99% Invisible - Video- The Norman Door with Vox

Episode Date: February 28, 2016

There is an epidemic of terrible doors in the world. But when Don Norman got frustrated with them, he ended up changing the way people everywhere think about design. Video by Joe Posner of Vox, featuring Roman Mars of 99% … Continue reading →

There's this door on the 10th floor of the Vox Media Office that I hate so much. God dammit. You're at this door wrong? Pretty regularly. Have you seen people misuse it? All the time, every day. Constantly. Me too, Kelsey.

But here's the thing. As soon as you start looking for confusing doors, they are everywhere. It's push. Why? I feel like Roman Mars would know about this. This is 99% invisible. And those doors you hate are called Norman Door. Um, what's a Norman Door?

Don Norman wrote the essential book about design. He is the Norman of the Norman Door. Alright and where is this guy? You must go to San Diego. Okay. Hi Joe. Hey, I'm Don Norman. I'm... She, you know, it's hard to describe what I am. 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. I was spending a year in England. I got so frustrated with my inability to use the light switches and the water taps and the dollars even that I wrote this book. If I continually get a door wrong, is it my fault? No. In fact, if you continually get it wrong, it's a good way to have other people continually get it wrong. Good sign, that's a really bad door.

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. Why does it need an instruction manual? That is why you have to have a sign that says push or pull. Why not make it obvious? It can be obvious, if it's designed right. There are a couple of really simple basic principles of design. One of them I will call discoverability. When I look at something I should be able to discover what operations I can do. The principle applies to a whole lot more than doors.

And it's amazing with many of our computer systems today. You look at it, there's no way of knowing what's possible. Should I tap it once or twice or even triple tap? So discoverability when it's not there, well you don't need to use something. Another is feedback. And somebody times there's no feedback. You have no idea what happened or why it happened. And these principles form the basis of how designers and engineers work today, commonly known as user or human-centered design. I decided at one point the word user was a bit degrading, why not call people people. And it's amazingly simple and amazingly seldom practice.

We call it inter-chip because it goes around in a circle. We go out and we observe what is happening today. We observe people doing the task. And from that we say, oh, we have some ideas. Here's what we should perhaps propose to do. Then you prototype your solution and test it. Quite often these are wrong at first. But each time we go around the circle,

we do a better job of making the device. Until the point we're actually making something that really works. And this process has spread all over the world. And it turns out it's improving lives. From better everyday things like the ones that don't know about. To using the same process to solve huge problems in public health and developing countries. Water, sanitation, farming. Lots more.

So what'd be a better human-centered door? An ideal door is one that as I walk up to it and walk through it, center door. 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. The vertical bars could go either way. A simple little hand thing though sort of indicates pull. But we still have terrible, terrible doors in the world. So many have that. There are lots of things in life that are fairly standardized and therefore whether I buy

this house or not is not a function of whether it has good doors in it. And so, except for safety reasons, doors tend not to be improved. But the tyranny of bad doors must end. I think that it's a really sh** design. Right, they put people in the middle, one in the push, and that should be a flat panel right here.

And not a f***ing bullhand. That's how I feel about this far. It's very misleading. I agree. You're right, Becky. You're God damned right. And if we all thought like you, well, we might just design a better world together.

It won't open because it's a security door. What a f*** are you doing? Hey, this is Joe from Vox. Thank you so much for watching. If you want to see more stuff like this, just come check us out at youtube.com slash Vox Vox. It was so much fun collaborating with 99% visible. As you can see, there's some improvements being made over here, but obviously not as improved as it could be.