UXD - User eXperience Design

Help - How do I open this door!

There's no way to intuitively know how to open the doors where I work.  The handle--a bar that spans the width of the door--looks like it can be pulled or pushed.  What's more, some doors you push to open, and some you pull, and it's completely arbitrary, at least as far as I can tell. 

In fact there's one way you can tell what action to take.  There's a mechanism at the top of every door.  If it's on your side, you push. If it's on the other side you pull.  So every time I go to open a door I instinctively look up.  I don't break my stride, and it's all very easy.  Problem solved.

But I shouldn't have to look up anymore.  I mean there are only 4 sets of doors I open on a daily basis.  I should know by know which ones I pull and which I push.   I should have had that memorized already.  Wait...this is leading somewhere design related, read on...

The mechanism at the top of each door was pointed out to me by a coworker.  Had he not relayed this useful bit of information I would probably have soon thereafter memorized the door situation, and never have needed to rely on looking upwards.  In fact I was on my way towards doing so.  I was in the process of constructing a mental model of the pattern of push/pulls that made sense to me;  mental models give their owners intuitive understanding of objects and how they are to be interacted with.  In this case I was coming up with some sort of construct that rationalized the seeming arbitrariness of the direction the doors swing, a construct that would be intuitive enough to allow me open each door without thinking.

I no longer need to do this, though, because looking up is easier than constructing that mental model, (perhaps because the doors do swing completely arbitrarily, and any model I conceive would be somewhat contrived, and therefore not really that useful).  The point is, that I ceased my efforts to find that model, and stuck with what was easy--looking up.  And I really never though about that consciously until now.  How many other interactions in my day to day life--in all of our day to day lives-- are made up of those same patterns of subconscious thought--finding the easiest way to do something, without ever really thinking about it.       

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What Goes on at Work Stays at Work

On a discussion thread to which I subscribe, a friendly debate about whether we prefer the term “Information Architect” or “User Experience Architect” as a job title took an interesting—but by no means unrelated—turn towards the subject of drinking wine. This prompted a post by IA Donna Maurer, who offered one of her blog entries describing the detailed taxonomy of her wine rack. In her explanation, she states that “I thought I should show just one aspect of my obsession with organizing stuff. People always laugh at me when I tell them about this. Not sure why – after all, I do organise messy content for a living.”