Norman Doors

I sit on the forbidden 4th floor at the office, that’s also the place where my team sits. My everyday office looks like – beeping my tag at the sensor and it blinking green, pushing to open the big giant entrance door, passing down the reception and trying twice or thrice (on worse days) to open the inner door. Now what’s so difficult about opening a door, right? It has “Pull” written on it on the metallic plate. Why do I fail to do such an easy task? It must be just me being me?

Unless you observe someone else pushing it to try to make it open. These types of unintuitive or misleading doors are called “Norman Doors”.

Don Norman wrote a book called “The Psychology of Everyday Things” (POET). In the book, he discusses about various design flaws, the first chapter starts with – yes- the doors and a picture of an Unusable Coffeepot (which is again from a book from a French author – a Catalogue of Useless Objects)- the author, Don Norman, talks about how he keeps pulling the door that needs to be pushed and vice versa, and can’t figure out in which direction to slide the sliding doors. He then goes on to narrate an example of a friend who got stuck between really fancy stylish sets of glass doors in a European Post Office and the mild panic feeling of getting trapped.
The author published the first version of the book in 1988, and these types of doors are now known as Norman Doors. The author talks about two main design principles (in the original version) – Discoverability and Feedback.

Discoverability -> going back to the door example, in case of glass doors, putting handles on it, so that the user knows from which side to push. The author’s friend got stuck because they were pushing it from the support hinge side. Also we as users will try to do things intuitively, so the sign helps after we have already done things wrong. (me reading the sign for the umpteenth time after pushing the “pull” door). Ideally a simple object such as a door really shouldn’t have signs, it should be intuitive enough to know whether it needs to pushed or pulled or slid through.

Feedback -> Imagine a regular day at office, and I put my ID badge tag at the sensor, there are various feedbacks I receive to know I have successfully clocked in my badge. Firstly, there is a beep sound, secondly I see the sensor signal changing from red to green and lastly, I hear the click sound of the door lock automatically unlocking – as a final – “Hey you are all clear, you can now enter”. All this feedback signals (sounds and light) are really important. Had it any of it been missing, it would create unnecessary conscious effort in getting in.

These subtle good design are so good, they become invisible, because they fit so well to our needs – Quoting from Preface of the Revised Edition of the Book.

The Backstory:
One afternoon, after lunch, I went out on a walk with a friend (or a group of colleagues) and we were exiting the main office building – the entrance-exit doors of the building are automatic sliding glass doors. At that time, I kinda mis-remembered what Norman doors were, because I only remembered the story of author’s friend, I thought only huge glass doors which are so clean that you bump into them are the “real” Norman doors. Turns out I was partially wrong. So I thought writing a post about it might make it stick in my head for next time and to send this post to the friend – to correct myself.

Then I researched again on what Norman doors were, quizzed my best friend from my college about it, apparently they remembered everything much accurately, even the book name! The newer edition is called – The Design of Everyday Things – Don Norman. And also realising, I do have one door in office on 4th floor, I keep getting wrong!

Link of the Book !

The Design of Everyday Things
Thanks for reading!