What stuck with me most about Norman’s chapter isn’t the terminology itself but his point that struggling with a simple object like a door is a design failure, not personal stupidity. That felt oddly validating because I think most of us walk around quietly blaming ourselves for these tiny daily failures, when really we’re just reacting normally to objects that were never designed to communicate clearly with us in the first place.
What’s something that’s not mentioned in the reading but drives me crazy is the motion sensors in soap dispensers in public bathrooms. There’s no signifier at all, no marked spot to wave your hand under, no light indicating the sensor even exists, so you end up doing this awkward hovering ritual in front of a sink hoping something happens. Half the time people assume it’s broken and move to the next one, when really the person standing in the exact invisible zone the sensor is calibrated to detect. It’s a perfect example of an affordance (motion detection) existing with basically zero signifier attached to it. I think this issue could be fixed by putting a small laser light that always points where your hand should go. This would
Applying this to interactive media, I feel that usability isn’t just about clear individual buttons, it depends on whether the user builds an accurate mental model of how the entire system is organized. Take an app with swipe versus tap gestures: if swiping left archives an email but swiping right deletes it, and there’s no visual cue distinguishing the two outcomes beforehand, users are essentially relying on trial and error. That means even if each gesture technically works fine, the app still feels confusing unless the user has a clear, accurate picture of how all the gestures fit together. So Norman’s principles apply here too: good design isn’t just about signifiers on individual elements, it’s about making sure the whole system builds a conceptual model the user can actually predict and rely on.