What’s wrong with this door?

In the Mountain View building complex that houses the main Mozilla offices, there are many doors like this one.

What's your natural reaction to a vertical door handle? You grab it like this...

...and pull it to open, right?

But if you're on the inside of the door, then pulling does nothing. EVERY SINGLE PERSON who I've seen encounter these doors has made this mistake.

The other side of the building, a few meters away, has doors like this.

The outside handle is vertical, the inside one horizontal.

When you're on the inside of the door, your natural reaction is to put your hand on it like this, and push.

The architects of the building had a perfect solution to the handle problem, so why did they use it on only half of the doors?

Don Norman would not be amused.

 

About the new banner image

I was going to put up a picture of a VCR or a microwave with a digital clock blinking “12:00″ — the classic example of user interface failure.

But my microwave doesn’t blink “12:00″. It blinks “66:66″, or sometimes “6:66″, like it’s possessed by the devil. I think it has a short-circuited 6 key, so it’s processing nonexistent presses of the 6 key at random times. Sometimes it beeps loudly in the middle of the night. I keep it unplugged most of the time just to keep it quiet.

But anyway, the impossible-to-set digital clock is the classic example of user interface failure — and by “classic” I mean it was considered a hilarious punchline back in 1987: People were always saying “I’m so bad with technology, I can’t figure out how to get my VCR to stop blinking 12:00″. Ha ha ha. And what’s with airline food?

But the real problem was not that people in the 80s (or today) were “bad with technology”, it’s that VCRs (and microwaves) presented a terrible interface that made setting a digital clock far more difficult than setting an analog clock, and for no good reason!

And that’s why this blog is called “Not The User’s Fault”.

 

Emacs, you know I love you, but..

The Aquamacs “Save File?” dialog box has a ridiculous surplus of buttons.

Readers: How many buttons does this dialog box really need? (Answer below the fold.)