As I walked past a restroom recently, in a building I was visiting, I came across a bathroom door that used a more conceptual symbol to identify the intended gender for the room. Next to that sign, stuck on the door with tape, was another photocopied sign with a more conventional image and text. I walked around until I found the men’s restroom and saw that it had been temporarily re-signed the same way.
On my way to the elevator, I walked past a facilities maintenance person. I asked him why the temporary signs had been put up. He chuckled and told me that new doors had recently been installed, and the new signs were creating a lot of confusion for some people. The signs weren’t clear enough about which was which and they had received some complaints of people walking into the wrong restroom by mistake. It seemed that for a large number of people the sign was a bit ambiguous, and in somewhat of a rush to find a washroom, people were being asked to decipher what the symbol meant and whether it was the appropriate one for them or not.
This got me to thinking about the importance of conventions in design. When designing for environments or applications that may be used by a wide range of people, we need to be careful to not be too abstract with symbols that are gateways to interactions that may have some urgency behind them. The way people unpack or interpret visual elements is highly influenced by culture and previous experience. In situations that have interactions with a certain level of urgency behind them, we need to consider that a user may not have the will – nor the patience – to interpret design prior to making a choice. In some instances it may lead to an innocent mistake in the choice of restroom, while in others it may be something with more serious consequences.
There are several design conventions out there that enable consistent user experiences with products and spaces, most of which can be found at the International Organization for Standardization. You can gain an appreciation for the rigor behind standardizing an internationally recognizable icon by listening to this 99% Invisible episode on a current initiative to change the accessibility icon. There are a lot of subtle nuances that need to be considered.
When designing user experiences we need to keep the users in mind, the intent behind the interaction(s) we are designing, and their state of mind while doing so. The most positive experiences are the ones in which there is the least amount of friction between the user and their goal. While I am always a proponent for change, I do think that it is important to understand why things are the way they are right now, so that our change can be inclusive and sustainable.
