The Visible and Invisible in User-Centered Design
The sign on the door prominently says “PULL,” but there you are forcefully pushing. We have all experienced, if not exactly this scenario, a situation in which our intuition troubleshoots in its interaction with things — be they material or immaterial. In the world of user-centered design, the onus is placed on the designer and not the user. Things and environments should be designed with a transparency of correspondence between form and function, allowing for the seamless translation of the person’s intentions into actions. When design is done right, it is both visible, a clear correspondence of form and function, and invisible, requiring minimal conscious thought on the part of the user.
What I want to discuss is the seeming invisibility of the “PULL” sign on the door.
A user’s engagement with a place or thing begins as a telescoping of awareness — a funneling of consciousness towards the thing or place. One’s consciousness and the object of focus are unified in the execution of an action. What happens in this telescoping of awareness is that one’s consciousness is occupied by that external inter-action with said place or thing, and awareness or attention to one’s self and surroundings fade.
There are gradations in the telescoping of awareness. Some actions require a greater focus and others less, freeing-up one’s consciousness to multi-task. In situations where things do not go as expected or become potentially dangerous, one’s consciousness is pulled from other tasks to focus on and attend to the matter at hand. Multi-tasking becomes difficult, if not impossible.
The sign hanging above the handle that reads “PULL”, is literally invisible until the smooth interaction of self-opening-the-door fails. You may have experienced the sudden waking from a daydream or daze when you cannot open the door or maybe when you trip on the sidewalk. That is exactly what is happening, your consciousness is wrenched away from any of its other occupations (internal or external) to attend to this moment in space and time. It is only then, in the failure to execute an action, that you will be able to see the “PULL” sign.
What does this mean for user-centered design? An answer with a caveat:
To answer, it is important to understand the process by which people engage with places and things, as they turn their attention towards the execution of actions in the world. It explains the shifting degrees of visibility and invisibility of the world around us. When interacting with people, places, and things, our consciousness attends, in varying degrees, to them. With user-friendly correspondence of form and function, we can spread our awareness and multi-task. We do no need to pay attention to any particular place or thing, not even to its surroundings. As, such the world remains invisible.
The caveat is that there is also the added dimension of habituation. With continued interaction, you can of course habituate any user to pull instead of push. The “PULL” sign would once more be rendered invisible to consciousness as would one’s interaction with the door fall into the background of awareness.
Clarity of form and function, then, is also a matter of learnt behavior. Encounter the same stimuli over and over, and you will no longer notice it. It no longer requires one’s focused attention. It is learnt behavior, internalized into our very body conscious, and rendered intuition. Encounter enough doors of similar shape and make, you will find that you no longer attempt to push, but automatically pull. User-centered design not only needs to take into consideration the clear correspondence of form and function, but also the user’s pre-existing learned habits for interacting with places and things.
