lack of insight/empathy that door designers/purchasers had for the people they were designing/purchasing for. And to this day, I still feel this frustration.
My daily routine changed last week when I started consulting full-time at Groupon. There have been plenty of badly designed doors in my daily routine before, and some particularly bad ones at Obtiva, but it’s natural to feel the dissonance of badly designed doors when you’re interacting with them for the first week.
Let me start by showing you the perfectly designed door. You can interact naturally (aka thoughtlessly) with it and get on with your day. This one is at Jimmy John’s on Clinton in Chicago.
Next is what I call the “worst-case scenario” door. Now, I love Groupon as a client. The people rock. And they’re an awesome company with a brighter future than just about any other company on the planet. So it’s a little mind-boggling that it’s their front door that has the worst design a door can possibly have. By looking at the door, there’s no way to know whether you should breeze on through it, or stop and pull.
My friend Todd Webb and I were talking about this and he reminded me that this concept I’m complaining about is called affordance. When an object has affordance, its possible actions are easily discovered. For a reason that baffles me, some designers seem to love the symmetry of the glass door with the identical handles. They love it so much, they’ll even place ugly labels on their doors to overcome their lack of affordance. I found an example of this in the lobby of 600 W. Chicago St, the large building where Groupon is headquartered.
The funny thing is, I even found perfectly designed doors that someone felt still needed to be labelled! These are in the lower level of Ogilve Transportation Center, my train station.
Yet, take heart all you idealistic door designers who are tired of luddite door users forcing you into asymmetrical designs! Technology has come to your rescue and provided a hinge that can swing both ways! Just inside those unintuitive front doors at Groupon, there are identical doors to their conference rooms that have different behavior. When you approach these doors you can push or pull.
This inconsistency is bizarre and frustrating to newcomers. I’m sure that almost everyone else doesn’t even notice it at this point. I’m sure I won’t notice it in a week or two. But it took me back to the reason I read The Design of Everyday Things in the first place. I’m not actually passionate about door design, but I am passionate about software design. I want the software I develop to feel like that intuitive door at Jimmy John’s. I want it to feel that way on the outside in the web browser. And I want it to feel that way on the inside in the modules and methods.
If you’re interested in where I’m going with this, stay tuned for my upcoming post: The Design of Everyday Software.
