"Knowing What to Do"

In the fourth chapter of his book The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman discusses a variety of non-user-friendly devices that could be more effectively utilized if the designers had considered physical, semantic, cultural, and logical constraints rather than emphasizing aesthetics or production costs.  I found his discussion of "The Problem with Doors" particularly interesting--I hadn't considered the different visual cues intended to indicate how the door functions, but frequently fail.  As it so happens, there is a door to leading out of a walk-in freezer in the Diner at the University of Puget Sound that confuses me nearly every time I go in search of milk for Cellar milkshakes!  It wasn't until reading Norman's discussion of door mechanisms and visual cues that I realized that the problem could be solved by the addition of a panel indicating on which side the door opens.  This situation is very much like the light-switches in Norman's laboratory, where everyone had gotten used to the poor design and have to work from rote memory rather than an intuitive design.