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We tend to think we’re more in control of our behavior than we actually are. That is, our brains are operating from habit a large amount of the time, and the id
by gdubs 9y ago
We tend to think we’re more in control of our behavior than we actually are. That is, our brains are operating from habit a large amount of the time, and the idea of the CEO brain consciously deciding our every action is largely an illusion.
This is why emergency exit doors must open outwards. People have died in fires in theaters trying to push on doors that said “Pull”. The crash bar on an emergency exit door is what’s known in design as an affordance.
When you present people with a door handle that affords “pulling”, they will pull even if the sign says “push”.
Now consider the fact that the primary affordance of social media is the “reaction”. Is it a surprise that content that garners a reaction will trend towards the outrageous?
If proactivity is the road to a more fulfilled, more civilly minded life and society, maybe we need to think of our affordances. Because we’ve made it awfully easy to be reactive, and awfully cumbersome to be proactive.
Edit:
The comments below correctly point out an error; what I should have said was that there’s a danger in putting a “pull” handle on an emergency door that pushed outward, because of the confusing affordance.
- InvisibleCities 9y ago>This is why emergency exit doors must open outwards. People have died in fires in theaters trying to push on doors that said “Pull”. The crash bar on an emergency exit door is what’s known in design as an affordance. Is this true? I always assumed it was because it's pretty much impossible to pull open a door when you are being crushed by people pressing against one another trying to escape.
- piptastic 9y agoI think it's true to some degree, I've seen people push on doors that say "pull" even when there is no fire. But I think your assumption is probably more correct, past a certain point they have no option to pull anymore.
- jclardy 9y agoThe push/pull "mistake" is usually caused by poorly designed doors. Like putting a vertical grab handle on a door that pushes open.
- Angostura 9y agoDon’t worry about that. Just retweet it as a fact, pronto.
- gdubs 9y agoThanks - you correctly caught an error and I’ve edited the post to address it. The danger is in the confusing affordances, and the point was about that and not the direction of the door swing (which as you’ve correctly pointed out has other more primary considerations.)
- KirinDave 9y agoIt's the same sort of myth as "why are manhole covers round?" and there are lots of attributions for why that ignore history for a just-so story.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mulmen 9y agoI don't understand the reference. Why are manhole covers round? I always thought it was to prevent the cover from falling into the hole. Is that not the case?
- KirinDave 9y agoThat is the argument but actually any lipped shape can give this guarantee. Even historically manhole and utility covers had to be somewhat flush to the ground and so they've always had to be lipped for this. You can see lots of utility covers that are hinged, square, or other options, but all are lipped for safety. While a circular profile makes the lipping easier, it doesn't seem to influence many utility covers.
- anigbrowl 9y agoYou can easily put a square or a rectangular utility cover into the hole, because the length of the side is less than the diagonal. This isn't possible with a circular cover because the diameter is uniform.
- derefr 9y agoThe parent’s point is that a lip prevents this for every shape, by making the hole smaller than the side-length.
- wizardforhire 9y agoYes and recent. >An inward-swinging door - three times cited as a code violation by West Warwick inspectors and three times replaced by club managers - was blocking the exit closest to the stage. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/02/15/series-errors-sealed-crowd-fate/7m4vKomVXAhUTpQAODnLHN/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/02/15/series-errors-s...
- somecontext 9y agoFor some context in case anyone is curious, two sentences later the article reports that "Bouncers opened it immediately after the fire broke out". The door in question's main problem appears to have been that bouncers wouldn't let people use it, not its orientation.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoAFAIK you're correct, a vertical handle is an affordance to that indicates a door should be pulled, but the reason is mechanistic. A crush of people will open the door with a push-release but won't with a pull handle - whilst the handle affords pushing some numpty will try and pull it but the people behind them will soon ensure that they push the door, with their broken ribs if necessary.
- sizzle 9y agoNorman doors https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-know-whether-push-pull-blame-design/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-kno...
- timcederman 9y agoActually, it's designed to open outwards because when there's a crush of people, there's no room for the door to open inwards. Also, affordances aren't to support habit or unconscious behavior. Affordances are to imply meaning or how to use something by their design (whether digital or physical).
- scubadude 9y ago> Affordances are to imply meaning That's actually called a signifier. https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/94270 https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/94270
- timcederman 9y agoI disagree. A signifier gets into semiotics, but more explicitly. e.g. the word "push" is a signifier, but a large bar that makes it seem like you can push it is a perceived affordance.
- apotheothesomai 9y agoSpeaking of them as signifiers isn't useful here, but yes, these are signifiers. You said yourself they convey meaning. The implication of their use wouldn't happen without signification. One could even write a book about the discourse of affordances. It would be boring and irrelevant, but it wouldn't be wrong. Sorry, just defending the mechanics of meaning.
- caveatemptor 9y agoSomeone did (in a manner of speaking): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- OnlyRepliesToBS 9y agoAlmost instant appeal to emotion to justify the correction wave. Notice the tightening of the 'public safety' aspect of it. Notice it's about finding the most extreme danger and then saying we're unable to control it innately, so it must be moderated. Tada justification. Impressive.
