Just Push

Questionable by Design

For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

— Romans 7:15

There’s a glass door at my office. Two panels, side by side. To enter, you push. To exit, you pull. Both sides the same have large handles.

I pull the entrance side at least once a week. Every time. The door doesn’t move. My brain sees a handle and reaches the only conclusion it knows.

A month ago, a colleague flew in from a remote office. She stood at that door and pulled. Nothing. She pulled again. She turned to the person behind her and said she thought the door was locked.

It wasn’t locked. It was designed wrong.

Donald Norman is a cognitive scientist. In 1988, he published The Design of Everyday Things. He spent most of that book arguing one thing: when people can’t figure out how to use something, they blame themselves. The real problem is the design.

Doors became so associated with his name that there’s a term now. A Norman Door. Any door that gives you the wrong signal. A handle that says pull when it means push. You stand there feeling stupid, and the door is the thing that failed.

Norman’s insight reached past doors. It was about how we assign fault. We feel confused and figure the problem is ours.

I’ve spent close to thirty years making things simpler for people. That’s the job. I walk through an airport and know in twelve seconds which queue signs will cause a pileup.

I got good at seeing it in systems. I stayed blind to it in myself for much longer.

Paul writes Romans 7 and he’s not being poetic. He’s describing something mechanical. I do the thing I hate. I don’t do the thing I want. He’s standing at the door, pulling the handle, and the door won’t open. And he keeps pulling.

For a long time I read that passage as Paul describing failure. Now I think he’s describing design.

The soul has a handle on the wrong side. You approach with every intention. You reach. Nothing moves. You blame the reaching.

Norman says the failure is upstream. The design created the wrong affordance. It invited the wrong action. That door was never opening from your side.

Paul doesn’t leave it there. He asks who will rescue him from this. He answers his own question. Not with a technique. Not with trying harder. With Christ.

You’ve stood at that door. Not the glass door at work. The one where you’ve been pulling for years and it won’t open and you’ve decided the fault is in you.

It might not be. The design might be wrong. The handle you’ve been using might not be the door you think it is.

Just push.

Paul doesn’t solve the mechanism. He doesn’t explain how the door finally opens. He just names who opens it.

I’ve pulled a lot of handles. I’ve blamed myself for most of them.

Some of it was me. Some of it was the door.

The grace is that it doesn’t matter which. Christ is standing on the other side, and he knows the difference.