Most of us take car locks for granted. You either raise the little pin or pull the little latch, and then pull the handle – and VOILA the door opens. Apparently, it’s not as easy as it looks.
As I was driving home this Saturday down a small residential street, I heard a repeated banging noise. Looking out my open window, I saw a girl in the back of a Toyota banging hitting her hands against the glass with a look of total despair distorting her face. Perplexed I stop. “Either someone’s fucking with me and there’s a camera somewhere,” I thought, “Or this girl is having some sort of crisis…” I decided to play it safe in case it was the latter, so I stopped. “My friends locked me in the car! I can’t get out!” At first, I actually entertained the idea. “Do you want me to call the cops?..” “No! Can you just go find my friends? They live around here…” As I was definitely not about to go door to door asking people “Did you leave your friend locked in a car?” I actually started to think. “Wait… this is not a police cruiser… just pull the handle…” “Look, I’m pulling it, it won’t open!” Looking in, I could see the handle on the front door on the other side of the car – it was the kind with a little latch right above the handle that just needed to be flipped. “See that little thing? Switch that first…” The car alarm went off, the girl (who turned out to be claustrophobic) stumbled out of the car, and the day was saved. I’m still disturbed that a senior at a top 20 university couldn’t figure out how to open a car door.
Design Moral? Don’t take things for granted. I have many a time gone back to an application I had written and discovered that something I assumed would be intuitive was actually quite arcane to an unfamiliar user.