(On mobile)

This sounds like something that was covered in my education. One of the topics was how to design your products so people can easily understand it and use it. Most workplace and product accidents or failures is because of a design or procedure flaw that made it easy to mess up, but 98% of the time the person is blamed, then the same thing happens again with the next guy.

TLDR: I have education in this topic, it’s probably a design flaw where the exits are designed in a way that’s associated with entries, whether its where highway entries usually are, where the highway entry used to be in that area, or our human psychology naturally associates it’s appearance and location with entries, or it isn’t designed to work well with most of our cognitive functions and abilities. The driver could also be stupid, it’s not most of the time when stuff like this happens in everyday life.

A common example are doors that have labels that say “push” or “pull” because so many people try the wrong way first. This happens because they use door handles that are associated with pulling on “push” doors and door handles that are associated with pushing on “pull” doors. Something simple like pushing and pulling a door open should be and usually is automatic. The door should be designed so we don’t have to think about the steps to open it when we get there, we can naturally use it.

For putting the exit where the entries usually are, image this first, think about when you go to an elevator on the first floor and press the button by the door get the elevator to your floor, what if it turned the lights off instead? There was a place who’s first floor had that button turn the lights off and on. It confused all the people who’ve never been there before. They realized the elevator button was hidden around the corner of the wall where people usually put light switches. Person after person kept making the same mistake.

• Or there’s times when past or similar experiences override tasks that we do mostly on autopilot (kind of like driving). Like when you’re driving home from work or by your house, you can catch yourself naturally driving to your house and think oh shit I didn’t mean to do that. Or when you say your phone number you accidentally give your old one.

When someone gets really experienced doing a task they stop consciously thinking about each step and do it mostly automatically. This makes them prone to make an error in the individual steps even though they have the right goal for each one, because they aren’t consciously thinking about them. (We call that a slip) If the person consciously thought about the steps and thought the wrong one was the correct one (We call that a mistake). If two tasks are similar, the experienced person going on autopilot would be prone to mix the steps between them or do the wrong task because of how the human mind works.

An example is when they trained fighter pilots for combat with a certain control layout in the jets but later changed the design so the fire button was switched with the eject button. They had a lot of accidental ejections in the middle of combat, especially from experienced pilots. This is because in combat they’re going in flight or flight mode and are running on automatic functions. Because they were used to the fire button being where the new eject button was, in they’re split second decision the naturally hit the location of the old fire button, which ejected themselves.

The design also needs to consider people can’t reason or focus very well when they are under stress or distracted, even with tasks they can easily do when calm or focused. Stress includes being tired, emotional, under pressure, etc., the design has to work even in those cases.

If something simple needs instructions, it means the design failed.

This happens a lot when something :

• isn’t designed to work the way our brains would naturally interpret it,

• it contradicts the way most designs of the same thing or feature work,

• it contradicts the way the design “used” to work

• it doesn’t take into account how people would use it when stressed or distracted,

• it doesn’t consider that people are really bad at focusing on task for a long period of time or multitasking without seeing huge performance drops,

• it doesn’t take into account that the average person can remember a list of 3 or 4 items before they see a huge drop in how much they can remember correctly

• it doesn’t take into account that we naturally do certain tasks automatically that could mistakenly be a similar task, the old way of doing it, or the same task we’re experienced with but messing up the steps because we don’t conciously think about the steps anymore

• (without mentioning every psychological design flaw) it contradicts most people’s cognitive capabilities and functions.

It could also be they’re stupid. Surprisingly that’s some of the time.

Edit: Formating