The “Doorway Effect” – forgetting why you entered a room

To each their own I guess. I for one love studios.

I don't recognize those issues.

The two problems I saw were getting it dark enough to sleep (wasn't hard but was a bit of a chore, automated blinds would have helped) and noise from the refrigerator, but that's pretty much it.

A friend of mine had a generalized anxiety disorder, and for a while she was living in an apartment which had a large living room / kitchen which connected all other rooms. Basically, you entered directly into a large room, some part of which was used for cooking, another for playing games and watching tv, other again for dining and some part was just a transfer zone between the rooms and the lavatory. She reported feeling uneasy when entering her apartment, as the potential for action was too large, and she couldn't concentrate on the one task she had in front of her - the task of arriving at home.

I guess it is connected to the concept of 'affordance' that is used in psychology and UX design. In the view of Gibson it is more about relations to the environment whereas Norman appropriated it to mean the perceived possible actions that are offered by objects, and as such are object properties. In both senses, the affordance of the space was too rich and uneven, and offered too many possible uses for the room.

My feeling is that we are having this problem more and more with generalized soft- and hardware. As browsers and phones offer ever expanding possibilities for action, they become more and more faceless and bland. My hope is that we will embrace limited affordances as a force for good, creating highly opinionated, characteristic and specialized products that offer precise ways of using them.

Lots of people around the world live in 1 room apartments. Tokyo and HK are full of them. I have friends that grew up in 1 room apartments, parents and all.

There's also that eco movement for tiny multipurpose 1 room housing.

Not saying I don't prefer more rooms but I certainly wouldn't go as far as saying something is wrong with 1 room.

I had both at university - a single room for two years, then a two-room set for a year - and found they had different strengths. In the single room, I could go to my bed for a break, or to fetch something from over there, without completely losing my focus. In the set, it was nice to have a separate room for sleeping and keeping clothes (so I didn't have to worry about keeping them out of the way - they aren't taking up space in my work area). Ultimately though, I didn't find them to be fundamentally different, other than literally having more space in the two-room set.

Worth noting that I didn't cook in either - there was a separate (shared) kitchen, though most of the time I would be eating in Hall anyway, which may have been a factor.

I lived in this kind of studio apartment for 2 years and didn't have any of the issues you describe. There was a discussion recently about airplanes with no windows and I felt similarly. I just don't really get anxiety about enclosed spaces.

Coincidentally, I work remotely from my home and I think that this contributes to why I like it. A lot of people have trouble working and relaxing in the same space. But I don't have an issue with it.

Not sure what all that adds to the conversation. Maybe I'm the weird one, and this is a normal feeling. But I just wanted to say this is not a universal thing necessarily.

I lived in basically a one room (there were no walls) but the bed room was a corridor away from the living/kitchen area apartment. I made sure to create seperate zones where I did things, although I would often violate the point of these zones (i.e. work on my couch watching TV, rather than at my desk. I feel as long as you keep the areas mentally separately, even if you can't physically seperate the areas you should be okay.

On the contrary... I feel a much closer connection to my current 1BR apt than I felt to a 2 bedroom, 2 bath, 3 story townhouse. It’s small enough that I can remember exactly where I keep shit(Smaller RAM). It’s less space to vacuum so I do that often.

I live in a small corner studio in the densest area of Seoul. Everything is close (piano, bed, PS4, kitchen, wardrobe, small table, bathroom), the view is nice and it still feels spacious and relaxed. I don't own too many things and actively try to reduce cleaning surface and remove anything that is even a tiny non-necessary maintenance burden. Keeping the house spotless is super easy. No anxiety due to visual complexity or owning too much. Loving it.

Not only me then.. I thought I was just getting old.

Especially with the "top sites" or "highlights" feature of contemporary browsers, that in essence show different doors, invite into other worlds as soon as you open a new tab. So instead of going where you wanted to go you get disoriented by all the offerings.

Can't not link to my blog post Open tabs are cognitive spaces [0] that deals with the browser as the place you externalize your cognition to.

[0] https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/

This is what I do in Firefox: In the current page press Ctrl+k, type the search phrase, press Alt+Enter, to open the search page in a new tab.

