I ran into a door today that had a handle on the push side. Not even a crossbar - an aluminum folded-over handle, one on each of the double doors. It is, unmistakably, a pull handle, and it had "PUSH" written above it and even underlined, and still it gave me pause.
When I worked for squarespace, their beautiful new offices had glass conference room doors that swung one way, the other way, or slid on a track, depending on the room configuration.
However every one of those doors had the same handle on both sides, giving you no clue as to which scenario this door was providing. You saw people pull/push the wrong way all the time, and then look up/to the side to see the hinges and where the door stop was. I eventually mentally dubbed that quiet look upwards before you touched a door the, “squarespace peek”.
After a while I’d heard that the original plans had the typical plate and handle for push/pull and the ceo felt like it messed with the design of the doors.
It reminded me of my experience at a Japanese Onsen (hot spring) last week. While entering the Onsen, the sliding door is automated and slides to open on it’s own. While exiting, the automated sliding doesn’t work. It has handles with no indication of pull or push or slide. The design of handles suggest most probably pull. I kept trying to pull/push with no movement. Finally, realized I am supposed to use those handles to slide the door left and right. That was one funky design, imo.
Another tricky thing is figuring out how to flush the public toilets. The user interface is non standard on every toilet. The most surprising way I've encountered was to step on a button on the floor. (Remember to never press the big green button)
One of my greatest fears :p I saw someone do that one time actually, and the door that the button opened was really slow moving and irreversible until it had completed opening fully. This was on a train, with all of the passenger seats facing the door in question. The guy that did it had to quickly pull his pants up and then stand there awkwardly while the door finished opening so that he could close it again.
That design is everywhere in Japan, and can be quite embarrassing for tourists.
First time I went to Japan I walked up to my hotel late at night. I went to the door. There was no handle or obvious way to open it. I stood there like an idiot for a minute or two. I walked back out to the street to make sure I'm at the right building. I walked back to the door and finally got it. The trick... you have to wave your hand directly in front of the door an inch or two. Places in Japan often do not put the motion sensor ahead of the door, but straight down. You start feeling like a Jedi at times, waving doors open.
Usually, the doors have a strip or label indicating press/touch/wave here but typically in Japanese or hand wave/ double chevron symbols. As a visiting foreigner, we typically are not used to seeing such signage. Over the years living here, I have started to recognize tell tale signs of automated doors in Japan.
One possible saving grace for this design is that mechanical sliding doors/panels are "traditional" in Japan - ie: tradional architecture makes use of sliding doors - often without clear "handles".
There used to be a coffee shop opposite my office that had a pull handle on the push side of the double doors. The right hand side doors were also often locked. I once sat at the nearest table to the doors and watched a dozen people pull then push on the right door, then pull and finally push on the left door, and often end up visibly aggravated by the time they got in and joined the morning queue!
The next day my debugging instinct kicked in, I bought some PUSH stickers and did some covert guerrilla ergonomic stickering. Problem solved and it made me smile every time I went past that cafe!
To this day, I can't understand the thought process behind opening only one half of the door and locking the other one. I used to go around unlatching the offending doors, but got tired of it.
I see so many glass doors designed like that. The doors usually have a sticker that says “PUSH” on the push side, however the sticker is invariably printed with a transparent background so you can read it from the pull side. I don’t notice when I am reading something backwards/mirrored, so I am always pushing on the pull side…… Arrrrrrgh!
The part of my brain that deciphers the mirrored text is so proud of its stupid little achievement that it shouts down the result from the easy version so that the part that tells my hands what to do only gets the mirrored instruction. Every single time.
I can think of one door in a place I frequent for lunch like this which I have repeatedly ran into. Now, 80% of the times I start thinking about it about 20 feet away as I’m approaching it. My internal dialogue goes something like “Ignore how it looks, it’s a push door.” The other 20% of the times I still fumble the opening. It’s the most unintuitive thing I’ve experienced in a while.
