I have no trouble understanding why this has to be this way.
Twice a year our facility has a staff day where we get hit up by aflac and find out how we are doing as a organization. We have huge placards we place in the walkways leading up to the doors. Our meeting room is right by those doors and inevitably we will have people who ignore all the signs saying closed walk to the doors and pull them several times before finally reading the sign that we also put on the door.
And sometimes you get so used to there being brightly colored ads, corporate propaganda motivational messages and various warning signs everywhere, that you develop a blindness for everything too flashy and ignore it until you encounter a roadblock that doesn’t yield.
This is true and not just about ads. It’s called ‘sign blindness’.
Having more signs can actually exacerbate the problem.
It’s not (always) about being dumb or careless, it’s our nature.
Truthfully it’s a design issue. If people keep coming up to a door and pulling on it, it’s because the design of the door is instructing them to do so. Design imparts information. A door in a home can have simple knobs - anyone living there can just learn which doors to push/pull. A door in a public space instead needs to be designed to tell people how to operate it, even without any labeling.
A door is a simple device. It shouldn’t require reading labels or a manual. It’s operation should be abundantly obvious. After all, even those who don’t speak the language or are illiterate need to be able to operate doors. A door that needs instructions is one that is poorly designed.
I have no trouble understanding why this has to be this way.
Twice a year our facility has a staff day where we get hit up by aflac and find out how we are doing as a organization. We have huge placards we place in the walkways leading up to the doors. Our meeting room is right by those doors and inevitably we will have people who ignore all the signs saying closed walk to the doors and pull them several times before finally reading the sign that we also put on the door.
And sometimes you get so used to there being brightly colored ads,
corporate propagandamotivational messages and various warning signs everywhere, that you develop a blindness for everything too flashy and ignore it until you encounter a roadblock that doesn’t yield.This is true and not just about ads. It’s called ‘sign blindness’.
Having more signs can actually exacerbate the problem.
It’s not (always) about being dumb or careless, it’s our nature.
You don’t normally have to step around a billboard.
Good thing they weren’t specifically talking about billboards and instead were speaking to the much broader spectrum of advertising strategies.
Good thing you aren’t them so its not up to you to say what they were talking about.
Truthfully it’s a design issue. If people keep coming up to a door and pulling on it, it’s because the design of the door is instructing them to do so. Design imparts information. A door in a home can have simple knobs - anyone living there can just learn which doors to push/pull. A door in a public space instead needs to be designed to tell people how to operate it, even without any labeling.
A door is a simple device. It shouldn’t require reading labels or a manual. It’s operation should be abundantly obvious. After all, even those who don’t speak the language or are illiterate need to be able to operate doors. A door that needs instructions is one that is poorly designed.