Sunday, April 3, 2005

Bad Door Handles

Unintuitive door handlesNot like I'm the first person to ever be annoyed by unintuitive door handles, but these were especially annoying to me. As you can probably tell in the image (click on it for a larger image), the handles on either side of the door are the same. And to me, these handles afford to be pulled. They have curvy handles about 1.5" in diameter that are perfect for grasping.

These doors (which I found at Southdale Mall in Edina, MN) do open when pulled...from one direction. From the other direction, you have to push the doors to open them.

So, regardless of whether they afford to be pushed or pulled, the doors will inevitably be unusably. Their use in an inherent contradiction. The same exact design means PUSH from one direction, but PULL from another. My brain just can't handle that unintuitive of a conceptual model.

The really annoying thing is that there is another set of doors just beyond these. And those doors are well designed--when they're to be pulled, they have a handle, and when they are to be pushed, they have a horizontal bar that one couldn't pull if they tried.

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