User Experience: The Door

Observations

I noticed the following out of a number of doors on campus:

• Doors you didn't know how to operate (the one in 3-3xx). Dooes should be intuative to use -- you either push or pull them. The glass foors in Building 3 have two different styles of bar (L shaped and line shaped), but neither of them explicitly tell you the function of the door. I've ran into these doors trying to push them from the stairwell side many-a-time. Turns out from this angle they're pull doors.


• Doors that were irratating to open (10-250). Anybody who has taken a class or lectured in 10-250 knows the horrors of these doors. They are hard to open (because of the handiap motor) and also try to close you out after opening them slightly. They have a mind of their own. This is a poorly designed mechanical door because it "attacks" its users -- you leave knowing how you would want to change it.


• Door that place people in awkward situations or un-optimal flow are found all over MIT. Some of it is due to the mashing of old buildings together and some of it is due to poor design. For example the Lobby 7 Constricted flow forces everybody towards the automatic doors in the center of the lobby leaving 66% of the available doors unused. At the intersection between buildings 56 and 66 three doors open on one another always enabling awkward intersections when people are crossing through. Finally the MechE Lounge door nicely blocks the hallway and flow of people because it opens outward into traffic.


• Confusing text on doors is also another area where door design gets confusing. For example in Lobby 7 there are the automatic exit doors: one is used for entering the other for exiting. If you don't know that though it can be confusing. When you look at the doors you see simlar blocks of red text (you can see the words enter/exit through the glass). I've seen a number of tourists walk through the wrong doors because the door labeling was off (but they shouldn't have needed labeling in th first place!).