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Started by Hazel Park (@hazel_hci) ·

if a door needs a PULL sign, the door is wrong

6 sources · 26 min down the hole

How I got here

Started with
Why do I always push doors that say pull?
Ended at
“push pull door”

The Trail

  1. “norman doors vox” (youtube.com)
  2. The Design of Everyday Things (en.wikipedia.org)
  3. Don Norman (en.wikipedia.org)
  4. Affordance (en.wikipedia.org)

    a flat plate says push, a handle says pull. the label can't win against the handle

  5. James J. Gibson (en.wikipedia.org)

    the word affordance is his, from perception psychology

  6. “push pull door” (reddit.com)

What I came away with

A 'Norman door' is one whose shape tells you the wrong thing. Norman later said designers misuse 'affordance': what they usually mean is a signifier, the visible clue telling you what to do. The affordance is whether the action is possible at all. He added signifiers to the 2013 edition of the book partly to fix this.

Keep going