When automatic doors… aren’t

Published on 15^th November 2009 in Accessibility, Usability, tagged doors, University of Nottingham.

Last year, the University of Nottingham extended the campus I have all my lectures on and added a number of new buildings. These look funky and modern, but whoever designed them seems to have forgotten one key detail: no-one can use the doors.

What would you expect to do to open these doors?

I go to the Amenities building once a week and without fail, I see the same thing every time. Someone will try to exit the building through the doors to Triumph Road, but they can’t. They walk up to the doors, expecting them to open, but nothing happens. They look around, confused, and only after a thorough survey of the area, figure out how to open the doors.

What they’ve failed to notice is the pillar on the right hand side of the door. On top of this, there’s a tiny button which once pressed, opens the doors.

There are a number of issues with this. First of all, the labelling on the pillar is too small and set in low contrast colours that make it difficult to pick out. There’s plenty of space that could have been used to make the text larger and it would have been trivial to choose a better colour. Imagine that your vision is less than perfect; would you be able to read that text? It’s hard enough to do so in the picture on the right, when you’re not in a hurry to exit a building and get to where you’re going.

There’s also little to suggest that the pillar is associated with the door. Sure, it’s relatively near to the exit and it faces into the building, but it has no other labelling. It’s close to the door, but placed far enough away from it that it seems removed from it.

You can approach this exit from one of three directions: left, right or where I’ve taken the photo from. Unless you’re coming from the right, you have to go out of your way to press the button on the pillar. If you’re coming from the left, you have to walk across the door, press the button and then go back towards the middle. This doesn’t seem too bad for able-bodied people, but anyone with mobility problems might find this frustrating, especially after repeat use.

The labelling that is provided is also misleading. When you see the word ‘automatic’, it essentially means ‘no further action required’. When coupled with the word ‘door’, it creates a strong mental model in our heads which has been reinforced by all of the other things we’ve seen labelled “automatic door” before. To open the door, you walk up to it and it opens. This is an interaction which is consistent across almost all doors labelled in this way, so when it doesn’t do what we expect, it’s surprising and confusing.

Doors that don’t work the way we expect them to aren’t the end of the world, but they make our lives that little bit more frustrating. For people with visual impairments or who have problems with mobility, it can be even more so.