- cookiecaper 9y agoYeah, I think this is close to the right interpretation. Much of internet usage is, essentially, a giant slot machine. We've studied the things that make gambling addictive and intentionally incorporated them into social platforms to keep eyeballs on. The goal is to generate a reflexive subconscious impulse to check for new inputs with specific relation to the platform. A good high-level overview of this is the book Hooked, about how to build addictive computer interfaces. As we've "gamified" and "optimized for engagement", we've created an apparatus that many have difficulty understanding or overcoming. This concept cemented more for me as I watched an Amazon FBA seller just impulsively hit "Match Price" over and over again, despite the fact that it was leaving him with margins of less than 25c per unit. He couldn't be reasoned out of this and insisted he had to match price with the lowest seller, even though his units would've sold for much higher margins over the ensuing weeks if he hadn't. I realized then that really, he was simply gambling. He hits the button, sees a corresponding spike in sales, and sees a corresponding increase in his "income", despite the fact that letting it increase at a slightly more moderate rate would've easily netted 3x-4x more money (not talking years here -- just a few weeks to sell out as non-cheapest). He does it because he likes the impulse. He likes pressing the button and correlating that action with numbers that say he increased his money. Facebook is the slot machine; Likes and Comments (broadly "engagement") are the currency; Your Posts are the input. You drop in a post and find that bland, mature, predictable posts don't generate a bright animation or engagement. You respond by posting more and more stuff that has high-engagement quality, which is, of course, the more controversial things like religion, politics, and identity. The check on this is one's own identity is tied back to it, but that generally just means that you take the things you conceptualize as positive self-image to an extreme that warrants reaction, in particular in these controversial fields that generally have high-yield output from the slot machine. So Republicans are put on a path toward cartoonish Republicanism, Democrats on a path toward cartoonish Democratism, and so forth. It has a distorting, reinforcing echo-chamber quality on everyone. It encourages people who are more moderate on certain issues to disengage, it encourages us to select them out and weaken our bonds, it makes it easier for our own little world to become all-consuming and feel all-encompassing. It has an overall corrosive effect on public discourse and relationships in general. The more I think about it, the more I think the physical constraints of "real life" on dialogue and relationships, like being in a room with someone who can punch you if you sink too low, or making instinctive reactions and adjustments based on a conversation partner's body language, are much more valuable than we've assumed.
- dalbasal 9y agoThis is an insightful analogy. To stretch it a bit, I'd say there's an important difference between a fire door and reddit. The fire door knows its job is to prevent people burning to death. Reddit... does it know it's job is to prevent outraged reaction? I think this is one of the things that made facebook so problematic on politics, it can't tell the the good likes, comments and shares from the bad ones. I'm not sure they really had a concept of better and worse. Some stuff isn't allowed, but otherwise? Imagine one post, where Mrs X invites neighbors to meet a local candidate at her house for revolutionary thoughts and biscuits. Another post, where Ms Y rants about Macron voters, Trump, taxes and kids these days. Both are political. One is actually democratic and participatory. The other is cheap, nasty, unproductive and divisive. Does Facebook, in any meaningful sense, value one over the other? Does reddit? Reddit has its non-censorship values. I respect that. It's important that someone does. I also think they want to house the weird, and I respect that too. But, I think unrestricted speech may be an insufficient value, like nondiscrimination or atheism. It's not enough to build on. You need positive values too. Free speech is also problematic, when taken as 'all speech is equal.'
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago>Reddit... does it know it's job is to prevent outraged reaction? // Ha, ha, ha. Cause that'll increase pageviews. Outraged reaction is exactly what all news media is going for because people rant and rave and in passing see more adverts. It's just they want to sanitise the topics according to their advertisers wishes. Reddit doesn't have non-censorship values, it's heavily censored; not all from the top admittedly, but the sanitisation that's gone on in the last few years is huge as Conde Nast have moved to make it a more tempting platform for advertisers.
- dalbasal 9y agoWell, yes that's the obvious (and cynical) assumption. It's definitely true as a real pseudo-economic force on the internet and media generally, but let's not just assume reddit are following that "interest" blindly. If you think reddit doesn't have those values, I guess we disagree. I don't see any way of coming to that conclusion apart from fundamentalism, it's either absolute or it's bullshit.
- kirse 9y agoGood points in your comment, I'd probably use the words impulsive vs. self-controlled (instead of reactive/proactive). Asking people to build user-interfaces that promote self-control seems a bit naive though. There's a reason self-control is identified as one of the primary "fruits" of a Christian life (Galatians 5:22-23), since it's exactly the opposite of default human behavior.
- anigbrowl 9y agoNow consider the fact that the primary affordance of social media is the “reaction”. Questionable.
- mwfunk 9y agoIronic!
- dredmorbius 9y agoCrash bars offer an unthinking affordance: if a crowd presses up against crash doors, the doors open automatically, relieving the pressure (or at least, if the doorway / passage itself is not overwhelmed). Automatic negative feedback mechanism.
- sizzle 9y agoNorman doors https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-know-whether-push-pull-blame-design/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-kno...
- BurningFrog 9y ago> Now consider the fact that the primary affordance of social media is the “reaction”. Is it a surprise that content that garners a reaction will trend towards the outrageous? Well, maybe, but is there a way it could it be otherwise?
- hyperpallium 9y agoWe are on rails. Even "The Road Less Travelled" is another road, ignoring the infinity of directions we could actually take. We can't even notice the other possibilities, let alone consider them.