Modern science is largely fiction derived based on the results or propaganda piece sought by the funding party.

At a certain point I realised that I had to update my understanding of the term "prove" to mean "it's now more likely that x the case" rather than "they've found out that x is the case".

Of course, the medium you're reading something in can give you extra reasons to be suspicious. An article about how some diet can give you magic powers is more likely to be there just to draw clicks and hence just based on a study that p-hacked its way into a correlation than an article about a new discovery on the LHC or something.

There's a problem that's increasingly relevant here on HN. It's commentors who only read the headline and leave a comment that is irrelevant and inadequate more often than not. I do wish we as a community would respond more to this.

To respond to this particular comment, which hardly deserves a response: this isn't a study, none one of the listed assertions are made. This is a short, free-form article that presents an interpretation or examination of some aspects of our intellect.

great point. btw: is there a list of experiments that have become mainstream beliefs and have proven to be wrong?

I definitely know of the power posture and the fertile women wearing red dresses crap.

That's an interesting observation.

The problem -- if it is one -- is certainly not limited to the Win 8 Start menu. There are plenty of interfaces where pressing a button, or some similar action, pops up a new full-screen or nearly full-screen UI element that looks & works differently from what was there before.

I wonder whether any research has been done on whether this makes any significant number of users forget what they were doing. If not, I think such research would be worthwhile.

As someone who just started using windows for the first time, doesn’t the little search box essentially replace the start menu? How are people expected to find their app—manually clicking through a bunch of menus to one they are looking for? Assuming they have NOT pinned it to the dock at the bottom.

I explicitly hated it for that reason - every time it opened I could basically feel the context switch and felt completely thrown off.

They recently screwed up the task switcher UI. Iff you turn off all the Timeline stuff, half of the UI is long wordy text about turning back on the Timeline. Every time you Win-tab.

I fight the 'pretty icons' syndrome by using monochrome / white on black icon theme. It really helps.

Oh I'll open the phone with the intention to do something, do something else because shiny, then realise the moment I lock the phone and put it away.

On particularly bad days, a couple of cycles have been needed...

Working with a couple coworkers is pretty frustrating because their window management strategy is switching rapidly between active OSX screens with the whole wipe animation too.

I started using a tiling window manager in Linux back around 2012 and I won't ever go back. Overlapping windows were a terrible UI decision. I remember having very early Windows for DOS back on my 286 and remember that those releases didn't have overlapping windows either. Each new running app just split the screen.

> It is also why I prefer the NASA mission control approach to monitor layout

Could you elaborate?

I'm assuming you mean "honey, I can't find X", and she comes in a finds X sitting right in front of you".

I attribute that to myself as, "I don't want to spend more than 15 seconds looking for this thing inside some random thing behind a door"....usually for me, some cabinet or shelf behind the bathroom door where the towels and a myriad of other stuff are.

Also, we're guys and tend to play dumb;)

I'd watch doorwayball.

I'm picturing basketball with a slightly larger court, a canvas wall suspended down the center strapped down around three doorways evenly spaced from the edges, six players per team on the court, and maybe some round padded platforms centered behind the free-throw lines for extra terrain strategy. There'd be some kind of rule similar to dribbling to prevent standing in doorways; something like, you can only stop or take more than two steps in a doorway zone if you've got the ball.

Gates on large fences might work for this too then. Be a good middle ground for testing. A larger chain link fence with a gate so you can still see both sides

Interestingly I find that doorways _help_ with my OCD - moving to another room helps me move on from my obsessions.

Memory evolved (at least in mammals) to tie together places, smells and [proto]emotions.

The connection is still quite present in humans.

There are many examples: going for a walk clears your mind more than being indoors. Smells and flavors reconnect to places & so on...

And yet we design open-plan offices around the central theme that people working in a concentration-demanding field should orient their every moment of work around the assumption that not only are context switches costless, but that “collaboration” only happens if everyone is constantly preemptible according to the capricious judgment of managers and other colleagues who are not in a position to even judge the importance of the current task the person being interrupted is working on.

but at the same time it's significantly less reliable for humans - quite often some or all data from "registers" is lost during the context switch

Maybe you live under a bridge? ;)

Perhaps you've just forgotten.

Marijuana can solve this for you.