that's not a design disaster, that's a company privacy disaster. The cookie laws just make transparent and explicit the amount of tracking that businesses engage in. The target of your criticism should not be the EU, it should be websites who put stumbling blocks into the user experience because they want to force you to consent to their data gathering. Compliance could be very simple without any cookie banners, just let the user opt-in and turn it off by default.
In the best case a cookie banner gives me an opportunity to trust a site owner (not necessarily a company) that they won‘t use cookies to do invasive tracking I didn’t agree to. Oftentimes sites just straight up require consent to „necessary“ cookies in order to use the site at all. In these cases the EU imposed Cookie Banners don’t even give me the option to disable cookie based tracking. In other cases it takes minutes of my time to navigate the cookie banner to get the desired results.
Why should I choose such an ineffective solution if there are superior technical solutions to the same problem such as privacy aware browsers or extensions that don’t require user trust in site owners compliance but stop cookie based tracking on a technical level ?
The Cookie banner legislation actually did nothing at all for privacy, quite the opposite it made browsing the web in incognito mode much more annoying as you’re constantly forced to close cookie banners before beeing able to consume the actual on-site content. (Googles (coincidental?) Decision to disallow chrome extensions in incognito mode renders relevant anti-cookie-banner extensions useless)
People should have noticed that these banners usually only show up on websites that heavily track their users. And most of the time they just redirect you away if you don't agree to the tracking.
Honestly people just use an adblocker and don't trust weird banners
A weird thing I noticed: software developers complain about these doors a lot more than other people.
I worked in a big office building with lots of kinds of people, and on the internal chat devs would always complain about a couple of these doors.
They would also regularly complain about a few other things, which while indeed being real, they would be considered minor by other people, one example - not being able to see from a distance if an elevator is busy, with the suggestion of placing elevator availability lights throughout the floor (like plane toilet lights)
I wonder what's the cause, is it attention to detail, being a bit further on the spectrum, too much free time so you hang out on internal chat, ...
Here's my theory: software developers are usually empowered to fix their own problems. You speak about offices, these offices are often filled with people working on computers. Most of them, when they have an error, refer to someone else. Few feel empowered to fix their problems. On the other hand, software developers usually know that there's a huge chance they can fix this error, and thus make things righht themselves. That habit translates to things like doors or elevator lights.
I just think it is a different mindset from people who build things for other people, vs people who don't. If you build consumer facing software you have to have a level of empathy for the user, otherwise you are going to create a hostile UX, similar to doors that don't indicate which direction they go. A small detail, but something that will at some level annoy every person that uses it for the first time. In software a similar example would be things like animations that take too long for often repeated tasks.
In software, small affordances to improve UX are usually easy and cheap, requiring a few extra lines of code and a little more thought..and in the case of a door the only affordance needed is a $2 sign saying "push" somewhere.
Been wondering that all my life. With my "software/geeky" friends we can have these discussions for hours; with my "non-software/geeky" friends... 0.5 seconds before being labelled as grouchy old geezer who should just let it go :->
I think partially it's analytical minds trying to / used to optimizing; but the more self-flagellating part of me also worries if it's me/geeks or "them"/everybody-else who are bad at filtering/prioritizing :P
1) the other way around - being the sort of person who notices these sorts of things inclines you towards (or is a good indicator you are also heading towards) engineering & CS;
2) knowing it could be different, having some idea how the lift display firmware is implemented makes you think 'oh but it could so easily do this why doesn't it', etc. If you have no idea how something works (or don't care) then you also don't really have a grasp on the limits of the black box, or how readily it could be improved.
It's a thought straight from my butthole, but The Design of Everyday Things is a book recommended amongst this crowd, and one of the early chapters of that book goes on about doors. Once you've seen it, blah, blah, blah. Or perhaps the book didn't make any difference other than to validate what many had already noticed.
Afaik the book isn't THAT known among regular software devs (otherwise we'd have far less shitty UI's). The doors in the book is mostly an obvious tool used in the book to get people into the right mindset to then learn about the other issues the book presents.
I'm an engineer, but have had a similar observation with my wife.
I am constantly tweaking and fixing things that bug me in our relatively new-to-us house. The feedback is usually along the lines of "I never realized how annoying that was, but this is better". She has a strange-to-me ability to just not register the little annoyances.
Her approach is probably a better way to go through life, but I'm just not wired that way.
As engineers, we encounter great (and poor) design choices via our consumption of APIs. Something that has well-chosen public interfaces can be a pleasure to use. At the very least, it does its job without calling attention to itself and allows us to move on with our day. A door is a great metaphor for this. Using a well-designed door isn't going to change your life; it's nothing to write home about. But a poorly-designed one can make someone want to pull their hair out, as is evident from the video. That pain is something engineers are acutely sensitive to as a result of using other peoples' APIs on a daily basis, so we're more prone to need to vent our frustration.
In addition, I once read (I forget where, maybe it was a Paul Graham essay) that part of the mentality of a programmer is the idea that we're lazy. In the sense that we're happy to spend a larger-than-usual amount of effort up-front to solve a problem, if doing so will mean we'll save time, effort, and energy in perpetuity which will more than offset the up-front cost of those things. I think the above comes into play for me when I encounter a Norman door. When I think about how easy it would be to solve the issue (remove the handle from the side on which you're meant to push), and the sum total of all the people day-in and day-out who are having the same problem as me with this door, it's mind-boggling that the door would have been designed this way in the first place. It indicates that whoever designed it saw their primary concern as being aesthetic in nature, as opposed to practical. To me, that's shirking one's responsibility as a designer. As Steve Jobs said[1], "Design is how it works."
As socially inept as we're stereotyped to be, we arguably have more user empathy than the average non-builder/non-engineer, considering how easy it is to build things.
As a software engineer, the fact that the elevators in the office don't have an up-peak mode in the morning and a down-peak mode at 5PM drives me up a wall.
