I recently so an old video on Vox today which I feel is worth sharing about door design. Yes, something as boring as a door can be better designed. Small tweaks can result in a vastly improved user experience. “user experience” and “doors” you say? Well, it’s not nonsense. Just take a look at the video yourself:
We’ve all accidentally pushed on a door when we were supposed to pull or vice-versa. Until today, I always thought the mistake was mine, but it’s not. If people keep making the same mistakes, it’s a design problem, not a user problem. There’s not much more value I can add to this discussion, so I strongly recommend just watching the Vox video.
It’s not just doors though. Small changes in design can improve the consumer experience tremendously in other areas as well. Making a shoe heel collapsible is a small change, but can make shoes much more convenient. Zeba Shoes made this small tweak and is now a booming business. Commercial aviation has been a thing since the early 1900s, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that someone came up with the idea of putting wheels on luggage, and people called him crazy. Now practically all carry-on luggage has wheels.
What other small changes to a product have yielded so much value? Can you think of anything else? Let me know!
The Intersection of Innovation & Design 