I’ll try to handle this as tactfully as possible …

Out of the blue one day, a friend of mine declared – with index finger extended – “isn’t it amazing how your finger fits perfectly in your nose?”.  Uh, well, sure.  Not that I’ve ever tried it, of course =).  Finger-in-nose activities aside, he’s right.  I had never thought about that before.  This divine design is no accident.  It’s only until you break your finger and it swells up or you have a splint on it that you notice how perfectly it was *designed* in the first place.

The same holds true for web or interaction design – or any design for that matter.  We walk through doors every day, but we don’t realize how well most doors are designed until we pull on a door that should be pushed, because it had a handle on it (which affords pulling).  As user experience architects, our designs probably won’t ever earn outward praise from users, because ‘good’ simply means it works as it should – seamlessly and to the users’ expectations.  There’s also never one *right way* to design something.  It’s only when something doesn’t work (or something breaks) that design gets noticed.

So, the next time you pull on that push door, or you can’t figure out which way to go at the airport then stop and think about why the design is broken, and what could be done to make it better.