I was going down the escalator today in Port Authority and saw this dude walking really fast towards the bottom of the escalator towards me and almost got on. He realized something was wrong when he was about to get on, which probably would’ve just sent him backwards. I thought he was just in a rush and being careless, but then I saw it happened to another guy. The escalator I was on, going down, was on the left of the other escalator going up. And I think most of us are accustomed to being on the right side when we’re heading “forward”, like car traffic, and that’s why the two guys almost went on the wrong escalator because they were expecting it to go forward, or up.

In England the car traffic goes the opposite ways from our system, so maybe over there the people walk forward on their left. I don’t think it’s our natural instinct to walk on one particular side, so this must be a forced, trained habit. Most of our behavior is habitual, and this applies to the way we interact with designs. There is design that tries to flow with people’s intuition, and then there’s design that is forced upon you, to make you get used to it, and once you do, it becomes easy, and it “makes sense”.

And once the people get used to something, that design becomes a standard. Or, you can set a standard and force people to get used to it - if you have enough people using your design. When the web was first started there wasn’t much standard for navigation or colors, but soon people got used to, for example, identifying links as blue and underlined. Now, however, most people are used to the web and are used to seeing links appeared in other formats. For a website that’s for at regular people, the general public, it should not introduce too many elements that are new and require training or getting used to. People want to come on the site and get their stuff done and leave, and they do not have time nor patience to get used to the design. But for something like an intranet, where the employees must interact with daily, there’s more room for designing some things that might not be intuitive at first, but save time later once the people get used to them.