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People try to find causes for events. They tend to assign a causal relation whenever two things occur in succession. If some unexpected event happens in my home just after I have taken some action, I am apt to conclude that it was caused by that action, even if there really was no relationship between the two. Similarly, if I do something expecting a result and nothing happens, I am apt to interpret this lack of informative feedback as an indication that I didn’t do the action correctly: the most likely thing to do, therefore, is to repeat the action, only with more force. Push a door and it fails to open? Push again, harder. With electronic devices, if the feedback is delayed sufficiently, people often are led to conclude that the press wasn’t recorded, so they do the same action again, sometimes repeatedly, unaware that all of their presses were recorded. This can lead to unintended results.

Repeated presses might intensify the response much more than was intended. Alternatively, a second request might cancel the previous one, so that an odd number of pushes produces the desired result, whereas an even number leads to no result. The tendency to repeat an action when the first attempt fails can be disastrous. This has led to numerous deaths when people  tried to escape a burning building by attempting to push open exit doors that opened inward, doors that should have been pulled. As a result, in many countries, the law requires doors in public places to open outward, and moreover to be operated by so-called panic bars, so that they automatically open when people, in a panic to escape a fire, push their bodies against them. This is a great application of appropriate affordances.

Modern systems try hard to provide feedback within 0.1 second of any operation, to reassure the user that the request was received. This is especially important if the operation will take considerable time. The presence of a filling hourglass or rotating clock hands is a reassuring sign that work is in progress. When the delay can be predicted, some systems provide time estimates as well as progress bars to indicate how far along the task has gone. More systems should adopt these sensible displays to provide timely and meaningful feedback of results.

Excerpted from ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ by Don Norman