What toilet door symbols tell us about information communication

Unisex Toilet Symbol?

Sometimes information needs to be communicated at the most vital moments of high stress and need. Traditionally, this has focused on semi-important areas such as missile defence systems, pretty useful when North Korea starts threatening world stability. But there are other situations which may be more important, and one we all face every day without realising it; knowing which door to go through when we need the toilet!

The picture on the left was taken at an art gallery I was visiting on Friday, which when I encountered threw me. Thoughts passed through my mind "is this right?" Looking at it I didn't quite know what to make of it, so started looking around, all the doors were like this. After a few seconds of desperation I thought I would chance it and went through, although all the time there was that worry in the back of my mind. Why was this?

Looking at the symbol, it isn't hard to work out that it could be anything else but a unisex toilet symbol. After all, a man and a women symbol which we all recognise placed together in a zone where we expect toilets. But here is the key word 'expect'. In these situations, we often rely on information cues which are glancable. That is, you have a need, you look up and in one instance you know the answer. This plays off our learnt behaviours and expectations, a visceral reaction. So when we are expecting a simple cue and we find something not there, it throws us. We start searching for those cues which we normally viscerally react to, and if we don't find them have to stop and think. So why is this important in this context? Because you are in a high stress situation where you need a resolution NOW. Maybe there is an option for an interesting art project, cryptic toilet symbols that the person has to work out with maths, therefore making the symbols useless in all practicality (unless you are a mathematician).
An interesting consideration for this post could come from Lewis et al. (2010), who won an Ig Nobel Prize for demonstrating that "people make better decisions about some kinds of things – but worse decisions about other kinds of things – when they have a strong urge to urinate".
So possibly a silly post but it does highlight an important thread about communication design in society. Just because you can design an information cue which when logically studied is obvious to everyone, it doesn't mean that when the time comes that cue will work. As the image below highlights too, beauty and artistic licence is no guarantee either. Is that a unisex toilet or the entrance to a speak easy? Again, it is the breaking out of the expectation which throws us here as each male and female symbol alone is not a problem (seeing the man on the door would only lead you assume that it is a male toilet).

Another logical, yet impractical unisex toilet symbol

Is there a solution? Maybe... install more unisex toilets, have a universal symbol used worldwide, throw us all into confusion for a few years and teach us how to viscerally react. An issue with this as described by Fogg is that teaching people to react a certain way is the hardest option in behaviour change, so we also need excellent design, and some good user testing!