Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I was gifted this book my a CIO when in college. She had a dozen copies in her office to hand out to various people.

It took me a few tries to get up the will to actually read it. It was years ago, so I don’t remember a lot of details. My main take away was to make controls logical for the thing being controlled. “Norman doors” are the big one, but I often think about it while I’m in my car trying to do something on a touch screen, when all I want is a knob, button, or switch.

In the modern era of web design I think it would point to these websites (like most of Apple’s product pages), that make users scroll through indulgent animations, just to get to the content. It may be cool the first time, but is very annoying for repeat visits, and it feels like it breaks my scrolling expectations. Not to mention all the horizontal scrolling thrown in there, which becomes a headache for those without the hardware to do it easily, and confusing to change scroll direction all the time.

I love this. Thank you for introducing me to "Norman Doors". I hadn't realized someone else had described this in such detail. I have been complaining about this years.

Ok this will be a tangent, but I also take this one step farther and also talk about "documentation". Just for the record, I don't think documentation is all good or all bad, but it definitely can be used incorrectly and in excess. And Norman Doors and a great way to get this point across.

When someone creates or installs a Norman Door by accident or out of ignorance and then realizes there is a problem, they often think "I know, I will document it!" and they add little placards to the door that says "Push/Pull" or some such. They see that this helps with a small subset of users and thinks "there, I fixed the problem, people just need to read the documentation and now it is their problem if they don't". But if you watch users of the door, a large portion will still use the door incorrectly because... people don't read documentation. If they don't read documentation, is it the users fault the door was designed incorrectly or was it the designers problem?

I use this as an example for my developers on thinking before documenting troublesome code or a confusing interface to first ask "can I design this so it is less confusing?" and if so, that would usually be preferable to adding documentation "to solve the problem". Well designed code (or doors) with no documentation always beats poor designs with documentation.

There's a funny example of even the "documentation" going wrong. At a local mall, there is a set of doors and they have put the word "PULL" (vertically like:

P

U

L

L

) on the window of the door, so from the wrong/opposite side, you still see the word "PULL" when you should PUSH (even if most of the letters are backward) so you still are tempted to take the wrong action when you see it. (I tried to explain the ridiculousness of it to the person I was with, but I don't think they cared.)

I've long suspected that I have a particular form of...dyslexia?, because I suffer from that Pull/Push thing, but also freeze when confronted with elevator door buttons that look like this: <>/><, and with public bathroom entrances, because in Spanish it's usually H/M (hombres/mujeres), but in English it's M/F (male/female), so the presence of the M throws me for a loop. My read on this is that if I see both options at the same time, my brain stutters for a second.

> but also freeze when confronted with elevator door buttons that look like this: <>/><

Same here! It's especially difficult when you're trying to quickly figure out the button to help someone who is about to miss the elevator.

Which reminds me of another "there, problem solved!" pet peeve of mine. I call it the Default Trap.

In many cases (Norman Doors are an example), there are two or more equally valid ways to do something. By "equally valid", I mean there is no clear standard for whether it should operate one way or the other, and if you ask 100 people which way it should work (which no one ever does), you get something approaching 50%.

So the product manager or perhaps developer simply says "make it a setting", and everyone agrees and declares the problem solved.

But the problem is, you have to choose a default. And 90% of the time, no one is going to change that default, or even discover how to. So you have to be very correct about assuming which value is the best default - and at that point, it probably doesn't matter that you make it an option.

The alternative I've seen to this is to ask the user which way they want it during the setup process. Light vs Dark mode is an example of this. The net result of this user choice is a longer, more complex, and burdensome onboarding process that is rife with decision fatigue. Once the user has chosen, if they don't like their choice, they may not know how to change it, since that initial action was outside of any standard interface.

The other issue with settings for everything is that the settings become bloated. In OS X, and to some extent iOS, I knew where all the settings were for the most part. Browsing them all to see what was available was a consumable thing, and I could largely remember where to go without much trouble. As macOS and iOS have added more settings to try and please everyone, and now redesigned the Settings apps... I've given up. I have no idea where most things are, what is in there, and have to search for everything and hope I use the right words.

There is an old video of Steve Jobs[0] talking about how every product is a series of decisions and trade offs. People pay companies to make all these decisions, and ideally, there is a company that makes decisions to similar enough sensibilities as yourself so that you can buy a product and use it without much fuss. It seems more and more that these decisions are all being pushed to the consumer, which in some ways makes a worse product. If I wanted infinite chose at the expense of complexity, I'd be running Gentoo or Arch. People choose macOS because it's supposed to be easy.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmRNIGqzuRI

The thing about norman doors is that it's not really a design flaw, not in every case. Like handles on push doors. It's tempting to think of that as a design flaw but more likely it's designed to be mass produced and reversible, the cost of making two (or more) configurations being much higher than the occasional confused user. You could argue this only enhances the metaphor as a lot of design issues occur when things are optimised for the company and not the user.

I still see this as a design flaw, even if it explains why it was done. They save a little in manufacturing, and then thousands of people per day end up using it wrong for decades, in the case of a high traffic door, like at a mall.

Related… this is one of my favorite Far Side comics.

https://fifetli.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/scr...

Wouldn't the solution to make the door so different handles can fit on both sides and then the installer can simply put the correct handle on each side as needed? Surely that is just as much of a manufacturing efficiency improvement.

My car has a staggeringly bad UI design choice - the cancel active navigation the control to do this only appears when you hold your finger close to the screen. Pretty much every time I want to do this I am flummoxed as to "Where did the button go" - before I eventually remember.

The navigation system is good - I prefer it to using my phone and CarPlay but that design is terrible.

Is it a VW? I had a VW with a proximity sensor like that. I didn’t use the in-car navigation, but it did that for the favorites on the radio. They only showed as I moved my finger close to the screen.

VW Group yes - a Škoda

I also have a Skoda that also has that "feature". I prefer using Maps via Android Auto, but if I am in that interface, and I have to cancel it, the way I cancel it is using a voice command.

Voice commands and Scottish accents are not a great combination.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com