22 Oct 2006 0740H

So much depends on a door handle

While I was at the Apple Store at Old Orchard yesterday — a busy day at the mall — I spent five, ten minutes observing the people who went through the door. The reason why is because the glass doors feature pull handles on both sides. The affordance on the entry is correct, you are supposed to pull on the door handle to open the door. But on the exit side, there is another set of handles, and that affordance is misleading, because it implies you have to pull the handle to open the door, but actually, you have to push for egress. This is a problem. But the extent of the problem can’t really be shown except through user observation and descriptive stats. There’s really only three observations I have to pass on here:

1) People tend to leave and come in waves, little groups of people, but groups nonetheless. When they come in or leave, if the door is open already they will not open the second door, but rather attempt to go through the open one. So they tend to follow the path of least resistance.

2) If the door is already open or if they are leaving and in a position to observe that the exit door is operated by pushing, people are much more likely to push, not pull on the exit door. People with baby carriages were most likely to push on the door with their backs and drag the carriage with them outside.

3) If someone or a group of people are exiting and there is no cue about which way the door swings, fully 60% of those people pulled on the door handle, and they were both surprised and embarrassed when that happened. There was one person who tried to enter the store by pushing on the pull handle, but was talking on his cellphone and appeared to be in a hurry, so, I’ll ignore him. Anyway, that’s 6 people in 10 minutes. Let’s extrapolate that, back-of-envelope style, not taking into account that it’s a Saturday and traffic is slower during the week: 133,056 people a year will pull on that door handle incorrectly. I expect that door will have some serious hinge problems soon if it hasn’t had some already.

So too with the web. There the issue becomes more important. We can design something to look good, but if error is not designed out of the system (as in “poka yoke”) to begin with, it becomes very expensive to fix it later on, and if this is your registration or checkout process, you’re losing all these people. Just because of a stupid design problem.

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