The Psychopathology of Everyday Things by Dan Norman was an interesting read as it caused me to deeply analyze the very mundane interactions I have with everyday objects in my life. The “Norman Door” phenomenon highlighted an interesting problem that I found to clearly illustrate the importance of addressing usability in what we design. It is a very common (and embarrassing) experience to walk into a glass door or continuously pull an unmarked push door. But if that is the case, if this issue is so prevalent, why aren’t we doing more to fix it? Two hours ago, I might’ve said because that’s just life, and walking into a very clean glass door is sometimes exactly what we need to stay humble. However, after reading Norman’s critique of these confusing designs, I’ve realized it doesn’t necessarily have to be our life.
After doing a bit of googling and further diving into this Norman door concept, I was reminded of the most frustrating design feature I’ve ever come across. If anyone lives in a NYC apartment, or any urban apartment building, they may be able to relate. Most of the time, these building are designed with a lock on the front door to your building and then another lock to your apartment. Many of these apartments will often have one key (for both locks) where one side of it opens building and the other opens your apartment. A common user error is to insert the wrong side of the key into one lock when it should be the other. (I know this sounds a bit confusing, try to imagine something simple, I’m overcomplicating it a bit) After 8 years of living in the same apartment I still sometimes insert the key the wrong way and believe there has to be a better way while still having to only use one key for both doors.
My proposal is that there is some kind of tactile imprinted indicator on each side of the key that tells you which side to use. My key personally is different colors on each side so in theory it should be very straightforward on which side to use but somehow I still couldn’t tell you which one is right (it also doesn’t help that the colors are not uniform for all copies of the key, so you have to memorize multiple combinations). If there was a small “F” for front door, and an “A” for the apartment door, I think even that would help. This may be too simple of a signifier but I think even a raised dot on the front door side and nothing on the apartment door side would help (so you could feel for it in your pocket as your approach the door instead of fumbling around at the front door.
I believe all of Norman’s principles of design are applicable in interactive media because they enhance the interactive experience between the designer and user. Not only does his focus on discoverability clearly correlate to a seamless experience for our user’s, but it reminds us as designers that we can only view our product with the end in mind, while the user’s are the opposite. I conceptualized this a bit more with what it’s like to put together a pen. If you’ve just taken it apart, you remember where every piece goes, and exactly how the pen should function; but if you’ve just been given a bunch of part and told it should make a pen it might be a bit more difficult to assemble.
This also leads me to discuss Norman’s conceptual modeling idea. I think an effective way to gauge your usability is to test this model with someone else. For every project we’ve done so far I usually send it off to my friend’s or my mom with a set of instructions on what they should do in order to generate activity. However, in the future I might just try and show them without any guidance and see what they are able to discover. This works an indicator for me as to what mapping makes sense and what does not. Although implementing all of these ideas is far easier said then done, this reading, in conjunction with the ideas from the previous week about what interactivity truly means has me excited to create a well rounded product that hopefully incorporates most of these standards.